Connecting A Wind Generator - The Basics

[Music] hi so i've been asked to talk about this a lot actually and i thought well it's time to talk about it a bit now that's probably because we've done lots on different kinds of generation and we've done lots on different kinds of storage but nothing at all on how to link the two together or how to actually use them when it comes to installing in your house so i thought yeah that's a really good idea actually i should spend some time on that and so i'm going to do that now it is not a complicated subject but there is a lot of information and that can be um quite daunting at times so what i'm going to do is i'm going to break it up we're going to talk about different kinds of generation and how we go about storing that and then how we go about connecting it and using it so there's going to be a few videos and they're going to be a bit random because obviously we're kind of in in the middle of doing an exploration so i'll do them every now and then and what i thought i'd deal with first is wind generation because wind generation is something that we're engaged in at the moment and obviously it's of great interest so i thought i'd have a look at wind generation first and talk a bit about that now the problem with wind generation is you can't actually just tie your wind generator up to your battery because if you think about it a wind generator and the motor are in fact exactly the same thing if you feed electricity in it'll act like a motor if you spin it it'll act like a generator i mean they're built slightly differently so that you get better performance from one or the other but in their essence they're identical so if you don't have any wind and you have a fully charged battery and you connect those two up all that's going to happen is your wind generator is going to turn because it becomes a motor so you can't just connect the two together you have to have something else in between now with a wind generator there are only three states it can be in it can be not turning in which case is generating zip it can be turning in the range in which it was designed to generate from a certain wind speed minimum to a certain wind speed maximum and then it will generate quite happily at the rated output and the third condition is where it's spinning just too quickly and it's generating far too much now that's possible obviously i mean we've seen it we did a conversion of a stepper motor and even with the lightest of turns we've got 50 volts out of it so it's quite possible to generate far too much if your wind is too heavy and you need to take account of that and you need to control that now equally on the other side of things you need to take care of your batteries because they'll be in one of three states discharged half charged or fully charged and if your battery is fully charged you don't really want to be putting any more in there or you blow your batteries up you need also to charge batteries at a certain way depending on the battery type that they are if you put too much voltage onto a battery lead acid is a good example what you'll basically do is boil the contents and give off lots of hydrogen and sulfuric acid gas not brilliant in a garbage if you do that with lithium then you stand the chance of thermal runaway and the whole thing going up in flames so it's not only that the battery can be in one of three states you also have to charge them at certain ways in order to make sure that you don't destroy the battery so considering those two sides of things you have to put something in the middle there that will take care of that now obviously we also need to add something on so that we can use it so a very basic wind system would look something like this the first component we have is obviously the wind generator now the wind generator we can think of as essentially three coils it's a three-fourth generator and we can think of it that way because mostly that's what they are if you're thinking about using something like uh an hamatek dc motor or a treadmill motor which is pretty much what lots of people use when they build their home window generators then it's going to be three coils that are in a magnetic field and is going to give out three phase output most of the standard micro and mini wind generators are also going to be three phase coils so you tend to have three phases come out if you have one phase come out which would be really unusual but if you do then the first step that you would do is rectification and you just use a single rectifier for a three phase you need a three phase rectifier and a three phase rectifier actually looks a bit looks a bit like this this is just diodes it's quite common to use lower voltage drop diodes like shocky diodes but you can also buy these in a single package and you have diodes like that this side is your positive this side is your negative and what you do is you link each one of those coils to one of those lines and that is your three-phase rectifier so the first step is rectification then what you need to do is pop it into a charge controller now a charge controller is a really interesting piece of electronics that you can build yourself all it really is is a switch and a sensor it mostly senses the voltage at the battery terminals you can do other things they can get very fancy but mostly that's actually all it does now this feeds into the switch then back out the switch into your battery bank that switch can switch between a couple of things if it switches here then you're just going to be charging your battery remember the charge controller pays attention to the state of the battery so it'll take care of that for you if it switches to this one here what it actually goes to is something called a dummy load or a dump load it's a load that can burn off the excess energy so this thing your generator is turning too fast and you're producing a huge amount of energy you don't want to be trying to feed it in your batteries you want it to go somewhere else and there's lots of places you can put it one thing is to just use a resistor and you'll see them they're just great big resistors and they're meant to burn off energy their power resistors and they get hot it's a bit of a waste to do that so what you quite often see is that they go into an immersion heater and you put that in a tank of cold water and it'll it'll heat your water up for you another thing that you actually see is a bunch of lights anything that has a resistive load that can be dumped into hence it's called the dump load if this is turning too quickly now whenever you connect a generator up to a load and it's a very high load it will effectively break the generator so acts like a brake on the generator and prevents it running far too quickly now that can actually be a switch it can be a relay i quite like relays but it doesn't have to be if you want something that's a bit more robust and reliable then what you're going to do is use mosfets they give a great deal of reliability to that now after the charge controller obviously what you actually want to do is feed it into your house and to feed it into your house you use an inverter so that is in essence all the system required for taking and connecting your generator up to your house supply or your battery bank and it isn't that many components you're only talking about four extra components you have a rectifier you have a charge controller you have your inverter and you have your dump load like i said these can be made and there is quite a lot of instructions on how to make those but to be honest a reasonable one is going to cost you about 30 or so so you have to ask yourself the question to what extent do you want to make one of those when you're concerned with a setting a system up like i said it really is that simple now i'm frequently asked to make a recommendation about pieces of equipment i can't really recommend anything particularly to be honest because when you enter into a marketplace you're always going to have the same three choices you're going to have something that's dirt cheap you're going to have something that's really really expensive then you're going to have a whole bunch of things right in the middle of the price range and it's up to you what you want if you want a charge controller that's going to have a full color display link with your phone now leave messages to it and put sugar in your coffee when you want to drink you're going to be paying a lot of money for such a thing and rightly so i suppose you have to ask yourself do you need any of that stuff if you have a basic charge controller that gives you absolutely no information and works on a relay then it's going to be really really cheap but how robust and reliable it's going to be well that's going to be questionable you're probably going to be repairing the thing or replacing the thing quite often so what you're really looking for are those mid-range price charge controllers one that can cope with the output from your particular generator and gives you the functionality that you want equally there's going to be a range in that mid-range where you're going to have things like very nice displays you're going to be able to set different settings on it but at a minimum you need to be able to set the voltage that you're using on your battery bank and it's very often 12 or 24 volts something like that and it's usually just a link switch or a flip switch to switch between the two and more of the mid-range ones they tend to have outline displays giving you basic information like the number of vaults on your batteries samps used that sort of stuff it's not tremendous in the amount of information but then equally you have to ask yourself what it is that you actually want because that's going to dictate an awful lot about what that control is going to look like and what that controller is going to cost you and themselves are tremendously simple things as you can see there's only really two wires that you connect in and two wires that you connect out and you'll see on the controller what those wires actually are very often rectification is contained within the charge controller itself as well as you often don't need the rectifying circuit they're just part and parcel of what you can get now there are lots of other things to talk about and like i say we will be going on to those other things including how to connect that inverter up but i thought it'd start with wind because it really is a simple circuit there isn't that much to it i hope you enjoyed the video watch out for other updates on this and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 70,855

Keywords: wind, generator, basics, fwg, robert, circuit, wiring, power, energy, off grid, home, installation, connect, how to, generation, renewable, install, system, wire, connection, electricity, engineering, turbine, battery, batteries, technology, diy, d-i-y

Id: ztA6UTcpXxY

Length: 11min 21sec (681 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 01 2020