Wind & Solar Power

It all began in my case when I wound up my business and thought what next?.   I already had a hobby, Amateur Radio (G6JWX) and thought that I really would like to develop a hobby that would compliment this.  I finally decided to make an emergency back up power supply for my radio equipment in the event of a blackout.

However being very green on the issue of wind power I researched the internet as a beginner and found that the Sturmey-Archer hub Dynamo ( 2 available on request) would charge up a battery, perhaps you did the same!.  I searched high and low for one of these (I was told that you could get hold of a 12v one) but found that today in my area, this was not the case.  Instead I bought two 6v ones and used a  voltage multiplier up to about 14v.  however in this as most of you reading will understand, amperage is lost and this combined with the fact that a rectifier was needed as the hub dynamos give out AC which is no good for charging a DC battery.

Having gone this far and having actually stored some power into a 12v battery and seen a spark generated, I became hooked and decided that this was my new hobby!  I proceeded to make a four bladed prop about 1.5m in diameter out of plastic guttering,  and another not quite as large from an old rubber bucket strategically cut.  See Photograph. (On the way) These both worked well and revolved at decent revs at quite low wind speeds but only delivered little useful power.

Click on picture to enlarge.

Wind Blades

The next step was to compliment the two feeble dynamos with solar panels.  I purchased two brief case types which purported to deliver 13W in good sunshine.  I found that they only made about 12W each but this was a lot more than the dynamos gave. (Needs to be bright sunlight)  The question of sufficient storage next came up and I needed to get some Ah under my belt plus a regulator. About a year ago Maplin opened a new store in Norwich and the  loss-leader  offer as an inducement to visit the shop was a little yellow jump starter now selling at around £45 each.  These were then being offered by Maplin for £16 each. A little inside information here will tell you that each of these contains a sealed battery rated at 17.5 Amh inside designed to take a medium charge/discharge cycle, so I took the bull by the horns and brought 8 of these units for the grand total of £128. (The batteries could be purchased elsewhere individually for £24.99 each!) I was now the possessor of 110Ah storage and after charging these fully, ran a 150w inverter to light a few lights.  As this quickly drained the batteries especially when cloudy, I decided to add to my battery bank until I had 22 X17.5 Ah compliment and began to run a television, DVD and Satellite receiver for two or three hours every night on a 600w inverter.

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