wind&solar power

[matt wny]

i have been living off grid for about 8 years.my choice was for economic reasons.it would have cost 12,000$ to get power to my home site.i have a serval propane refrigator,an air-x 12 volt wind generator wired to 6 trojan t105 batteries that power an inexpensive 750watt inverter.i also have a 5 horse motor that runs an alternator when the wind doesnt blow enough.i also have to run a generator for water.unfortunately my site wont allow a gravity system to work,a design flaw on my part. this system works well for me but it would be to small for most people.i was just curios what kind of electric systems other people out there are useing and what components they like and dislike i dont know anybody in my area that has an off grid system.

[jac]

Hey… has anyone out there made their own wind turbine ?.. details please if you have… or water powered generators ? I’v priced them up over here and I recon my great great grandchildren might just see the initial outlay pay off ..I know its more than just the money issue but when your skint it has a bearing on whether to make the shift away from the grid :rolleyes:
John

[Gabe Ayers]

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/High_Cost_and_Low_Value_of_Electricity_from_Wind.pdf

Haven’t read this, but thought it might be of some interest on this subject.

~

not an issue for HHFF, ignore signature

[jwayne972]

That is a very enlightening article, thanks for posting it Jason. It basically proves that all the “common knowledge” regarding using commercial wind farms as substitutes for traditional electricity production are actually wind industry propaganda. Based solely on assumptions. One thing in the article that is never addressed is the value of using something that is not depletable, and produces no waste, at least not when it’s producing electricity. Wind farms are definitely not the answer, but it doesn’t mean they can’t be part of the solution. Worth the read, or at least a quick skim.

Back to the OP, I would also be very interested in electrical system layouts that any of you are using, or have used.

[jac]

It was an interesting article Jason.. A lot is written elsewhere about how the windmills will never “repay” the energy used to create them.. same with tractors.. But if the second generation windmills are created using electricity from wind does that make them more acceptable than the 1st ones made using coal fired power ? does that energy “debt” get less as time passes, providing wind is used as the source of power ?? Scotland uses a lot of hydro power stations..Ben Cruichan is actualy hidden inside a mountain!! Unfortunatly we have our share of the nuclear stuff too:( I have to agree that I dont think wind farms are the answer, or bio fuel for that matter.. The wind mills I asked about were the home made ones, the old aeroplane propeler bolted to a generator and put up on a pole sort of thing:) one thing I noticed is you guys talk of 120v ? we have 240v and 13 amps for household use. does this mean its easier to generate power in the US than the UK ?? I know zero bout electric other than its not to be played with so if Im being too simplistic I appologise in advance.
John

[OldKat]

@jac 15673 wrote:

It was an interesting article Jason.. A lot is written elsewhere about how the windmills will never “repay” the energy used to create them.. same with tractors.. But if the second generation windmills are created using electricity from wind does that make them more acceptable than the 1st ones made using coal fired power ? does that energy “debt” get less as time passes, providing wind is used as the source of power ?? Scotland uses a lot of hydro power stations..Ben Cruichan is actualy hidden inside a mountain!! Unfortunatly we have our share of the nuclear stuff too:( I have to agree that I dont think wind farms are the answer, or bio fuel for that matter.. The wind mills I asked about were the home made ones, the old aeroplane propeler bolted to a generator and put up on a pole sort of thing:) one thing I noticed is you guys talk of 120v ? we have 240v and 13 amps for household use. does this mean its easier to generate power in the US than the UK ?? I know zero bout electric other than its not to be played with so if Im being too simplistic I appologise in advance.
John

John,

I perused the article Jason posted, but not in depth. I was thinking that you were in mind of more of a household sized generator. I don’t know about homemade ones. I do know that about 25 or 30 years ago there was an outfit that was selling that sized unit around where I live. In a 30 or 40 mile radius of our town there were probably a half dozen or so that I know of installed. None of them are standing today. Although I consider our area to have fairly strong and consistent winds, I have heard that the problem was that the winds did not blow consistently above the minimum threshold. I was kind of disappointed in this outcome, because I wanted to install one as well.

BTW: You being a railroad guy you might be interested to know that the Burlington Northern / Sante Fe line that runs through our town was one of the main carriers for the parts that were used to build the massive wind energy farms in West Texas. For several years starting about 5 or 6 years ago trains would come through loaded with sections of the massive towers that holds the generator and blades assemblies. Then we started seeing whole trains that were nothing but flatcars that were probably 1&1/2 to 2 times the length of the normal cars. Each of these were loaded with a single blade. I’m just guessing these blades were 8 to 10 foot wide and 60 foot long or longer. In was really something to see a train that was 100 to 120 cars long go through loaded with nothing but wind turbine blades.

[Carl Russell]

Matt, we have 990 watts of solar in combination with a 1kw Bergey wind turbine. They charge 12 trojan 105’s, that power a 2500 watt trace inverter. We have gravity water, a sunfrost 24 DC fridge, and heat our water with solar in the summer and wood in the winter.

We also have a back-up generator that we run sometimes a couple of times a week. The solar electric panels are our best generators, because when the wind doesn’t blow, it doesn’t make any power…..

We also use much less electricity than most people could live with, but to us it is a harvesting system. We have collectors that allow us to gather energy, and we have a system that allows us in turn to monitor how we use it.

Carl

[goodcompanion]

We are currently in the process of applying for grants for a low-tech vertical axis wind turbine. Not pretty, not super efficient, but cheap to build and install and reliable as all get out. I am working with a retired turbine engineer on the proposal–he estimates that the prototype will generate sufficient power to offset its extremely modest material cost in under two years.

This engineer says that low-tech wind gets no cred from the engineering community because it does not lend itself to large scale applications and can’t be refined to high degrees of efficiency. But who cares about that if small-scale is all you want, and you can build something out of workaday materials that’s crude but effective, and easily can make your meter run backwards on a typical small farm with moderate power consumption.

Earlier on we looked into one of those Bergey turbines Carl mentioned. But the ridiculous cost for the yield, and the necessity for specialized parts and labor for every aspect of its installation and maintenance was very discouraging. Even the wind consultant trying to sell us on the project acknowledged that getting one was not really very rational, and most units were sold to people without any grid access, or to the very rich.

Anyway, a 10kw unit was $36,000–various incentives would pay 20k out of the public purse, leaving us to pay 16k, in order to generate enough power to negate a $100 / month electric bill. Didn’t make any sense ‘tall. Made for a 13-14 year payback just for our part (30yr overall), except for during that time it would almost certainly require a lot of parts and specialized labor.

Anyway, our low-tech power grant is pending, if we get approved the resulting design will be public domain and I will personally be putting a lot of effort into publicizing it.

[Author]

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