Hugh Piggott's blog

Try putting your own name into Google some time. I have just found a site called http://hughpiggott.com/ . It started with Amazon adverts for windpower books (I didn’t see them at first because of my adblocking program) but then lead on to marketing all sorts of stuff including my least favourite windpower scam stuff like ‘Earth4energy’.

I just hope that nobody thinks that it has anything to do with me! I am glad it wasn’t the top of the page at Google. But it’s very annoying to see one’s name being hijacked.

PS….. This matter has now been dealt with by exposing the site’s owner to public criticism and negotiating with him to stop doing that. Thanks for the support I had with doing that.

The wind widget on my front page was given me free by Logic Energy. It is fed with data from my house by a device called the LeNet. (I can access the data and make lots of interesting charts and csv files on a management site. ) You will probably have to pay to get your LeNet.

The widget shows both the windspeed and the power produced by my AWP wind turbine charging my 48 volt battery. Lately the windspeeds have been terrible (average 1-2m/s), but this morning the wind is picking up at last, and you can also see the power production picking up (in red). Power depends on the cube of the windspeed. When the wind gets stronger, (around 10 m/s) the AWP turbine starts to furl away from the wind speed and the power doesn’t increase any more. In fact it may go down (a bit) in very strong winds.

Click on the link called ‘Energy’ to see another chart – this time showing kWh of energy produced each day.

We use about 6 kWh of energy each day, and most of this is usually provided by the AWP. We also have a PV array (640 watts peak) that provides over 2 kWh per day on average, but at this time of year it hardly does anything because the sun just gets up and goes down in one swift movement (if it bothers to show up at all). This morning we have already had 4.8 kWh of wind energy before breakfast, which is great news after all the calm days.

If we don’t get enough energy to keep the battery healthy then we have to run a generator. If we get more energy than the battery can absorb then the surplus gets used to heat water.

We run the generator for about 150 hours each year. That produces 2-300kWh of energy per year. We dump about 4-500 kWh into hot water. If we had a big enough (huge!) battery then we would not need to run the generator, but batteries are not very environmentally friendly things, so this is a good compromise. I am building a bigger windmill so that we can use more electricity (dishwasher?) and not have to run the generator so much.

Click on the word ‘Battery’ to see our battery voltage. We often glance at the battery voltmeter. If it gets low then I go around turning stuff off to save energy. If it gets high then we make an effort to use more electricity by washing clothes and stuff like that. If it gets down close to 48 volts then I start to make plans to run the generator. You can see a generator run yesterday on 29th and also on the day before when we got home from Edinburgh. The battery voltage goes up pretty fast when the generator is on but when it stops the voltage drops back down to around 50 volts again.

Today the wind is blowing, so the battery voltage is rising more gently, but because the wind puts in a lot more hours than the generator it does a much better job of charging the battery. If it gets up to 60 volts then the charge controller will kick in and start to make hot water, but I don’t expect a lot of that for a few days because the battery needs to get charged up first.

The calibration of my battery voltage sensing is not exactly perfect but near enough plus/minus 0.5 volts or less. In this cold weather the charge controller may well push the voltage up above 61 volts and it may drop down to 47 due to sluggish performance.

I hope this helps you make sense of the windspeed widget. I have plans to add wind direction when I get around to that. Meantime it must be breakfast time soon.

Jimmy showed me a link and it lead to another link, and before long I found myself looking at the same old stuff again. Earth4energy and the rest of that stuff! Oh no.

Expletives evade my tired brain. We live in a free world where people are free to rip each other off cheerfully and brazenly. All I can do is to suggest to you that you save your money and ignore this stuff. Or by all means try it… You are free to do so after all. I have looked into it and it’s all as vacuous as the marketing drivel that sucks you in. There’s nothing useful there (except the chance to become a reseller and cash in at the expense of some other poor sucker!)

But try leaving the site once you are there! This is what they tell you:

Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>> WAIT WAIT WAIT <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>

My marketing techniques leave a lot to be desired. I suppose these are the sort of advertisements that I would be paid to carry on my site if I chose to do so. I bet they would earn me a few quid. But I couldn’t do it.

🙂

I did a survey recently:

What do you think of the new navigation column on my site?

Only ten people responded out of the many thousands that visited my site over those few days so I did not learn very much. In the end the result is evenly split on the new navigation bar that I have made. Anyway it’s optional – you don’t have to use it unless it helps!

The windspeed widget was out of action for a few days over Christmas while I was away and the broadband connection to the leNet device went down. Hopefully that is back to normal now.

The web counter I put on the site for a few days amazed me. It seems that there are over a thousand visits per day and about 700 of them are fresh ones (as opposed to people returning). They come from all over the world – the USA being the most common country. It’s quite tempting to put advertisements on the site but I suspect that they would irritate me intensely by promoting completely unsuitable products! Anyway I think people do appreciate the non-commercial atmosphere on the site. I do already provide links to people and products that I think are of interest, but I am not paid to do this.

I am sorry the order is a bit random. Many thanks to Pedro Bernardo for the nice photos.

2400 diameter blades, 12 magnets in each steel disk, the magnets are N40 50 mm x 25 mm x 10 mm.

12-volt system, 80 turns of 1.6 mm wire per coil with rectifier on the machine.

The Otherpower discussion board is a great place to chew over the reasons why sh*t happens. Building your own wind turbine often does not end at the point where you erect it. You could say that is the end of the beginning.

Here’s a link to a similar project with a lot of information and some links of its own.

Vivek is in the news again with a project based on one of my alternators. Quite a few people use them like this to charge batteries with human power, but I do have to wonder where the hours come from in the equation:

Energy (watt hours) = Power (watts) x Time (hours).

A good way to keep fit anyway.

As part of my tidy-up drive I have made a navigation frame version of the site that you can access from this link. It needs a bit more work but it’s useful enough already to be worth making it available as an option. Later I might build it in a bit more, so that everybody uses it automatically.

Over the years a lot of people have pleaded with me to allow them to rewrite my whole site in proper posh web designer format but I have resisted because I like things simple and I want to be in control and it’s my site.

Anyway there are a lot of corners to the site, and I may have a go at tidying some of them up and doing newer versions here and there. It’s actually quite a big site when you get into stuff like the web diaries of past courses. There are dozens of web pages in this section and I have not bothered (yet) to do a navigation frame for them, but I could do if it helps. Or maybe find a way to link to the more interesting bits of content that are buried in there.

I have put a survey on this blog so you can leave feedback for my efforts and please feel free to comment on them too if you have time and stuff to say. You can also email me privately – loads of people do so every day so don’t be shy.

My next project is to start breaking down the huge great old front page and adding bits of it to the other pages such as homebrew, international, developing world, rooftop nonsense etc…

But I will try to always put any new stuff on this blog first so as to make it easier to find out what is happening.