Wind Max HY Energy Chinese imports hype or good stuff?

Re: Wind Max HY Energy Chinese imports hype or good stuff?

That's really strange because any wind turbine big enough to power a house would have to be grid-tied. There's a practical limit to the size of battery charging wind turbines, and when you go to a size big enough to power an entire home on the average day, the amp output in high winds is simply more than any battery bank can take. That's why I use several smaller ones instead of one big one. You can shut down the system one at a time in high winds to prevent ridiculous amps when the wind blows.

That whole story doesn't make sense.

Thom - I agree. 10 years ago when I started putting up wind power to power our home, the first 1.2 kW of solar we ever bought cost us $5,200. These days, for the same $5,200 you can buy 4 kW of top-name, Made In USA capacity, including the rails and all the stainless steel hardware. So wind power should only be used anymore for off-grid, and only when it can reduce the generator run time enough to make it pay. And that typically only applies to the northern climates where 5 kW of installed solar capacity is lucky to make 3 kWh/day in the winter time.

We believe in conservation, but after 11 years of living without utility power we also believe in living comfortably. So we burn thru 20-30 kWh/day, depending on the time of year. That sort of lifestyle is hard to support in the winter time (when our consumption is the highest) without wind power. So for us those turbines are worth their weight in gold. For others, you have to weigh whether or not wind power will even work on your site, and assuming it will installed properly, is it going to reduce your generator run time in the winter enough to make it worth messing with.

Just one of my towers has $4,000 in concrete and $1,200 in rebar in the foundation. And that's just to anchor it to the earth. Plus I spent $2,000 with TEP (Tower Engineering Professionals) to get the required engineering stamps on the towers and foundations. And I'm a licensed mechanical engineer so I did most of the loading analysis on the structures myself and that $2,000 was just to file the necessary paperwork and have a civil engineer sign off on it. For the average joe it's going to cost $5 Grand just for the engineering analysis in a township where guyed structures are prohibited (being adopted by more and more townships every day).

Wind power is anything but cheap anymore. And I have zero respect for anybody that puts a wind turbine on a 40 foot chunk of pipe held up by 1/4" cables. That's a disaster right out of the box and I wouldn't touch it with 40 foot telephone pole because it's dangerous in high winds. When the 1,000+ foot tower for WEAU-TV went down here locally due to ice load a couple years ago, the guy cables cut 36" diameter oak trees off slick as a shear when they started whipping around like snakes in the grass. And that's why ordinances are being passed outlawing guyed structures in many townships anymore. They're not safe because all it takes is one point of failure - a single guy wire letting go - and the whole thing comes down. Having a antenna array on it when it comes down is one thing - having a several hundred pound wind turbine on it with a spinning rotor makes it even more interesting.
--
Chris

Re: Wind Max HY Energy Chinese imports hype or good stuff?

BB. wrote: »

10x $2,600+ for a Windmax H20 turbine (only, not including towers, electronics, cabling, etc.) (or HY-2000 -- not sure of the details) is not exactly inexpensive either. And at near 300lbs for the turbine assembly, that is not small either.

Bill, any turbine that does not use a mechanical furling system or variable pitch rotor to protect itself in high winds is dangerous, and just an accident waiting to happen. That lesson was learned better than 80 years ago in the wind power business.

WindMax does make a V-series turbine that has a furling system on it. But I am not familiar with them as I have never worked with one to tell you how well it works. Otherwise, every successful turbine that has gained a reputation of reasonable reliability, including even the Chinese built Bergey XL.1, uses a mechanical furling system and/or variable pitch rotor.

Unfortunately, these machines with furling systems are also typically more expensive because they have more moving parts than a set-it-on-the-tower-straight-into-the-wind" machine that uses only stator braking to keep it under control. That is simply a bad design, and yet it is the one used by the vast majority of small wind turbine manufacturers because it's cheap and simple to build.

Exmork, in the Chinese brands, has been fairly reliable on top of the tower, but still many problems with the electronics on the ground. The reliability of the Exmork turbines on the tower end is primarily due to the fact that they have a passive side-furling mechanism to prevent generator over-amps and/or rotor over-speed in the event electromechanical braking is lost.

I have seen a lot of township ordinances for small wind energy systems now that require a turbine to have dual methods of rotor over-speed control. All it takes is one of these machines installed someplace in a populated area to have a failure and toss a blade and cause damage to neighbor's property and wind turbines will be banned at the next township board meeting. So IMHO, this is something that people should be looking at when considering purchasing one.
--
Chris

Re: Wind Max HY Energy Chinese imports hype or good stuff?

BB. wrote: »

Wind is a dangerous force. Putting a small wind turbine on a roof

Wind turbine on a roof? Don't even get me going on that one because I'll get really riled up and use words like "idiot".
--
Chris

Re: Wind Max HY Energy Chinese imports hype or good stuff?

BB. wrote: »

On occasion, I have posted a few youtube links to commercial sized turbines that have failed and could not be shut down

Runaway turbines are really fun. About three years ago I assembled a 4 meter machine in the shop and put it on the forks on a stand that I made for my forklift. It was 20 below outside and I wanted to test run it to check the dynamic rotor balance. So opened the overhead door and drove the forklift outside and turned it into the wind. I had neglected to hook up the generator on it because I figured it would be a short test.

There's all kinds of things that can happen when you do something stupid like that. One is that the wind picks right up as soon as you get it outside, the turbine swings into the wind and lights right up to 400 rpm almost instantly. And then the forklift, designed for concrete floor only, gets stuck in the ice and snow and can't move it. The next 1/2 hour spent trying to get even close enough to that wind turbine to stop it was one of the most interesting (and dangerous) things I ever done. I even climbed up on the roll cage on the forklift and tried to manually turn it out of the wind. The forces on the rotor made that impossible. At one point I grabbed the output shaft on the gearbox with one hand with leather glove on and tried to brake it - that glove went to like 200 degrees almost instantly and I threw that smoking glove into the snow. Throwing a rope at it is not even an option because if it violent stops it would more than likely tip the forklift over.

I finally stopped it with a set of jumper cables hooked to the forklift frame, but trying to hook jumper cables up to stator power studs that are putting out over 200 volts, and can deliver 400 amps inrush is sort of a risky thing too.

That's all the BTDT part when it comes to wind power.
--
Chris

Re: Wind Max HY Energy Chinese imports hype or good stuff?

BB. wrote: »

And that is why I like to throw the $1-$2 per kWH out there for folks to ponder. Yes, a few people can hit under $1 per kWH for off grid / Renewable Energy power

Bill, do you think off-grid power costs that much? I think we're somewhere around 40-50 cents, the way I got it figured. At our present consumption in the last two years (which has gone up a LOT compared to what we had before that) I figure we use about 7,000 - 7,500 kWh/year off-grid. And about 1/3 of that comes from the generator over a year's time.

Our consumption is going to go up this year because we're putting in a new Central A/C unit for the house. But we're putting in additional solar capacity to run it so the generator doesn't have to get involved with that.

Anyway, at 7,500 kWh/year, and if I use 50 cents/kWh, that's about $3,700/year to cover equipment and batteries, maintenance on equipment and fuel in the generator. And I think that's pretty close over the long run. There's one of the fellows here (Photwit maybe?) that I think says he's got it below 30 cents/kWh and I could see that with a well thought out and designed off-grid system. Ours has actually been hacked together over time with not a lot of thinking or design in the initial stages of when we started doing it, so it's not as cost efficient as it could be.

But even so, when it comes to some equipment like inverters we've been able to basically recover our costs on those when we upgraded to newer/bigger/better/faster because there's people that will pay premium price for used equipment, as equipment costs seem to keep going up with time. So even though our system isn't what I'd consider efficiently done or thought out, I think it's still pretty economical from an off-grid standpoint. To be over one buck/kWh I would think would take a really badly designed system?
--
Chris

Re: Wind Max HY Energy Chinese imports hype or good stuff?

20yrDCman wrote: »

Chris there are just a lot of people who want to make power at night and during storms and a few kwh when the wind is blowing at all.

That's all fine and good. But there are too many people on a budget that have been burned by these wind turbines. Knowing what I know about wind power, in all good faith I find it impossible to recommend them to anybody when I know that their money spent on solar is a much better investment. And that's the problem with them.

You have to have a legitimate reason for putting in a wind turbine. And the only legitimate reason I've found over the years is if (emphasis on "if") it will save you some money by reducing your generator run time for your off-grid installation. Otherwise wind power is a complete waste of time and money, except for the hobbiest that "just wants one".

I designed my turbines and put the information out there, completely free, for the DIY off-grid person who wants to build a wind system that puts out big power and uses top-of-the-line electronics that won't go up in smoke at the first sign of a cold front blowing thru. My turbines were designed out of necessity, years of experience as to what it takes to build one that stands up in our northern winters, and the fact that most of what you can buy from the commercial manufacturers is junk out of the box. They're not designed to compete with the Chinese or car alternator turbines. They're designed for people that want something that works, but they're not going to throw it up on a 40 foot piece of pipe or mount on the roof because it'll tear the roof right off your house. When it comes to wind power I'm from the Go Big or Go Home camp.
--
Chris