My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

pechan
pechan Solar Expert Posts: 92 ✭✭
My turbine has been installed for about a month now.
It sits @ 42' on a homemade guyed pipe tower in Casper, Wy.
The closest obstruction would be my 24' tall house that sits about 300 feet from the turbine.
Average wind speeds by month are:
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Annual
16.2 14.8 13.7 12.5 11.6 10.9 10.1 10.3 10.9 11.9 14.4 16.0 12.8

The turbine itself is built extremely well, and houses a "twin axial flux permanent magnet brushless alternator".
Assembled the turbine weighs about 170 lbs.
The blades are made out of fiberglass with a foam core and are pretty light, upon installation they must be balanced by measuring
the distance between the tips and adjusting them to be equal.
Overall assembly was pretty easy, only requiring a few metric sockets, torque wrench, hex wrenches and of course locktite.
I lifted my tower with a rented tow behind man lift that I already had been using for some work on my house.
I have the tower guyed in 2 places with 1/4 inch high tensile guy wire, not wire rope.



The turbine is a grid tie model @ 200 volts nominal ( produces between 160-600 VDC) the rectifiers are built into the turbine itself so you get DC right out of the turbine.
Something I am a little concerned about if I ever get a lightning strike that fries a rectifier. I have not heard of anyone that has had that happen to them as of yet.

I am using the turbine for battery charging, not what it was made for, but I bought it in a surplus auction for pennies on the dollar.
It came with a voltage limiter to clamp the voltage spikes, the nameplate on the limiter says 245 vdc and I assumed that would be the max voltage out of it
and purchased a Midnite Solar Classic 250 charge controller. Come to find out it will let up to 280 vdc through to the charger, thanks to the classic's ability to survive 250 volts
plus your battery voltage (I run a 48 volt bank) It did not damage the classic.
After consulting here on the forum I removed 20 bridge rectifiers from the voltage limiter and so far I haven't seen it go into hyper VOC.
I have all the parts to build a high voltage DC supply in order to be able to test a voltage limiter( AC dimmer, 1:5 AC 500va transformer, and a bridge rectifier) I hope that will work...
I will be trying this out next time I am at home( I work in ND for 3 weeks at a time).

How much power am I getting?
So far 140 kwh's in the last 4 weeks, including several days when I had the turbine braked while I tinkered with it.

Today as of 16:00 hours it had produced 10.5 kwh's.

I am very impressed with this turbine, and am looking forward to my next wind project:

Building 2 80' towers to mount my 2 - 3000 watt kestrels that are sitting in my driveway all crated up!

pechan

Comments

  • BB.
    BB. Super Moderators, Administrators Posts: 33,431 admin
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    Wow! Pretty windy area.

    About the guy wires==Only two? Usually 3 is a minimum.

    Also, keep a really close eye on the guy attach points... If one fails, the tower (and turbine) are probably going down.

    -Bill
    Near San Francisco California: 3.5kWatt Grid Tied Solar power system+small backup genset
  • pechan
    pechan Solar Expert Posts: 92 ✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    2 levels of 3 wires, :)
  • DaveB
    DaveB Solar Expert Posts: 48 ✭✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    I couldn't tell from the video you posted of it on the other thread if you have the kestrel vibration dampener on your tower?

    I have the e300i 110V and can say this turbine is far higher quality then anything I have seen. I had a African wind power 3.6 that didn't last very long and compared to the Kestrel was a piece of junk.
  • DaveB
    DaveB Solar Expert Posts: 48 ✭✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    I was also curious why you didn't just get the 110V version and voltage limiter to begin with so that the Midnite controller could easily handle it?
  • pechan
    pechan Solar Expert Posts: 92 ✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    Hey Dave,

    I do not have the kestrel vibration dampener on my tower, I didn't know that they made one.
    What I did was buy some gasket material from my local car shop, the fiber stuff that is about 1/8 inch thick and put it in between my tower flanges.

    The reason I don't have the 110 volt version Is because I bought it as new surplus from a company going out of business, the good thing is that I paid 20 cents on the dollar for 4 kestrel turbines.

    I will be putting up the 2 400 series turbines this next spring.

    pechan
  • DaveB
    DaveB Solar Expert Posts: 48 ✭✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    The dampener was added as a standard feature probably 1.5 years ago. You simply use the same 6 threaded bolt holes on the tower adapter the turbine is bolted to now to attach the dampener. The turbine then attaches to the dampener. There is NO metal touching metal. All of the metal is isolated from the turbine head from touching any part of the tower. Because of this there is a separate earth cable to attach the turbine to the tower.

    I've enclosed page from document:

    Attachment not found.
  • DaveB
    DaveB Solar Expert Posts: 48 ✭✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    Here is a cleaner version of that page:
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/cjqy840b3c09n8z/Scan.jpeg
  • ws9876
    ws9876 Solar Expert Posts: 440 ✭✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    where was this surplus auction you found??
  • pechan
    pechan Solar Expert Posts: 92 ✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt
    ws9876 wrote: »
    where was this surplus auction you found??

    I found it on Ebay .
  • pechan
    pechan Solar Expert Posts: 92 ✭✭
    Re: My experiance so far with a Kestrel 300i -200volt

    Hit 400 KWHs today!

    Not bad for 2.5 months of production.

    Last week I had a 15.5 kwh day!