Short Term Contract Opportunity: Market Assessment Research Assistant/Instructor

Wind Empowerment have been contracted by the Scottish Government to carry out a market assessment for small wind turbines in Malawi in partnership with Community Energy Malawi. This will be carried out between December 2015 and March 2016 and will involve a week long training and planning session in Malawi with Community Energy Malawi staff. The project will be lead by Aran Eales and Jon Sumanik-Leary, who are looking looking to recruit two further research assistants/instructors to assist with the design and delivery of this research project.

Community Energy Malawi

A proposal containing further information about the project can be found here.

Please send any questions relating to this opportunity to [email protected]. To apply, please send a CV and covering letter to the same address by midnight UK time (GMT) on Monday 14th December.

 

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Adopt a turbine!

If you’d like a homebuilt wind turbine but can’t find time to build one then you might consider adopting one built in a workshop course?  V3Power are offering several wind turbines and parts on this basis here.

 

Posted in construction, People, products/technical, UK small wind scene | Leave a comment

Build your own windmill workshop course on Scoraig April 23rd 2016

I am planning to hold a course here on Scoraig in April.  We’ll build and test a wind turbine as usual.  Accommodation is provided from Saturday 23rd to Saturday 30th April 2016.  These will be the arrival and departure days.  The course will run for six days from 24th to 29th.  Your partner may be able to find accommodation here too without attending the workshop. Please ask for details.

See photos of 2012 course (plus video) , 2013 course, 2014 course and last year.   Cost will be £750 including accommodation.  I may be able to offer a limited number of student discounts if there are enough people paying full price.

Contact me for more details and to book a place.  I do not plan to travel around teaching courses any more as I already did that for 12 years or so.  This may be your only opportunity to be taught by me personally, although there are several other groups worldwide offering courses based on my Recipe Book or derivatives of it.

20150423_092325

 

Posted in courses, my own projects, Scoraig | 6 Comments

My electricity supply here

I don’t write enough about what goes on here at home on Scoraig so here is a run down on where my electricity comes from. I have two windmills and a collection of solar PV panels.  800 Ah Rolls 4000-series battery and 48 V and two Outback VFX 3 kW inverters.

 

The big windmill charges the 48 V battery via a couple of heaters in series.  We get very little heat in low winds but almost all of the power goes to battery charging with very low cut-in around 60 rpm.  As the current increases to (say) 20 A we get about 1000 W to the battery and 300 W of heat.  When it reaches 40 A we get 2400 W at the battery (assuming 60V) and 1200 W of heat.  The heat (combined with waste heat from cooking) is sufficient for our well insulated house most of the time.  I prefer the windmill should not go a lot higher output than that, but it’s turbulent site in NW gales so we do see much higher surge outputs and there is trip that brings in extra heaters as a braking load when the voltage reaches 140 V (7.5 kW).  I had a bad accident with this windmill (tower buckling) in a bad storm last January, and nowadays it is governed to about 1 kW average into the battery.  It looks lazy but it does all we need.

The smaller windmill is an AWP from Zimbabwe but the blades are locally made from wood.  It runs through an MPPT controller (I have tested both Classic and Tristar) that enhances the peak output to about 1500 watts.

The Solar array consists of 4 strings (pairs) of big 240 Wp 30 V modules and 2 strings (fours) of little 80 Wp 17 V modules totalling about 2.5 kWp.  These feed into the battery, and surplus power (wind and solar) is dumped to hot water using a Tristar PWM diversion load controller.  When the water tank is hot, the excess power is diverted to AC heating loads using a phase control SSR.  We also have some evacuated tubes for hot water.

Electricity consumption is running at about 6500 kWh per year.  (The UK domestic average is 4200 but I also run my business and the extended family house next door).  We do most of our cooking with electricity, using a kettle, toaster, microwave, induction hob and halogen oven.  We also recently replaced the gas oven with a big electric oven.

When the wind stops and there is not much sunlight the batteries get a bit of a fright, and I have to fire up a diesel generator.  This has run for an average of 150 hours per year over the last two years, feeding about 2-3 kW of power into the system.

Posted in my own projects, Scoraig, wind systems tutorial | 8 Comments

free KD-reports

Adriaan Kragten writes:

As I am retired for some years now, I no longer need income from selling my KD-reports about small wind turbines. So I have decided that from now on all my public KD-reports can be copied for free by anybody. This concerns ten more reports with former prices in between € 20 and € 40. My most important report is certainly KD 35: Rotor design and matching for horizontal axis wind turbines. Report KD 196 gives questions and answers about each chapter of KD 35 in English and in Dutch. A list of all 46 free public KD-reports is given as the first item of the menu KD-reports on my website: www.kdwindturbines.nl. All reports have a rather long title which gives a good impression of the content.

The most recent report is KD 598: Ideas about the 3-bladed VIRYA-0.65 water turbine with 20° inclined shaft coupled to the generator of the VIRYA-2.68 windmill for 12 V battery charging.

Posted in Adriaan Kragten, Books, construction, People | Leave a comment

Nice CAD model of 4200 blade

“Hello Hugh.

My name is Josue (Joshua if it is easier for you). I live in Colombia, South America.

I would like to share this file we made for the 4200 blades. This is the Adobe 3D version. (You’ll need the Acrobat Reader DC in order to see it.)

This file was produced using a CAD program called Solid Works.”

Josue has offered to share the solid works file, and if you are interested in this I will put you in touch with him.

Aspa

Here is the Acrobat version he sent to me : Aspa V1
 You probably won’t be able to view it with your browser but if you download the file and open it with Acrobat Reader DC then you can play around and view the model from all different angles.

Posted in construction, People | 14 Comments

Lifting handle for the magnet rotor

I never like lifting magnet rotors into the mould.  The rotor for the 4F is very heavy, having 20 big ferrite magnets on a 50 cm disk. So I made a handle to lift it.  I had to make two of the holes in the mould base a bit big to accommodate the nuts on the ends of the handle studs.  Worked really nicely and not hard to do!

Posted in construction, ferrite magnets, my own projects | 3 Comments

Homebrew stuff for sale

John Gambill has some useful stuff for homebrew wind for sale.  He lives at
Hotwire EnterprisesDiversion Load 003
102 W. Fulton St.
Tarpon Springs, FL 34689, USA
(727) 943-0424

He has diversion loads and blocking diodes and some low power Chinese alternators ($99 each) for 12 volt homebrew projects.  Contact him for more details.  I can’t comment on whether you will get a good deal or not.

Here in the UK I know of a guy Russell Evans (Mobile – 07456 976374) who is selling an altenrator that he cannot use for some reason.   The Alternator is a Ginlong GL-PMG-1000 1kW alternator for grid tied application.  It can do 1kW at 450 rpm.  Drive plate included.  It needs blades though.  Big ones I would suggest.

I cannot vouch for either of these people but I pass on their offers for you to negotiate directly as you see fit.  Just thought I would oblige them by letting folks know about the stuff they have on offer.

Hugh

Posted in construction, People, products/technical | 1 Comment

webcam view from tail

This turbine is based on my design although it owes a lot to the Otherpower book too.  You could say via the otherpower book.   Nice video.

Posted in construction, Video links | 1 Comment

Windempowerment in Ethiopia

Wind Empowerment Jijiga 2015 from Wind Empowerment on Vimeo.

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