My Latest Projects

Hiya Guy's,
It was my choice to go 100% RE as mains power would of cost me over $100,000 for a single phase 10 amp supply at best and as far as drinking tap water just think the govt puts in thing to numb the senses of the mass's and our rainwater is the best tasting water I've every drunk. Well most of the spring water sold at great expense over here is taken from springs where most land holders have septic toilet systems so the water is basically **it.

the power grid

I heard that the power over in SA goes off regulalry in summer, it has not happened to me yet have not been here long enough... But I beleieve it is because we buy most of our power from Victoria and when the load goes up they stiff us, it was a little more complex a situation than that but the same principal probably stands...

williB said:

Hey Bryan ,
this is what i've been up to lately
in the background is my breadboard , with the 16F877A in the lower right , not shown is the 16F88 in PWM mode , driving a fet and the DC motor which is powering my mini gen , in testbed mode .
picture 2 is a close up of the new minigen i just got the three bolts on it
the last photo is the bearing that i am going to use when i'm done testing it, 5/8-11 threaded rod shoud hold it together, it will replace the 3/8-16 threaded rod going down the center

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I'm intrigued 16F877A is a smart card 2 eproms right? 16F88 is another Eprom? and the pictures are of ? So the DCmotor is driving a minature generator which has super power magnets on each face and is controlled by a some form of Eprom?

Tytower,

See microchip.com for details on the 16F877A and 16F88. They are microcontroller chips. EEPROM inside, RAM, program memory, RISC processor, etc.

tytower said:

I'm intrigued 16F877A is a smart card 2 eproms right? 16F88 is another Eprom? and the pictures are of ? So the DCmotor is driving a minature generator which has super power magnets on each face and is controlled by a some form of Eprom?

Click to expand...

the generator / alternator will be powered by the wind
yes the neos are very strong magnets
what i am working on now is the stator support , and i've changed the motor with a bearing which is a VCR head

Well Guy's a salesman at work today threw a heap of electronic gear in the scrap metal bin today and I just had to take it home to see what goodies were in them . Well what I did find was two 3 phase diode bridges(part No. 6RI75G-120) 75 amp 1600 volt bridges . Also there was six dual 75 amp 1200 volt IGBT's(part No. 2MB175N-120) and a heap of 24 volt fans along with a huge bank of high voltage caps etc and well the heatsinks weight about 5kg's each so one should keep the diode bridges cool when the wind is blowing a gale and the F&P wind genny is putting 60+ amps into the dumpload as the batteries are already charged. When I finally bring the digi camera home from work I'll throw a pic up.

Cheers Bryan

Hey ya Brian, i'm in Adelaide, have just got hold of a Fisher and Paykel washing machine, not sure what model yet, but will be looking at it this week to make into a wind generator. Did you buy stuff for yours from https://www.ecoinnovation.co.nz/ ??? I have found some reasonable instructions for how to build one up, for free online at, https://www.thebackshed.com/Windmill/fp2a.asp

Will let you know what sort it is and I how I get along with it, if it turns out to be the correct sor of Fisher and Paykel, will start a new thread about it.

simoin

Hiya Simoin,
I got my f&p motors locally at about $20 each off memory and I've wired one of them per Glenn's instructions in his siliconchip 3 part article from awhile ago. If your lucky that f&p motor might be one of the new ones but in any case just follow the guide on the backshed site and you'll have no problems. You might want to join the backshed forum too mate as we are all f&p wind genny nuts in there and theres plenty of guy's will answer any questions that might arise.

Cheers Bryan

Hiya guys,
Well I finally got this 10kw 4 pole motor stripped and ready to start figuring out stuff for the conversion. I've made an album in my anotherpower album

**broken link removed**

When I get some spare cash i'll get the magnets (about 100 1/2"x 3/8" round). and machine down the stator to suit the poles in the motor. As this is my first conversion I've got a heap of research to do as with a project of this size mistakes aint an option.

This is going to be a long term project as the tower needed to hold this baby will be a huge one and I reckon 18' blades would suit.

Anyway enough for now hopefully I can get going on it but I still need to finish off converting the bridgeport to a VDF drive so I can use the mill off my inverter.

Cheers Bryan

Well guys with winter setin my current kaneka thin film panels just aint cutting the mustard and charging the batteries so the motor conversion has gone on hold and i'm on making a solar tracker for my 175 watt solar panels which have been sitting in the shed idle. I've made the frame which measures 3.320 x 1.200 metres and when the panels are fitted the total weight will be over 100kg's. so i've made the frame out of 40x40x3 RHS and the tower is 100x100x6 RHS. Once I get the unit up and running I'll take some pic's and put them in here. Once I'm convinced the 700 watts will safely charge my battery bank I'll take the 14 kaneka's offline and make 2 trackers 1 being 8 panels and the other 6. At work we sell linear acuators so next week I'm going to get one and between me and a mate we've workedout using 2 led's and a simple pic circuit we can track the sun so the unit will be totally automanous and hopefully provide plenty of current to charge my house array.

Thats all for now

Cheers Bryan

I'm not surprised your pannels aren't enough to recharge the batteries in the winter time.

How about just adding more pannels?

It might work out more cost effective than building a solar tracker.

Hero999 said:

It might work out more cost effective than building a solar tracker.

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Particularly as a tracker may use more power tracking than it actually produces - usually an accurately aligned fixed panel isn't a great deal worse, and has far less to go wrong of course!.

Nigel Goodwin said:

Particularly as a tracker may use more power tracking than it actually produces - usually an accurately aligned fixed panel isn't a great deal worse, and has far less to go wrong of course!.

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True Nigel but with my house location to the sun the sun goes from east to west and here in winter the correct aligment is 45 degrees. My current panels are bolt to the roof and are completly out of line. Hopefully in the next 2 weeks I'll atleast get the tracker frame up and connected to the house batteries and the data logger I made, then I'll see the power made from being aligned at 45 degrees but fixed. When I put the linear acuator on I will be able to measure the difference and I'm told a tracker can get 20% or more power from fixed panels.

Time will tell

Cheers Bryan

bryan1 said:

When I put the linear acuator on I will be able to measure the difference and I'm told a tracker can get 20% or more power from fixed panels.

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But does it use less than that 20% doing it? - but 20% isn't really much, not for the extra complexity involved.

Obviously if you're only using a single actuator, then you need a polar mount (like satellite dishes use), so that it tracks in a curve and not in a straight line.

We'll be interested to see your results from it!.

Perhaps you've heard of C.A.T. in Wales, I went there a few years back, you might find this interesting?

Hiya Guy's
Well I finally got my first F&P wind genny up flying last weekend and good ol' murphy was around ensuring I didnt get any wind. Anyway we had a severe storm here the other night and this morning I went and checked the genny out to find one of the blades had hit the tower and smashed. Silly me thought 6" was enough space between the blades and tower but on talking with some guy's in irc they said 12" is the minimum distance and I'm not the first or last to find this out the hard way. So guy's remember if your going to put up a wind genny ensure you have a heap of room between the blades and the tower or guarenteed tears will flow after the first decent wind gust. Well a I've got a dose of the flu and off work for a few days time to carve out some new wood blades and hopefully they'll last this time. On another project the bridgeport mill, I'm nearly ready to power up the VFD and see if it works off my 3kw inverter. I've spent all day making a new ali box to hold the VFD and ripping out all the old wiring etc. So hopefully the inverter will run it. If all goes well I'll get a VFD for my 4' lathe which has a 2hp motor and run that off the inverter aswell. Then I can probably claim I'm the only totally RE machineshop in Oz.

Cheers Bryan

i've wired the stator up for my F&P genny, what size blades are you using? I am buying some stuff to setup the mount for it this or next week. If you end up with spare blades let me know I am sure we can come to some arrangment.

How do you mean 12foot between the tower and the blades?

Hi simoin,
Eh mate 12" = 12 inch's not 12' (foot). Anyway for blades I suggest you take a look at the link in the sticky and go to the scoriag site and download the plans for making blades. A few blokes make blades from pvc pipe and are quite successfull but the amount of work shaving the pvc to get the pipe correct to the blade contour your better off just making them from wood. However if you just want to buy a set of blades Trev in the backshed forum who is based in Qld sell fiberglass blades for a good price, you might want to check them out.

Cheers Bryan

Bryan
If you need any help with your sun tracker just say,
I'm fairly good at sizing drives - and control systems.

Well Guy's,
I did say I'll put a pic of my wind genny in here but not what you would expect. Rather than takeup server space here is a link to to a thread I did on the backshed site.

https://www.thebackshed.com/Windmill/FORUM1/forum_posts.asp?TID=743&PN=1


Cheers Bryan

I had a TV antenna mast bend like that.