Recent content by glenkleidon

My wind turbine turned out to be a dud, but the temporary storage worked out great. I can feed the batteries by wind (but I dont have a working generator at the moment), solar or on-grid battery charger using "excess solar". I have a YouTube playlist here The specific video where I turned it...

HA! there is https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/5kva-stirling-engine-mini-generator-loncin_1731364281.html?spm=a2700.galleryofferlist.normal_offer.d_title.463763d8h1KtxE but this one runs on diesel I think - so in principle you could supply the heat from the sand battery instead of burning...

Still if you can avoid water it would be better. If you have 1800 Celcius sand, then you can easily heat air enough and use that. You could probably also use a Stirling engine to generate electricity - again with no plumbing. Just not sure if there is a small scale Stirling engine...

Yep absolutely right. All I am saying is that you do need a heat exchanger inside the battery. Ideally you have the heat source buried deep enough in the sand to stop heat radiating to the air, so you need to insert the heat exchanger well inside.

Err - no. Sand can get to 1800 Celcius at 1 atm, water can only get to 100 Celcius at 1 atm. Yes, you can go higher by increasing pressure but that is the killer - high pressure systems require energy to pressurize, complex plumbing, valves and complex safety systems because pressurised steam...

Yeah sorry - I was pointing out that low thermal conductivity is actually what you want (it is very good to have it). But it will mean that you do need a heat exchanger INSIDE the battery to get the heat out coz it wont just leak out passively

Oh, and you should probably use resistive heating run by solar electricity - again you wont get any conduction via thermal solar

Sam - Sand batteries are Awesome - but the Thermal Conductivity co-efficient of Sand is exceedingly low - so you wont get any conduction - you will need to insert Thick metal rods or plates to get the heat out. That is the real advantage of sand. It will stay hot (100s of Degrees) and wontly...

OK, worked up the courage. Turned on the auto charger and its charging ok. It is a micro-controller driven one though - so I expect it is sampling the voltage thousands of times per second - so all should be good. Mppt controller does not seem to care. There is no wind blowing either so...

Wow almost the same as my question. I have a 12V mains power battery charger and a Marsrock Hybrid wind/solar charge controller connected in parallel. Too scared to turn both on a the same time. Is will this be OK?

I saw a youtube video where Will Prowse said it was ok to run multiple charge controllers on the same battery bank. I wonder if it is true that you could run a mppt controller AND a 12V Auto battery charger on the same battery at the same time? My main concern is to avoid damaging either...

I just uploaded this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL42y13vA83asowyQdm_LIxH8NmlErr2w0 My new battery system is being fitted tomorrow, so I will be making sure they configure the second PV input for constant voltage.

The charge controller supplied with my "1.2kAW" wind turbine is rated at 192W while it appears the generator which I tested separately does indeed have a much high capacity. So the 1.2 is likely correct for the generator (at max speed it would likely deliver on the 1.2kW) but with the lantern...

I just received 5 x 90+V boosters from a seller in china at $12USD each. They were all exactly the same, well laid out and beautifully built with quality connectors and excellent soldering. I also received the 97 version as well which I bought to compare. Again well assembled and the inductor...

I have had advice from Fronius about this: essentially they are fine with the idea but are concerned about the efficiency.. It biggest limiting factor is ensuring that there is a spare input line so that you can configure the MPPT to expect the constant voltage that the booster will deliver...