[Tugger]

2 years ago a friend of mine was building a small cottage to "get away" on weekends....it was pretty primative at best. But well built with milled lumber.

he had a creek slowly running thru the property

anyhow....he asked me of ways that he could power up some lites inside the cabin at night.....

We discussed a few things and came up with what we called the cheap mans wind power set up...

I have no pictures as it was 2 years ago and due to a computer crash we lost all our files.


it cost him about 200 dollars but it works like a charm...
heres what we did...
He bought an Oddessy Battery (these are used in Abram tanks according to the manufacturer) and are deep cycle.
He also bought 2 - 20 foot lengths of 3 inch sprinkler pipe
and he bought a 400 watt power inverter...

we were able to get 70 feet of 4 guage wire
and I had a high out put alternator from a jeep

I welded a small peice of plate to the top of one of the peices of sprinkler pipe (this was to house the alternator)

I welded a 6 inch peice of round bar to the alternator

we fabricated 4 blades out of hard wood my dad had in his shop and mounted it the the round bar on the alternator


we dug a 6 foot hole next to his cabin and placed one of the poles in the hole and added some concrete to ti

I welded a sleve over that pipe to slide the other pipe with the alternator to it

we erected the the whole unit and ran the wire to the batteries using large size booster clips.

from the batteries to the inverter and then to 3 lights in the cottage...




one thing we would have changed.......figuring out a way for the alternator to be able to pivot with the wind....(the way it is now he has to pivot the upper pipe by hand depending on the wind direction)

he was also able to add 12v LED lites as opposed to using the inverters 120v lights.....

he is able to charge things with this set up and was pretty pleased..


hopefully some you can use this set up in you secluded BOL

Tugger

 

[almac]

if you add a Tail to your windmill, and put the whole assembly on a pivot, it should 'follow' the wind direction.

peace
al

 

[Josiah922]

This is the same concept. Not going to be the most efficient, but it will work if you got some wind.

 

[Tugger]

if you add a Tail to your windmill, and put the whole assembly on a pivot, it should 'follow' the wind direction.

peace
al

Almac........I agree.....as it was not something we had thought of at the time.....

but thinking about it now....I would not know what to use to prevent the wire from spinning around the pole...

 

[Tugger]

Josiah....it was somewhat efficient as he was in a field and had plenty of wind....

The only problem was if there was little wind it did not work like the factory types with plastic blades and needing less rpm's.

Being that the alternator we used needed 6-700 rpm's to send a charge....

But as stated in plenty of wind it was sufficient for the small load he was drawing from the battery

 

[Tugger]

is that your wind powered generator Josiah?

 

[baka]

Almac........I agree.....as it was not something we had thought of at the time.....

but thinking about it now....I would not know what to use to prevent the wire from spinning around the pole...

I have no idea what this assembly is called but it may help you.

I'm sure I have seen something like this before. So I drew out a simple sketch in photoshop to show how it works.

 

[Josiah922]

is that your wind powered generator Josiah?

No just a vid I found where they were doing the same thing. I thought that it might add to the discussion.

 

[Thesenator223]

Almac........I agree.....as it was not something we had thought of at the time.....

but thinking about it now....I would not know what to use to prevent the wire from spinning around the pole...

You would have to use concentric rings insulated from eachother and isolated from the mast and spring loaded contacts to allow the windmill to rotate freely on top of its mast. This is the type of system used on aerial ladders to feed power to the operating pedestal.

 

[boulevardtalonman]

another option I saw (and do realize it uses gasoline) would be to power an alternator with a small engine. 3 horse or better should work fine. Im planing on building one as soon as an engine is aquired.

 

[Ronnie]

your best bet would be to setup a gear system, your pole would be a a hollow shaft with a drive shaft of sorts in it. What would happen is you upper propeller would be setting up there on a pivot o it could turn freely, it would be attached to a gear that would spin the gear on your drive shaft. at the bottom you would have this to connect to a pully. Then you could build something to cover the alternator and protect them from weather, also you could use the pullys to make the alternators spin faster with low winds. You could also hook up more then one alternator for double or even triple the charge. I will try to draw something up tomarrow to explain what I am talking about. I have been thinking of building something to experiment with except I was going to buy a prop.

 

[Ronnie]

OK here is what I was talking about doing, this picture may describe it alil better then what I said.

 

[Tugger]

I see what your saying.....
your gears section almost looks like the spider gears in a solid axle....I understand your concept

Tugger

 

[8 Passes Wind]

Google 'Vertical Axis Wind Turbine' and see what you think.
They are supposed to be far more efficient than 'normally configured' blades. That will be the route I go down I think.

 

[Ronnie]

Yeah tugger thats where I got the idea for it We was putting in a LSD one day and I was thinking about doing something similar to this the night before and then it hit me

 

[boulevardtalonman]

one thing i forgot to mention was that I saw this done with an antique hit-and miss engine. I believe around a 6 horse. But the moral is that these things are pretty low rpm and it did charge the batteries in the guys rv. He was showing it at a car show, running and chargeing. The amp meter was showing low but was chargeing. A modern small engine is higher rpm and should work better. And it doesnt take much to turn an alternator so I believe that pretty much anything would work

 

[Ronnie]

even if you have a low RPM engine you can increase RPM's dramatically with pully's. You will need a larger pully on the power supplying object and a small one on what you are turning, this will make the whatever you are turning turn much much faster then what is turning it. Doing this you are also losing torque though. So if you try to turn something to fast you will have no power. This is how a transmission works.

 

[ForestBeekeeper]

Good going there.

Anything is better than nothing.