Calm after the storm

What a wild Saturday down on the River Itchen!

I don't think I've ever been on board Lady Jane when the weather has been so wild before.

I've also never seen the wind generator producing as many amps as it was doing on Saturday (14.7 amps was the top I saw, with an average of just over 8 amp hours = 0.224 Kwh).

Needless to say, the wind generator produced too much power. So much so that I eventually went out into the storm and stopped the blades. No point in wearing the thing out unnecessarily.

The picture shows my wind generator amp monitor on the Sunday, in the calm after the storm. It's showing 436 amp seconds produced in the last hour in virtually no wind.

Overall, I would guess the wind generator is now producing about triple the power than it was doing before.

Workshop space

For all kinds of reasons, this last weekend has been a lazy one for me, so far as progress on Lady Jane goes.

One thing that has been progressed slightly is the sides for the workshop space.

If you look carefully at the picture, you can see the bottom of the boards is slightly narrower than the top. This is in preparation for the sideboards.

The recent wet and windy weather has helped emphasise just how important the side pieces will be in keeping us sheltered from the elements when working in there.

I know it doesn't look it, but that was a full day's work for both Fred and I. Getting the first of the side boards on either side measured up and correctly cut.

Why is it, I wonder, that the tough looking stuff takes almost no time but the simple looking tasks take forever?

Wind generator yaw

This weird looking contraption is an easily reproducible experiment, to clearly demonstrate the issue I've been having with my wind generator.

The issue has been the wind generator turning out of the wind, reducing it's power output.

After an anonymous comment suggesting I try stopping the generator, then watching how it performs, I figured out that the generator was not turning out of the wind, but was, in effect, too sensitive to changes in the wind.

I've now tied a piece of rope around the mounting pole, using a clove hitch, then tying the other ends around the generator. This effectively dampens the yaw.

This had an immediate effect, with the generator now consistently pointing into the wind, yet still turning as the wind shifts over time.

As a conservative estimate, I'd say that I've doubled the overall power I'm now getting from the wind generator, as the blades no longer stop then have to run up again due to being pointed out of the wind.

I can only estimate the power output as, due to the nature of the wind, it's impossible to say definitively.

By way of a demonstration of the improved performance I'm now getting, I thought I'd setup an experiment so that anybody interested could get an idea of what I'm talking about.

I took a ballpoint pen, round, and using bungee chord attached a 2.5mm welding rod to it. If you are in the UK and have no bungee chord, just follow a postie for a while and you will soon collect yourself a rubber band you can use.

If you have no 2.5mm welding rods to hand, simply use squish a wire coat hanger to achieve the same effect. With the welding rod, I wanted to simulate the mass of the wind generator as it swung round, so the cross piece needs to be a reasonable weight and length.

The tail piece of the demonstration is simply a few pieces of duct tape stuck onto one end of the welding rod.

The whole construction I then put into a convenient piece of pipe I found, and taped that to the work table on board.

Because the ballpoint pen has virtually no resistance to turning, on account of it standing on the ball, it turns freely in the wind. Perfectly demonstrating the over-correction I see on the wind generator to tiny changes in wind direction.

For the second part of the experiment, I stuck some duct tape on the other end of the ballpoint pen, such that the duct tape gives some friction inside the tube (no sticky bits showing though), slid the welding rod to the other end of the pen and put the whole thing into the tube the other way round.

In the second position, the welding rod now consistently points into the prevailing wind without swinging wildly around, emulating the damping force the rope now gives the wind generator.

Rough and ready, I know, but it does the job.

Wind generator

Here's a picture of my wind generator in action.

The eagle eyed amongst you will see the tail has a home made extension stuck to it.

The issue I'm having is that the wind generator keeps turning out of the wind, for no apparent reason.

It's really frustrating, as the wind generator is not producing the power it should as it turns out of the wind, slows down then turns back into the wind and speeds up again.

There is no specific pattern to which direction it turns out, and no particular wind speed or direction either.

I've been working with the folks at Eclectic to resolve this. They have been extremely helpful, to the extent of replacing the whole generator for me.

I am now sure it's not the generator, but something in the setup on Lady Jane. But so far I just can't work out what the issue is.

I know it's not:

• The cable, or for that matter any of the connections, from the generator to the batteries, as I've changed all that.
• The connection, as this is all connected up securely and correctly.
• The inverter, as it still faces out of the wind with the inverter disconnected.
• The battery de-sulphinators, as they have been disconnected to test this.
• Any of the boats 24V systems, as they have been isolated to help find the problem.
• The voltage regulator, as this has been temporarily bypassed.
• Any turbulence, as the generator has been moved to endure this is eliminated.

The best I've been able to do is to extend the tail, so the generator turns back into the wind as fast as possible. This maximises the power I can get from the generator.

Any ideas anyone?

I blame the RNLI

I blame the RNLI for this one.

After seeing the pristine clean, white, decks of one of their boats on TV recently, I thought "No reason Lady Jane should not have that".

Well, after the work to get this far, I can now think of several reasons.

The bright, clean effect keeps me going though.

Eventually all of the engine room deck will be this colour.

A great project for those rainy days.

More primer

Here you see Fred and I have now got that all important second coat of primer on.

Experience has shown that unless we get at least a second coat on pretty quickly, the rust does not take long to peep through what must be microscopic holes left in the first coat.

As you can see from the small stretch of red there, we ran out of the grey just before the end.

I'll catch up the missed bit as part of painting the second coat on the next section I rust bust.

Solar power(less)

I've been looking into augmenting my wind generator with solar power.

For me, the bigger panels I need for my 24V system would cost around the one thousand odd pounds mark (US$ 1,600), so some research makes sense.

The concept seems idyllic - slap in a couple of solar panels and job done. Free power for the next twenty odd years with no maintenance other than an occasional clean of the panels.

After looking into it a little more, I must say that I'm somewhat under whelmed by the whole idea.

Green issues aside, solar power looks very expensive for pretty poor returns.

The panel you see is one of two different types I bought for my solar power experiments. This one for my on-board 12V system.

Forty quid that cost me, and it only produced a sorry amount of power over the course of the last few weeks. Not even enough to keep up with my intermittent use of the radio. Oh yes, and the battery is in really good shape as it's quite new.

4.8w output I think is promised on the box, but in reality I think it only does that when it's pointed directly into blazing sunlight. That's not going to happen. Especially here in England in the daylight savings months.

Before we go any further, bear in mind that this panel could not keep up, so I'd have to use a generator to top up the power at some point anyway.

So here's my, very rough, calculations....

Forty quid buys me forty litres of petrol. At .4 litres per hour (1/4 load from here), this gives me 100 hrs (6000 minutes) generator runtime. In reality the generator will use less petrol than that, as the load to charge the 12V battery is not that significant (say 10 amps * 12V = 120W vs 500W for 1/4 load).

I estimate it would take a maximum of 5 minutes generator runtime to produce the same amount of charge that panel did in two weeks.

Based on the above, 2.5 minutes runtime per week, that forty quid on the solar panel buys me the equivalent of (6000/2.5) 2,400 weeks, or 46 years, generator charge time.

End of experiment.