Wednesday, July 1, 2009

RB900 actual output

We did a field test of the RB900 in 3 - 5 Meters per second wind speeds today. Auckland Met report had the wind speed at 10 - 14 MPH all day ( about 5 - 8 knots. ) We ran the RB900 in 12 volt mode.
I should mention that our battery bank was situated 60 meters from the wind generator. Perhaps with the bank directly under the generator we could have got better results.
The results we got were very encouraging indeed. 3 - 5 meters a second is really light winds. Most wind turbines need more than this to produce useful power.

We were averaging 5 amps at 12.6 volts. The results varies with wind gust sometimes peaking at 10 amps at 13.5 volts and dropping to nothing as well on occasion. Generally as soon as the turbine spins useful power was produced to charge the batteries. On average we were getting 60 watts. Over 24 hours this would have translated into about 1.5 kilowatt hours.

This is very good results as we often get this amount of wind all year round. We could not operate the turbine at 24 volts at this wind speeds as the turbine output voltages rarely exceeded 25 volts. To operate at 24 volts we will need a DC to Dc inverter. That will be our next project. For the time being we will operate the turbine at 12 volt and when the weather report predicts 20 KPH and above winds we can manually switch over to 24 volt operation.

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