HighDesertOffgrid
Solar Addict
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2022
- Messages
- 628
Fitting day for the 1 year anniversary of the MPPT test.
The goal of said test was to determine with lazy scientific methodology if there was an advantage to allowing the turbine to gain inertia without the constant load of the 24v applied voltage but rather to let the charge controller determine the input voltage and load the turbine accordingly. It does function as expected, often allowing the turbine to reach over 90 volts of the 150V max input of the CC with steady winds keeping it around 32V. The laziness on my part is mostly due to budget constraints as it would have been nice to have a second unmodified control unit onsite as a comparison. Also, the CC has only 10 day internal logging, so there's that.
Before connecting the MPPT charge controller I was running directly out of the rectifier to the + and - bus bars for a couple of years with this turbine. The highest output I have witnessed has been 254 watts. That was not changed significantly by the addition of the MPPT.
The turbine is a 1 meter-3 blade rated at 400(chinesium) watts mounted around 14 ft. AGL. NWS reports my average wind speeds @ 6mph. Turbulence isn't as much of an issue here in the desert as in other areas.
There is no dedicated dumpload as I use more power than it can produce (mini split heatpump running constantly and 20 gallon electric water heater set to turn on at >27.5V system voltage). The CC is set to 28V at which point it removes the load and allows the turbine to freewheel.
The pics are from 02-10-23, 04-08-23, and today.
Final annual output will hit 100kwh today as it is supposed to be VERY windy for the next two days. giving me and "average" (defined as sporadic and unreliable) daily output of 274wh. Some of which is when it's cloudy and my 8kwh of panels are operating at 10% and some of which are at night.
Grid-tie numbers with a microinverter would be interesting.