Alan Stevens's posts

Bruce

Withe the simplistic approach I suggested, the greater problem is what to do with to much power, not the lack of it.

If you used an old water heater as a preheater buy connecting the AC output of the wind generator, (the ones that produce 240V wild AC), any amount of current would produce some heat. If for example the heater had 3000W elements, then it is rated for a max amperage of (3000/240) 12.5 Amps. However, if you only produced 5 amps, then you would only have 1200 Watts to produce heat.

If your generator produced more amps than the element is rated for, then the voltage would rise and cause problems, probably burning out the elements. You could wire the elements together for a limit of 25A.

This is just for direct wind energy to heat. If you put up a wind generator, why not use the electricity for poering your house. In this case, you would have batteries, an inverter, etc. You could use a diversion shunt to divert any excess power into your water preheater.

These are my thoughts, anyone else care to comment?

Alan

>45' air tower kit still in box
>never been opened. $150.00 plus shipping
>call 970-481-4656 MST.

I am interested, but where are you, how big is the package, how much does it weigh ?

This is so I can calculate shipping costs.

Thanks

Yes there is a way to do this. I have been looking into this myself, since this winter it seems to be very windy here in the Ottawa valley.

Using either solar PV or wind generators, the question is what to do when you don't need any more power, i.e the batteries are fully charged. Solar PV arrays can be disconnected via the charge controller (fancy name for a regulator), but Wind generators should be never be removed from a load. If you did disconnnect the load, it would spin to fast and damage itself. Therefore a different kind of regulator is required. This is called a diversion regulator. When there is excess power (the voltage rises past the set point) it diverts the power to an alternate load usually a resistive heating device.

Now if all you want is heat, forget the regulator, batteries etc. and connect directly to the resistive load. The Whisper generators (and maybe others, I haven't reserched this to far) produce a "wild AC" (meaning the frequency varies wildly) at 208VAC 3 phase. This is intended to be transformed and rectified, but it could be connected directly to a separate (from grid AC power) water heater for example.

Hope this helps