How's the wind at your location?

[Watt]

The wind here is pretty gusty.  Nothing real steady and this picture shows just how the wind here is unpredictable. 



How's your wind?  This is for 2 days even though it says 24 hours. 

[rossw]

Here's the wind at my location over the last 24 hours

[Watt]

Sweet Ross, that is a great way to view your info.  Did you say yours samples every 5 seconds? 

Mine samples every 5 minutes. .....  Must be nice for you to be able to do cool things with software.

[rossw]

Sweet Ross, that is a great way to view your info.  Did you say yours samples every 5 seconds? 

Mine samples every 5 minutes. .....  Must be nice for you to be able to do cool things with software.

Yes, I got a cheap WM-918 or WX-200 from memory, and wrote my own software for it.
It gets wind data every 5 seconds, which I log and store.
I log and store the other data (temperatures, humidity, pressure etc etc) every minute.

I've never seen anyone else present wind like my "historical wind rose" - but I like it. It gives a wealth of wind information at a glance. Speed and direction from where the dots are reference the middle. The colour is an indication of age, with red being oldest and white being current.

[Norm]

Beauty is to the eye of the beholder.....yours is nice rossw....but
personally just looking out the window and watching anemometer
cups spinning....don't even have to be connected....beautiful !
Norm

[rossw]

looking out the window and watching anemometer
cups spinning....don't even have to be connected....beautiful !

How true!

The downside to that is - you can't tell which direction it's comming from, and you can't readily compare how it is now vs half an hour ago, vs an hour ago (is it getting windier or calmer?) - and for me, since I spend a lot of time away from home - nothing like looking at the graphs from 300 miles away and knowing the batteries are fine

[ChrisOlson]

Beauty is to the eye of the beholder.....yours is nice rossw....but
personally just looking out the window and watching anemometer
cups spinning....don't even have to be connected....beautiful !

I prefer the good old analog 500 amp ammeter that shows total incoming power to my bus.  If it isn't high enough my "fix" is to build another turbine and put it up   
--
Chris

[rossw]

I prefer the good old analog 500 amp ammeter that shows total incoming power to my bus.  If it isn't high enough my "fix" is to build another turbine and put it up   

500A @ 48V is 24kW.... how do you USE that??

[ChrisOlson]

No, my system is 24 volt.

On a really good day with both wind and sun I can see the bus ammeter touch 250, or even a bit more sometimes.
--
Chris

[rossw]

No, my system is 24 volt.

On a really good day with both wind and sun I can see the bus ammeter touch 250, or even a bit more sometimes.

Ahh. Phew. That makes me feel a lot better.  6kW I can get. Even 8 or 10. 24kW would scare me

[ChrisOlson]

LOL!  24 kW would scare me too   

We typically get 28-30 kWh in a day.  On a really windy day we can get up to 90 kWh.  But I don't run all the turbines on really windy days because there's no place to use the power.  I put up enough wind power so we meet our needs on the "average" day, which is typically around 12 mph wind speed.  Instead of building huge turbines I kept building small ones because they're easier to manage.  40 amps apiece is easy with little ones.  Build a big honker and try to manage 160 amps coming out of it?  Not me   
--
Chris

[rossw]

We typically get 28-30 kWh in a day.

I typically get about 22kWh from my Solar, although it could be a lot more if I could actually "use" it.
My hot water comes from other sources (so that's free), I pump a bit of water now and then, but we don't use enough to run the pump every week much less every day. So once the batteries get to "absorb" I'm forfeiting some power, and when they hit float, I'm forfeiting heaps. I'm usually in float by 1pm in summer, so that's 6+ hours I'm "not using" over 2kW.

I only have a 3m, 1kW turbine up at the moment (but a 3.8m 2.5kW in the workshop to put up soon as I get a round tuit). It doesn't generally contribute many kWh/week.

Instead of building huge turbines I kept building small ones because they're easier to manage.  40 amps apiece is easy with little ones.  Build a big honker and try to manage 160 amps coming out of it?  Not me   

Makes perfect sense, and probably the way I'd do it too.

I get up to 20A from my current 1kW turbine in a strong wind.
I expect 40+ from the new one. (Both are 48V though, so thats equivalent to 40A and 80A for yours, respectively)

[Norm]

Back to wind direction but mostly wind speed ....if it messes up my hair....
it's too much...
Norm

[Watt]

Beauty is to the eye of the beholder.....yours is nice rossw....but
personally just looking out the window and watching anemometer
cups spinning....don't even have to be connected....beautiful !

I prefer the good old analog 500 amp ammeter that shows total incoming power to my bus.  If it isn't high enough my "fix" is to build another turbine and put it up   
--
Chris

I agree with you regarding the " see what it is ' doing ' " as an indicator.  Good one for sure.   

I looked at other peoples progress and benefits as they posted results of projects.  And, I was hoping to post my wind data so when I post how a particular turbine responded, others could see how well or bad a particular turbine responded from that actual wind data. 

Well, I have already found out that just because I have some wind data, it may not be exactly what I can use for a turbine comparison.  Ross has shown, in my opinion, wind data that is so far exactly what I'd look for in data logging vs. performance.   

Anyway, I think you are right and maybe a post with wind and performance is more appropriate.   

[rossw]

Well, I have already found out that just because I have some wind data, it may not be exactly what I can use for a turbine comparison.  Ross has shown, in my opinion, wind data that is so far exactly what I'd look for in data logging vs. performance.   

Anyway, I think you are right and maybe a post with wind and performance is more appropriate.

I haven't done it yet in any public-accessible way, nor as a continuous display - but one that I think would be useful would be an interval-by-interval (minute, 5 minute, whatever) "wind potential" graph.

This would take the wind each (minimum) measured interval (in my case, 5 seconds, and anything more than that is probably not much use), and calculate the "wind-cubed" speed, and accumulate those for the display period.

Since the power in the wind is basically it's cube, adding them up the cube of each interval, then dividing by the seconds should give a "unitless" figure to compare a machines actual output to the winds potential over the same time.

You can then plot turbine output against "wind potential" and get some sort of meaningful result.