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Cheap Horizontal Wind Turbine/MPPT 1 Year Results

HighDesertOffgrid said:
What do you have in the Victron CC lineup that would work with this?
www.hurricanewindpower.com

Hurricane XP 24 Volt Wind Turbine Generator Kit 1000 Watt , Max 1500 Watts

Hurricane XP 24 Volt Wind Turbine Generator Kit 1000 Watt , Max 1500 Watts
www.hurricanewindpower.com www.hurricanewindpower.com
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Nothing. Victron does not approve their controllers for use in wind applications.

That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it requires additional knowledge, or you're willing to risk the controller without a brake or dump load as you are with your existing MPPT.

IMHO, best to go with something intended for wind with a brake and/or dump load.
 
@HighDesertOffgrid I appreciate you posting results.

I was kicking around a 400 watt wind turbine for a temporary setup in hopes to produce 250 wh to 350 wh for an RV.

Thought was the places I was camping got winds in excess of 15 MPH and often 35 MPH each night for a couple hours just after sunset or just before sunrise.

Places I go now have calm winds.

THe average watt hours per day hit the goal I was looking for.
 
sunshine_eggo said:
IMHO, best to go with something intended for wind with a brake and/or dump load.
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If I pull the pin on this one, a braking system and dump load will be requisite. Although the dump load will likely be a hot tub.?
Midnight 150 is one of their recommended wind CCs. I have worked on those before but don't remember anything in the menus related to wind turbines.
 
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chrisski said:
@HighDesertOffgrid I appreciate you posting results.

I was kicking around a 400 watt wind turbine for a temporary setup in hopes to produce 250 wh to 350 wh for an RV.

Thought was the places I was camping got winds in excess of 15 MPH and often 35 MPH each night for a couple hours just after sunset or just before sunrise.

Places I go now have calm winds.

THe average watt hours per day hit the goal I was looking for.
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I was a full time traveler for several years. Spent many winters in Q. No turbine then. I have seen some mounted on RV ladders, but knowing how violent they get in strong winds, I wouldn't do it.
 
HighDesertOffgrid said:
I was a full time traveler for several years. Spent many winters in Q. No turbine then. I have seen some mounted on RV ladders, but knowing how violent they get in strong winds, I wouldn't do it.
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Mine would be to install a 12’ pole in a circular hole in a truck hitch. This is available off EBay. Guy wires would be up top to hold the turbine. There would be a base of some sort.

What is stopping me is the attention this would get with people coming over to look at it. If people would stat away, I may try it.
 
chrisski said:
Mine would be to install a 12’ pole in a circular hole in a truck hitch. This is available off EBay. Guy wires would be up top to hold the turbine. There would be a base of some sort.

What is stopping me is the attention this would get with people coming over to look at it. If people would stat away, I may try it.
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The 12' pole would probably work well.
I understand unwanted attention. I pulled my 5er with a class 8 freightliner, custom bed on the truck with two motorcycles and a Suzuki Sidekick on there. Nothing worse than a bunch of looeyloos when your trying to set up camp.?‍♂️
 
Zwy said:
I was impressed with the information on the website.

8' swept area will take a pretty good tower.
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Between you two, I sure hope you try this out and report back how it worked out, I am tempted every winter, as the sun disapears and the winds arrive. Mostly concerned with endless maintenance. If the units have dump load and brakes built in, maybe the attention they need will be reasonable.
 
Zwy said:
I was impressed with the information on the website.

8' swept area will take a pretty good tower.
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This one belongs to one of my clients. It is approximately the same swept area. I re-engineered the CC for it after their previous solar contractor thought one of the phase wires was a neutral and bonded it to the system. Smoked everything.
The mast is 3" sch 40 pipe embedded in 64 cu ft of concrete. It is supposedly rated at 3kw but I've not seen that.20220202_125840.jpg
 
OffGridForGood said:
Between you two, I sure hope you try this out and report back how it worked out, I am tempted every winter, as the sun disapears and the winds arrive. Mostly concerned with endless maintenance. If the units have dump load and brakes built in, maybe the attention they need will be reasonable.
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It would be 2 years before I would consider it as I'm installing more PV due to the sale on the 31 370W panels. 11 panels will be added to the house system.

100Kwh from grid would cost me about $20 and that is what we used from grid in December. January will be higher but if we get more sun in late January I will run excess thru a dump load heating the house so I save on propane. Probably makes it net positive for me. I did dump load excess in early December in house heating.

Even at 200Kwh in a month I would probably just use a standby generator in total off grid situation. $2500 (cost of wind generator) x 5%= $125 return in a money market CD. 3500W output on a propane genny runs about 0.72 gal/hour. 200Kwh takes about 57 hours runtime so under 50 gallon of propane. I buy propane at around $1.50 in summer. 50 x $1.50= $75

Considering during warmer months I used house heating as a dump load, it probably would cost me nothing to run a propane generator. I do have to buy the propane generator but if totally off grid I would have one anyway as backup even with some wind.
 
HighDesertOffgrid said:
Of course I'm not joking. I'm discussing. The wind is blowing 15mph as we speak. Gusting to 21. Bet those off-grid folks in Fairbanks getting 3 hrs of sunshine a day might appreciate that about now.
I think my reply to Stephen includes a screenshot with the price I paid for the turbine. But I'm glad the price of solar continues to drop. I have 3 solar projects to bid this week.
I stomped around in the Ozark foothills for around 40 years but I don't get back there often. Is it not as overcast all winter as it used to be? Maybe climate change.
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Funny you mention Alaska. I've been around some of parts of Alaska and I don't recall seeing a single small wind turbine but that really doesn't mean much since I spent most of my time being gob smacked about how awesome the scenery was.

A few years ago there was a member from Alaska who shared a story about their personal and thier off grid neighbors experiences with small wind. In short, they all had tried and gave up, with no plans to ever try again.

This member also volunteered that when they started they were so confident of how successful it was going to be that were writing a book about it but pretty quickly they realized that their book was not going to have a happy ending thus abandoned it.

At the end of the day if you're living off grid you already have a generator that you can turn on at the exact time you need it for as long as you need it for just few dollars of dino juice. You'll never have that luxury with small wind.

And yes... it's quite dreary in the Ozarks from early December through the end January but they wind may or not blow. Our windiest months are March and April but by then the days are getting longer and sunnier so solar is easily providing 100% of my energy needs.

Even with all of that said, I'm currently collecting the parts and pieces to build my own wind turbine based on Hugh Piggott's designs.
 
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1705888757292.png

HighDesertOffgrid said:
This one belongs to one of my clients. It is approximately the same swept area.
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I'm curious to hear more about this turbine. I noticed that it's mounted off center which is very interesting to me.

I believe Karl Bergey was the first one to come up with that. It's an ingenious way of passively protecting the wind turbine from overspeed. To the casual observer it looks like the tail is folding but in reality it's staying in the same place and the rotor is getting pushed into a folded position and out of the wind.

1705888573361.png
 
OzSolar said:
View attachment 190546



I'm curious to hear more about this turbine. I noticed that it's mounted off center which is very interesting to me.

I believe Karl Bergey was the first one to come up with that. It's an ingenious way of passively protecting the wind turbine from overspeed. To the casual observer it looks like the tail is folding but in reality it's staying in the same place and the rotor is getting pushed into a folded position and out of the wind.

View attachment 190541
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I don't remember the brand. I believe it is of asian origin. The OM/installation manual was very sparse in information. I'll try to get a make and model next time I'm there.
 
I built mine this way, using data from several larger units and alot of weight vs offset calculations. I can confirm that mine works as expected, it furls in a 30 mph wind with a 3.25" offset and a tail surface area of 407 sq inches. Balance is very important for this to work, so CG needs to be determined and then length and weight of tail can be calculated.
 
sunshine_eggo said:
Nothing. Victron does not approve their controllers for use in wind applications.

That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it requires additional knowledge, or you're willing to risk the controller without a brake or dump load as you are with your existing MPPT.

IMHO, best to go with something intended for wind with a brake and/or dump load.
Click to expand...
I sure wish they had something. My Quattro 10kva build, which I'm about to pull the trigger on, is primarily powered by micro-hydro and a small number of panels. At this point the advice I'm getting is Midnite Solar Classic and do the modbus tweak with VenusOS to allow it to talk to the Cerbo. The problem with the Midnite unit is that I don't think it pulls dump load power off the top but rather from the batteries, which is just dumb. The Morningstar Tristar unit, I believe, will feed excess power off the top before going to the batteries. That way, you aren't constantly micro-cycling your batteries.
 
I've thought about buying one of those "400W" wind turbines from Amazon and designing/fabricating some larger blades for it, potentially 3d printed with wood spars (or similar). I would imagine the "400W" rating is reasonable for the generator/wiring and wishful thinking for the power able to be captured with the included blades.

Edit: but then I wrote some python to analyze the wind speeds in my area (measured on my roof) and found that at best, it would be a fun experiment to watch the blades spin. Solar + battery would be a much better ROI in terms of both time and money.
 
SajgZi said:
Edit: but then I wrote some python to analyze the wind speeds in my area (measured on my roof) and found that at best, it would be a fun experiment to watch the blades spin. Solar + battery would be a much better ROI in terms of both time and money.
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The big desire is for those dark windy days....sure it's got a horrible ROI vs solar when you look at the big picture. However, for someone living in, say, Alaska or some other cold/rainy/dark place, having even a couple hundred watts coming in goes a long way toward not needing a generator in a totally off-grid situation when the sun goes away for 3-4-5 days in stormy weather which is often also windy weather. I'm powering two houses off of 350watts continuous hydro and will be adding a small amount of solar to supplement when I switch from the Magnum to the new Victron setup. But with all that, I would like to add something like a cheap 400-watt wind turbine. Christmas week was a perfect example; this year, it was cold grey with 15-30mph winds for 2 days. Something small that doesn't need a massive tower, etc. It could be especially useful for people with these cheap Chinese inverters with high idle consumption, basically enough to mitigate that parasitic draw.
 
NC_hydro said:
I'm powering two houses off of 350watts continuous hydro and will be adding a small amount of solar to supplement when I switch from the Magnum to the new Victron setup
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I’d like to see a thread and pictures on this to see what 350 watts of hydro looks like.
 
I thought about wind again this winter with 4 weeks of non stop clouds, with only 3 days of sun.

The problem is finding a good wind generator, from what I've seen out there they just don't hold up. If you find a good one, I wouldn't mind hearing about it.
 
Zwy said:
If you find a good one, I wouldn't mind hearing about it.
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There are several whole-home sized turbines in my area. They have yellow nose cones and tails. They are mounted 40-80 feet agl. Not sure what make they are.
The closest of them to me had a failure of some sort last year. It was 60-80 ft agl. I saw a crane working on it one day, then the blades were gone for some weeks, then it was operational again.
I surmise it was worth fixing or the owner likes to throw away large sums of money. 🤷‍♂️
 
HighDesertOffgrid said:
There are several whole-home sized turbines in my area. They have yellow nose cones and tails. They are mounted 40-80 feet agl. Not sure what make they are.
The closest of them to me had a failure of some sort last year. It was 60-80 ft agl. I saw a crane working on it one day, then the blades were gone for some weeks, then it was operational again.
I surmise it was worth fixing or the owner likes to throw away large sums of money. 🤷‍♂️
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My brother has a 17.5Kw Jacobs, 110 foot tower and something like a 26 foot swept area.

He used to sell to the rural coop, now they put him on net meter. Way overkill for what I would want and I prefer as little maintenance as possible. He tilts his down yearly for service, he can't climb since a fall off a roof.
 
chrisski said:
I’d like to see a thread and pictures on this to see what 350 watts of hydro looks like.
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Definitely can do that. I need to get before and after pictures before I start my upgrade. Plan is to add three more 2” pipes. It can accept 4 but currently only running one at 58psi. The upgrade will relocate down stream where it would be around 80psi.
 
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