As her indoors is now out of doors I thought I'd grab a few mins on the PC to upload some piccys and plans of my WT tower. My turbine is 1500w with 1.5 Mtr Dia blades. The tower and turbine are located at 1000ft up in Welsh hills. I have yet to drop the tower in strong winds, I just leave it up there running. I hope I'm not about to dig my self a hole here, hubris you know old chap.
When I first looked at adding a WT to our setup I noticed that some suppliers state that you should drop the turbine in strong winds!!! My thoughts are if its windy it's making elecy so lets make the kit strong enough to stand up and use the wind. Plus if I'm working away from home I can't run back and "drop em".
So I designed the tower to take what nature can throw at it (hopefully), its still standing unbowed after 3 years. Apart from building strong I also designed the tower so it can be raised or lowered single handed with a simple winch or ratchet block without the guy wires being in place. This is because the ground is uneven and the wires are different lengths.
Due to location the guy wires could not be spread to wide. The base is 750mm sq and 750mm high and is bolted down to a concrete base 600mm thick. Guy wires all locate on to turnbuckles with expansion bolts in concrete pads. We have little soil thickness so having dug out for bases I drilled down another 600mm with 15mm SDS bit, then drove 900mm lengths of rebar into said holes. So conc pads are spreading load over wide and deep area.
Do you want some piccys now.
NB, I, at the age of 58 have never owned or used a camera before. I had to go and borrow a picture making machine from a neighbour so if pics are not of the best please be gentle.
Here is piccy of hinged tower base
Tower plus PV array to rear
I'm told most turbine failure is due to tower failure. I also read that small turbines are put up on scaffold poles!!! May be OK but I didn't think so. The tower is 60mm square box section steel with 3.5mm wall thickness. I thought box section would be stronger than tube as it's got 4 angles keeping it stiff, sort of. The top of tower is reduced to 50mm tobe for last 300mm to take turbine. The tower base is 6mm steel plate. Now I can't glue metal together to well, looks like bird splatter so my local blacksmith stuck all the bits together.
Whilst I can't warrant anything and everybodies situation is different, my design is still standing in everything we get here. If you think the idea is of use please feel free to copy see plans below. If you make money from it I want a cut!!
[url=http://postimage.org/image/d19u17cud/]
The blades on my turbine are carbon fibre and very flexible as wind speed increase the tips start to bend which has some effect on rotational speed but apart from that there is no furling. The alternator has no cowl so airflow thro the alternator is unimpeded, to give good cooling. Heres a piccy of spare blade set showing how bendy the blades are.
Picture taken outside gennys shed so here is pic of Lister TS2 which is serviced every 450 hrs with genuine lister filters although I draw the line at using Mr Listers oil. My (off the grid) neighbour supplies and services Lister gennys to earn his daily bread and sold me this unit he'd reconned, with new mains and big end bearings and we fitted a new 8KVA alternator. He comes around periodically to check I'm looking after it properly. He comes in for tea, checks the genny is being loved then comes and checks my log book to see that I've serviced it correctly.
Note recycled stained glass window adding class to "the shed". Also note that no calculations have been made as to strength or suitability, it's all done on the back of a fag packet and I've smoked the fags. I also found this strange picture on the borrowed camera. Don't know what it means but it struck me as kind of funny.
Merry Christmas and happy New Year to you all. And don't get caught stuffing Santa in the chimney!
Andy
