Topic: ok smartie pants.... green energy ideas

[the technological J]

ive been thinking about how to make some electricity on my own not so much for green purposes but to save money.... my long term is to have the tv, computer, phones(droid pad) and  most of the lighting(prob changed to leds) to some home made device... something like this
Home made windmill generator part 1 - building a small prototype
 you can watch it all or skip to 7 here
Home made Windmill Generator part 7 - Test on VAWT
obviously i would be storing the energy somehow
 this is just an idea, ive yet to source anything(magnets or wire) just curious how you would improve on this idea and keep it cheap... or what would you do(pay for electricity is not an option)

[fmctm1sw]

Have you seen those Harbor Freight 45 watt solar panel things?  Just a thought...

[Don R]

I always wanted to build a wind turbine with an automotive alternator. Never did. I had thought of using it vertical shaft with a weather cover that turned with the rotor  and something like a squirrel cage blower tomturn it. might require a gear or belt drive to get the rpm required.

[scottly]

I lived "off the grid" for 9 years. I gave up on wind after a couple of years; it seemed like it was always feast or famine. I had much better results with photo-voltaic. I scored on some Arco panels from a decommissioned one-megawatt plant, that was shut down in the '80s, after the feds changed the laws that had encouraged green energy.   

[Don R]

Did you shine a light on them at night so you could watch TV?

[Don R]

Just kidding of course. I think that is awesome.

[scottly]

Did you shine a light on them at night so you could watch TV?

No, I had a good-sized battery bank. BTW, the wind machine had a Mopar alternator.

[Don R]

So it can be done with automotive parts, cool.

[scottly]

I also used 8" schedule 40 plastic sewer pipe, cut into quarters length-wise for the windmill blades..

[Retro Rocket]

I also used 8" schedule 40 plastic sewer pipe, cut into quarters length-wise for the windmill blades..

I made one exactly the same Scott, even used a car alternator, i got a plan for the blades off the net and used a sewer pipe cut into 4 but shaped like propeller blades, it worked well in even a slight breeze, blade shape is critical.... . Solar panels are very popular here as is solar hot water systems. My mate has just had 24 solar panels fitted to his house and with a large swimming pool, a huge fish tank and his 2 boys living in a double unit in the back yard, they now have no power bills. No power storage at all, it feeds directly into an inverter which then sends the power to the meter which basically runs the meter  in reverse when producing power, they were paying $250 a month for power until buying the solar panels...

[OldSchool_IsCool]

The trouble with many automotive alternators is that they use some of the generated power to excite its own magnetic field. This means you loose power to overhead. If you have an ample power source, like an internal combustion engine, the loss is manageable.

A permeant magnet alternator is more efficient, but harder to find and more expensive.  I've seen DIY plans on the Internet that are made from automotive brake disks.

[Roach Carver]

Interesting.

[333]

The other issue with using an auto alternator is that you have to have some serious wind to turn it after gearing it to turn fast enough.  An auto alt requires serious speed to make enough volts and amps.  The video posted at the top uses a large diameter, home made alternator, using about 10 times the coils found in an auto alt.

I watched all the videos, which was difficult.  The dude's English was poor at best.  He used about 100 words to say that you needed an even number of magnets/coils.  At one point, he was "showing" how to rout slots in a wood wheel to mount the coils, but when he actually went to cut, he would bend over and block the shot with his back, so you couldn't see.  He also never said how many loops of wire were in each coil.

And then there was the part where he cut his hand.

[333]

This link was one of the ads on Facebook.  It sounds like an okay deal, but I haven't bought in yet.  Click the link and follow another link at the bottom of the page for a "presentation".

http://lifestylefeeds.com/energy/electricity4.php

[the technological J]

i dont think he balanced the rotor very well but got his ideas out therei was thinking if i did something like this would cut the wire to  the same length and then wrap it

[scottly]

My rotor was about 7 1/2 feet in diameter, 8 or 10 blades (don't remember). I had something like a 16" pulley on the rotor, and a 1 1/4" pulley on the alternator. I had two mercury switches in series with the field, so the field only was energized when the rotor was turning. In light winds, when the field switched on, the load would slow the rotor down, and the field would shut off, then it would speed up again. It would keep cycling like that, over and over. Even if it had been a PM alternator, it wouldn't have produced much, if any, usable power in those wind conditions.
I did convert an alternator to PM, using a couple of ceramic "donut" speaker magnets to replace the field coil. I also re-wound the stator with more turns, of smaller gauge wire to reduce the speed at which the alternator began producing power. However, when I was testing it, spinning it with a Briggs & Stratton motor, the magnets blew up when I spun it too fast! Worked great until it blew!
One thing I noticed about the last video: the voltages shown don't mean squat if there is no load. No load means no current means no power is being produced.
Here is a pic of one of my blades:

[Retro Rocket]

The one i made was simple, i pulled the guts out of a ceiling fan and used the brackets that held the fan blades on to hold the new blades i made, it still had the bearings either side where the motor used to be and worked very well, made it in an afternoon for my son's school project, it had 4 blades and worked in a light breeze, the car alternator wasn't ideal but it worked well enough for its intended purpose.

[scottly]

Here a pic of the first wind generator I played with. I used a Schwinn bicycle generator. Whipped this together in 1982..

[the technological J]

does anybody know what kind of system(electrically) that would make sense to set up in my home? could i pull off a 12 volt system? and what makes a 12 volt battery 12 volts?  like why not 6 volts or 40?

[lostmykeys]

 Please know this is a joke.
 But most of the ghetos in this country get high on a product called jenkum and they make it themselves....no #$%*!
 My thoughts are to turn this simple proccess into energy.
 Look it up if you dare and be prepared to be disgusted.

[Retro Rocket]

Led light conversions are all the rage at the moment here, costs virtually nothing {well not much} to run them.  I often wondered why anyone would need 240 Volts {Aussie} to run a light....

[scottly]

does anybody know what kind of system(electrically) that would make sense to set up in my home? could i pull off a 12 volt system? and what makes a 12 volt battery 12 volts?  like why not 6 volts or 40?

It's hard to recommend what would work best for your home. I looked into setting up a system here, that would feed any excess power back into the grid, and found that for small systems the payback was about 10 cents for every $1 the utility charged when the power was flowing the other direction. Subsidies and such may help offset the initial costs, and I've heard of solar companys that will set up a system on your property and lease it to you; not sure how that works...
I ran a 12V system, with an inverter to provide AC power. I wired my remote cabin with both 12V DC and 120V AC outlets, but that was before the price of inverters came down in the late '80s. When the price of the inverters was lower than 12V DC lights and such, the common practice was to just wire for standard AC, and run everything off the inverter. This also made it easier to get past the building inspectors, who had no clue. I paid something like $35 each for some 12V CFL lights when that technology first came out.
You only need batteries if you plan on being completely off the grid. As far as voltage, the voltage of a battery is determined by the number of cells. With lead-acid cells, the nominal cell voltage is 2V, so a 12V battery has 6 cells in series. Common inverter input voltages are 12, 24, and 48, but I have also worked with industrial 120V UPS systems.

[the technological J]

that makes so much more sense... i was thinking about alot of stuff that runs ac and has a power supply that converts it to dc why not skip the power supply and try to meet the dc demand
 but im new to power measurement how could i figure out what everything is using?

[scottly]

that makes so much more sense... i was thinking about alot of stuff that runs ac and has a power supply that converts it to dc why not skip the power supply and try to meet the dc demand
 

You are correct that a lot of stuff runs off dc internally, and can be more efficient when run directly off dc. For example, I had a small ac/dc tv, that according to the label on the back, consumed about half the power on dc as ac. It also cost about twice what a straight ac tv of the same size. The modern inverters are also very efficient, upwards of 90%, so it is more cost effective to use common ac appliances in a lot of cases.(Try to find a 40" 12V flatscreen tv... )

[the technological J]

I was thinking of actually  going into the tv and bypassing the power supply (after rediculous amounts of research) and meeting the dc load... as well as bypassing the power blocks on the laptop and wii

[scottly]

It's not worth the trouble in the long run, trust me.