Dynohub - Turbine Blades

Greetings from Scotland
Hi Everyone,
I'm on an Island off the west coast of Scotland. My house is very well sighted to make use of the prevailing winds that are generally from the south west.

I've been trying to get into developing some wind turbines and hopefully with the help of the members on this forum I will be able to achieve my goal this coming year.

I'm going to start with Ben's Sturmey Archer GH6 Dynohub project as I have a dynohub available and have some questions that I will post elsewhere.

I have a set of Ben's plans and I'm going to follow them for my first project - just wanted to know whether I can use a the 4" 3 blade soil pipe design for this project?

Thanks,
Pete

[Gotwind Ben]

Hi Pete.
Welcome to the forum.
I copied your first post and pasted it into your post above. (just to keep things tidy) no worries.

Firstly you have probably one of the best advantages over most all of us here i.e. the presence of some decent wind off the West coast of Scotland, best in the world possibly. (That's Hugh Piggott territory?)

Most of us battle with very poor or turbulent wind locations and try our best to harness what we can, very little in reality.

Therefore almost anything you do will produce power i suspect, the first ever turbines I played with years ago were indeed the Sturmey Archur hub dynamos (Dynohubs), they are a good beginers project, but will never produce more than 5 watts (they are electro-mechanically designed to saturate and limit current).

The 4" diameter 3 blade soil pipe design would suit the dynohub well in your location, please be very careful though, the raw wind power can be seriously dangerous.

Maybe run things past this forum first if as I suspect you are quite new to all of this. (forgive me if I'm wrong, Safety is always my main concern).
Your average windspeeds up there would also be a useful gauge of what you can expect also.

Take care.

Thanks for the welcome Ben - I also do a lot of work for the local Community Woodland group and I think they have access to things like wind maps etc (so they can predict where they are likely to get trees blown over).

I will ask them re the average wind speeds.

Since I moved here 20 years ago the wind direction has changed, it use to be westerly but now it blows mostly from the southerly directions SW and SE because of the hill opposite, but some distance from my house.

Pete
I strongly second Ben's point about safety. A couple of years ago I had the interesting experience of finding, the morning after a very good night's wind, that one of the carved wooden blades on an early 9ft diameter turbine had entirely snapped from the strain and the remaining two had both split lengthwise. Thing is, when I took those remaining ones off and put them horizontally between 2 chairs, they took my weight with no problem, damaged as they were.
I weigh 19 stone.

What wind can do has to be seen to be believed, though if you're observing a 500 or 600 RPM rotor snap and turn into a pot-luck javelin, then I recommend it's best observed from a very great distance indeed.

Thanks for the advice - I'm very aware of health and safety issues and in particular risk assessment ever since I took my chainsaw courses for felling small treas - I will bear in mind what you both have said when I'm installing and maintaining any turbines.

Thanks,
Pete

Tim L,

I had to google 19 stone :)

Tim

Sorry about that, easy to forget that while the States kept British Imperial units, it forgot about updating them when the British did! (1824)