Gone with the wind

We have been having a variety of weather lately and can finally start to see how our 500 watt wind turbine can perform.  In a word-poorly. Now I can not comment on all wind turbines, just this one. We have been in contact with the company many times to try to solve some real issues with this type of technology. We have had to come up with solutions on our own. Very disheartening.

First let me start by saying, if your thinking about adding wind power to your homestead, you really have to be sure you live in an area with SUSTAINED winds. Yes our area is windy, but now I see that periods of sustained winds are not as numerous as I thought. If you want to put your turbine on a 100 foot tower, that would solve that problem since most wind at that level is sustained. But many municipalities to do permit 100 foot towers and a small turbine like this one would not be able to withstand the constant wind streams at 100 feet and be worked to pieces. Plus if your installing it yourself, erecting a 100 foot tower would be an extremely dangerous operation. This turbine is recommended to be mounted on a 30 foot tower, but most winds at the 30 foot level are far to choppy for steady power production. They don't tell you that in the small print when you purchase one and as I research this topic I am finding many dissatisfied customers.

The turbine may be spinning constantly, but it must produce over 24 volts to be able to begin to charge our batteries (which are configured into a 24 volt bank).  This is not as often as one may think.  Even here it is only producing 22 volts and it is spinning its tail off.  When it is finally  producing 24 volts it only amps out at 1.9 amps or 46 watts. No big power producer.

Now here was the most disturbing problem we encountered. Electricity is not something that only flows one way. If the turbine is not producing any power at any particular time, it is not only NOT adding power to our system, but it can be leaching power FROM the batteries back out to the turbine. When we first hooked it up we noticed the batteries quickly draining. Our charge controller for the solar panels has a built in blocking diode, but the turbine feeds to its own little charge controller (which really is not a charge controller like one may think, but a load diverter for when it produces more power than the batteries can take and it must divert that power load to something else or it could fry the batteries). So when we brought this up to the manufacturer they acted like they had no idea what we were talking about and felt that the solar array would be the culprit of the power back feed. We explained that was impossible since it has it's own blocking diode . So we bought a blocking diode and installed it on the turbine side. And it solved that problem. Think of it as a stop valve for electricity. So much for the manufacturer knowing their product.

Luckily for us, the wind turbine came with some of the solar panels when we purchased them from an individual selling the system. If we had bought this turbine outright, we would be very disappointed. But since we owned it anyway, having it hooked up doesn't hurt. But it does not supply us with enough power to recommend it either. The little power it does produce is just icing on the cake for us and we gained a lot of knowledge on small scale wind systems that we otherwise would not have known. If we found a larger wind system for a really great deal, it may be tempting to find out if it would be more efficient. But even in our area that is rated as one of the worst for solar power due to the amount of cloudy days per year, we would still invest in a larger solar array first. Solar is such a smooth  power system and is far more controllable that wind. But that is homesteading, a constant learning curve.