THE ANSWER IS BLOWIN' IN THE WIND
(Page 7 of 10)
November/December 1973
By James B. DeKorne
I now have a 32-volt (1,200-watt) Wincharger, and a 32-volt (2,500-watt) Jacobs . . . both of which I will install on my homestead to give me 3,700 watts of power.The Wincharger should be up and working by the time this is published. It now only awaits brushes, a rebuilt prop and a control box.
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REBUILDING A RIG
Brushes for the Wincharger are, of course, no longer manufactured, but they may be purchased on special order
(custom made) from the Becker Bros. Carbon Co., 3450 South Laramie Ave., Cicero, Illinois 60650. The cost is $35.00 for ten brushes. (Although a generator only needs two brushes, you should buy extras ... they eventually wear out and must be replaced.) Send Becker Bros. an old brush when you place an order so they'll know what to make up for you.
What about rebuilding, or in most cases, making a propeller? I haven't tackled that one yet, but am not worried about it. LIFESTYLE! NO. 3 has an article (see page 47 of that issue) on how to construct a wooden prop, and the November 1972 issue of Popular Science describes a propeller made of expandable paper and fiberglass. Actually, a wind generator prop is not as difficult to make as it may seem at first. A friend of mine crudely hacked one out of an old 2 X 4 in a few minutes ... and it turned up a storm when held faced into the wind (see Photo No. 4).
The control box poses my third problem. What goes into it, and how is it constructed? Knowing as little as I do about electricity, I'm going to entrust that one to a qualified electrician. With the help of an old wiring diagram from the 32-volt Wincharger manual, we should be able to put one together without much trouble. A "control box" of sorts can be as simple as the one in Photo No. 5 and Drawing No. 4, which really amounts to an anti-motor device and protection from lightning.(A DC generator will act as an electric motor if the current is reversed. Without an anti-motor device, the juice from the batteries will "motor" the generator when the wind isn't blowing. . . and this will eventually discharge the storage units completely.)
And what about batteries? What kind are best? You can get a lot of different opinions on the subject, but the kind of storage cells used by the old-timers I visited out on the plains were large industrial-type 2-volt units connected in series to add up to the voltage of the generator. (Nine times out of ten, that was 32 volts ... or sixteen 2-volt cells hooked up to make one big 32-volt battery.)
These units are still available from the industrial division of any battery manufacturer. The flyer shown here is from Gould, Inc. (Fig. 2), but Exide, Delco and others offer similar units. They're heavy (upwards of 70 pounds each), and expensive (several hundred dollars for a set) ... but in the long run probably the most efficient and economical way to go. Some units have a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years . . and if you prorate their initial expense over that period of time, your costs are really very reasonable when compared to what you'd otherwise be paying for Reddy Kilowatt's pollution-producing electricity. Probably the minimum capacity you'll want to consider for efficient operation is 180-amp-hour batteries. (The 110-volt Wincharger manual speaks of batteries in the 240- to 424-amp-hour range.) If you can't afford the big units, golf cart or diesel truck batteries will be a better bet than ordinary automotive units.
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