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| General Information | ||||||||
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| Wind
Speed and windmills explained. By Don Brown. Originally a letter sent to Silicon Chip magazine as a comment on my original windmill article, Don explains the complex relationship behind windmill power and windspeed. |
Standby power, and how to reduce its cost. Standby power, the power used by appliances when they're not actually in use, could be costing you over $100 per year. Here's a few tricks to reduce your standby power costs. |
Townsville
Strand Windmill. |
Ravenshoe
Wind Farm |
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| Windmill projects and information | ||||||||
Mini
Mill Battery Charger Based on a stepper motor from an old floppy disk drive, and takes about 30 minutes to make. The Mini Mill will generate about 1-2 watts and charge a couple of Nicad batteries in a couple of hours. |
Fisher & Paykel Windmill Using a F&P Smart Drive motor, this windmill is capable of producing up to 300 watts. This new design replaces the windmill kit I sold. |
Making a set
of propeller blades Some information on windmill blades, materials and options. |
Chainsaw Blades! Forum member Oztules shows us how he made his windmill blades with a chainsaw. |
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Turbine Balancing. A very accurate way of balancing your windmill turbine. |
Understanding Swept Area A look at how the swept area, and therefore the power, of a turbine changes with diameter. |
Sliprings Homemade sliprings using hardware store items. |
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Pumping Windmills.  A personal favourite, some info and links for Southern Cross and Comet windmills. |
Improving those
cheap Chinese Windmills.  The cheap import Chinese windmills are popping up everywhere, and you can buy the blades separately. But they are very noisy. There are two parts to this article, firstly how I modified the blades to give more power and make less noise, and secondly, how a forum member, Kevin, modified the windmills to improve tracking and reliability. |
Furling explained. Furling is used to protect the windmill in high winds, but how does the furling system on small windmills work, and some calculations to work out the furling speed, tail lengths, etc. |
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 Check out the Kits & Parts page. |
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| The F&P Smartdrive | ||||||||
What
F&P is that? How to identify the different F&P types. |
How to pull apart
a F&P washing machine.  Instructions on removal of the F&P motor from a dead washing machine |
Decogging the
F&P smartdrive Cogging can affect the low wind performance of a iron core alternator based windmill, like the F&P. So what is cogging and how can we fix it. |
Rewiring the
F&P stator How to reconfigure the F&P stator for charging 12v batteries. |
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 The 7 phase cogless
F&PUsing a magnet hub from a late model F&P washing machine, and a old stator, its now possible to make a cogless 7 phase alternator. |
Staggered Stators Modifing the F&P stator for a better power curve. |
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| Electronic projects and information | ||||||||
PixAxe
Chips What are they and how do you get started. |
Pump Controller A little PICAXE project. Reliably controls my water pump for the header tank. |
PICAXE Windmill Controller/Charger A work in progress. Based on a PICAXE chip and features menu driven setup and serial output. |
PicLog. Windmill logger Yet another PicAxe project. This unit logs windmill data ( volts, amps, windspeed, RPM ) to your PC via the serial port, and works as a simple shunt regulator. The PC software displays the results on a graph. |
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 Gill's Anemometer loggerGill has put together a clever anemometer ( wind speed ) logger using a PicAxe chip and EEPROM's for data storage. The logger has low power consumption and can record weeks of data ( depending on the sample rate ). |
12V sensor light
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Pete's step by step guide to making circuit boards. |
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LCD Panel Meter How to make a volt and amp meter for your battery bank.Click Here |
Expanded Scale Voltmeter Adding a expanded scale voltmeter to my old battery charger |
Simple Windmill/Solar controller Based on a TL084 op amp, this is a easy to build controller suitable for wind and solar applications. |
Buliding a  A dump load is used to drain off excess power. This design uses a few 50watt light bulbs and with some parts from the junk pile, shouldn't cost more that $20 to build |
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Floor fan converted to 12v Converting a burned out 240vac fan to 12v operation. |
"This paper will enable the user to understand the operation of switching and linear voltage regulators. The most commonly used regulating modes will be covered." Great article, thanks to Bryan for finding this one. PDF format. |
Building encapsulated resistors |
Gordons Cap Mod |
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| Miscellaneous Projects and Articles | ||||||||
Pedal Power Building your own pedal powered generator. |
Car Alternator Rectifiers How to use a rectifier out of a car alternator. |
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Rebuilding Lead Acid Batteries. Ron ( wind-pirate ) has written a proceedure on rebuilding wet cell batteries to give a few more years service. |
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| Some of my own projects | ||||||||
Induction Motor Conversion This was a little project to convert a small induction motor to a permanent magnet windmill. |
Oatley DC Motor Windmill <
Based on a 300watt 24v DC scoota motor, this little windmill would work well if I could boost the output voltage. |
AC Servo Motor Windmill A windmill built around a 3 phase servo motor from an old welding robot. |
CNC Router Now this was an interesting project. |
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| Modern
Electronics. I've been in the electronics business for almost 30 years now and I dont like the way its heading. |
My own RE installation |
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My Photos A bit outdated, but here for interrests sake. |
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| Projects by our forum members | ||||||||
| Matt Lyons double stator F&P windmill.  |
Martins Windmill |
Rob's roof top mounted windmill |
Phills RE Grid tied system |
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Oz's EV A wind powered car built by Oztules |
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If you have a interesting home made renewable energy setup that you would like to share, please contact me using the About Us page. | ||||||
Linear and Switching Voltage
Home made portable charger