Is This 💰Cheap Turbine💰 Really 400 Watts? Best Value for 2019?

hey Happy New Year everyone its retired at 40 my new year's resolution is to heat my greenhouse all year round and I'm going to try and do it with this inexpensive windmill it's a it's actually windmill brand and the model is DB 400 you can pick these up on Amazon or Ebay relatively inexpensive I think they're around 350 to 400 dollars it claims to be a 400 watt wind turbine we're gonna give it the test today first thing we're gonna do is open it up and just kind of see what all is in here what you get for the 350 to 400 dollars okay what do we get in the box it looks like this is the body of the wind mill you get a charge controller which is kind of nice that it comes with one I don't know how good a quality it is, a user manual this looks like a nose cone a parts bag and then here's your blades so my first impressions of this are pretty good nothing really seems like it's flimsy it's all pretty well built which obviously it needs to be if it's being exposed to weather and wind rain snow ice you know all that good stuff that kind of just puts a beating on this constantly but nothing's flimsy everything seems like it's pretty good quality just gonna show you the Box real quick it says it's 400 watts that seems like a pretty ambitious statement on their part but we'll see what it truly does I don't see that it hasn't built in charge controller which is kind of cool that's going to limit the voltage that it puts into your battery so it doesn't overcharge it and then on the side on this side you have some specs it says 400 watts once again rated speed your output voltage is 0 to 15 volts minimum cut in wind speed is 6 point 7 miles per hour survival wind speed is 110 so it doesn't recommend going over 110 and that would be with the break on suggested battery capacity is greater than 50 amp hours it's really important not to put this back on your head you don't want to suffocate as this sticker says so you're supposed to actually mount this to a pole before you put the blades on but just for the purpose of this video I'm gonna put the blades on just so you can see what what it takes there's really not much to it it takes a three bolts in each blade there's three blades and it is kind of nice because they give you the allen key and a wrench you know a lot of places anymore they don't even give you the tools that you need together one thing I think I would change on this is they just give you straight washers there's no lock washers and a lock washer if you don't know what it is it's the one with a little slit in it and what that does is it keeps pressure on the nut it keeps the nut from loosening itself up over time with vibration and just moving it back and forth I'll probably do that before I actually get this mounted I'll add some lock washers all right that was really really easy now I gotta do is just snap this nose cone onto here so I've got kind of a temporary pole set up on the second level of our house just to kind of see how this thing moves what kind of water just gonna put out it's let's head up there okay so I'm on the second story of my house I have a temporary pole just leaning there I'm gonna take some electrical conduit clamps and clamp it to that pole and then I can actually put the wind turbine up on top of that pole I did actually take the blades off I did also find my first weak spot of this thing and that is the nose cone when I was putting nose cone on it cracked it nose cone is really really fragile the plastic is really cheesy and so that's my first thing that I I'm not liking about this I'm gonna have to glue this back together put some sort of epoxy or something back on it but I did make an attachment to go on to that one-inch pipe the diameter of this post is going to be inch and a half and then you slip this rubber grommet over the top of it and you feed this through and then tighten it down I went ahead and drilled a hole in this so I can feed my wires through it and then I'll tighten it down and next we're gonna hook up this brake controller and it should be really easy everything's color-coded the red is just your positive and then the brake is actually just the the green and the yellow wire and what this brake does if a if you have a crazy storm where you have really really high winds and it's just it's not good for the windmill I think what they say is 30 miles an hour which doesn't sound like much to me but you can you can manually flip this brake on and it will actually shut the windmill down it'll stop the blades instantly just so it doesn't get damaged in high winds okay I've got my connections made up at the windmill and then I've actually run the wires down into the garden area where I'm gonna put my brake if you're using the brake you just put the red light the red lead and a yellow lead together and then your negative would go to the battery so I've had this up for about a week now and we've had basically no wind for about a week until today and it got a storm kind of blew in and got a little bit nasty I just wanted to show you the difference between having the brake on and the brake off so I woke up and turned the brake on last night because it was really really blowing hard and right now the brake is on so it's just barely turning the blade it's still turning it so with the brake on it keeps producing power but it just slows the blade down so it doesn't get to a dangerous speed so I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna turn the brake off and show you the difference so now that the brake is off you can see that the wind can kind of just take its course and blow the blade as fast as the wind is traveling so now I think it's a good time since we've got a good wind to take an unloaded meter reading it is a nasty day out even the Coyotes are not not having very much fun today but we've got a nice consistent wind so it's a good day to test the turbine all right so we're about 8 right now I'm gonna connect it to the battery obviously if we just touch this battery which is right now twelve point seven so in order to figure out what this is gonna do with a load on it we're gonna have to hook something up to it all right so I've got the two heat lamps hooked up and up to a power inverter right now it hasn't seemed to really faze the turbine alot of times if you get something that's really under a load it'll start slowing the blades down but 125 watts of light bulbs eleven point nine volts so you can see that it's drawing you know the battery so there I turned everything back off and it's a twelve point four again lets sit here for a second and see what we can get our peak to be there's 11 12 13 14 15 16 so the winds picked up just a little bit I'm gonna give this one more shot I can see the needle on the amp meter just kind of spiking up every once a while so I want to see just what one more reading is one final reading all right so now that I'm out here of course it's not doing what I wanted to do it's hovering right around six I did see it spike up to about 19 and I saw the amp meter get up to almost 10 so I'm gonna call that best-case scenario because I don't think I would want to be anywhere near this thing if it was up in the 20 amp range there we go there was a 19 for a second so we did get a 19 on there that is with no load so once again I'm gonna call that the best case so let's go do some some quick math and see if we can figure out what the realistic wattage on this is so did our inexpensive Amazon wind turbine live up to its 400 watt expectation...hardly even at its peak unloaded performance it was only at 19 volts and 10 amps and if you take the volts times the amps that will give you the wattage which is only a hundred and ninety watts and obviously if you put that under a load that would dramatically decrease that wattage value so if you found this video helpful make sure you give me a thumbs up if you've never joined us on this channel we do some self sustained living some gardening some cooking some grilling and you get to join me and my family on retiring at the age of 40 in the meantime this is retired at 40 remaining you to live life simple and we'll catch you next week

Channel: Retired at 40- Live.Life.Simple.

Views: 318,812

Rating: 4.7976131 out of 5

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Id: THkiIaeTLPE

Length: 10min 5sec (605 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 27 2019