Salmon – Rossport, Ireland, 2012

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IMG_5365 We ran a course in early 2012 to construct a 4.2m machine for Terrance’s house over in Rossport. After a few setbacks “Salmon” the turbine was erected just before Christmas and other than a brief period of downtime due to an undersized tail it has barely stopped spinning since!

The stator was wound as a 48V battery charger however we’re currently letting the DC volts run up as high as 125V using a pair of LDR 96-15 to clamp the voltage. These put power into a “110V” 3kW immersion heater (from http://www.therightelement.co.uk) and a set of air heating resistors (home made taking advice from this article). The LDRs are set to slightly different voltages which means the water heater takes preference and the air heaters only come on in the bigger winds.

When his budget affords Terrance will get a grid tied inverter but for now he’s got lots of heat and is burning less gas!