Our power system

I have been sending a large group of individuals e-mails answering their questions about Woodhenge. I have also been negligent about posting more frequeently on the Woodhenge site. A flash of the brilliantly obvious hit me the other day...I could be using the individual notes to post to the site to give you all an idea of the scope of projects we do here. The following is a description of most of the electrical power systems we use here

The electrical system can be broken down into several parts. The energy production systems are covered several ways: We have a Bergey XL1 wind turbine on a 105' tilt up tower (tower, turbine and control system cost $3200, this price is not what you are lead to believe if you call a home wind power dealer...they usually think grid intertie and $30,000 to $50,000), a Whisper 400 at Phil's place and an Air 403 at the common house (these are salvaged units that I rebuilt with students on 30' - 35' homemade towers).

Our house has 500 watts of photovoltaics, the common house has 30 watts and Phil's place has 50 watts. We have a 10' diameter concrete block building with a 5000 watt generator - just a gas generator from the local hardware/lumber yard. It is connected with a twist plug to our house and if you switch plugs to the common house. Phil is a bit further away and has his own recycled gas generator. All of the generators run through the inverters in each of the buildings - the inverters act as battery chargers when the generators are running. We hope to switch to a diesel generator in the generator building this summer...I got a Kubota 3 cylinder diesel engine on a two wheeled trailer and want to tune it up and attach a generator head (10Kw) and convert the unit to run on waste veggie oil or, at least biodiesel. The long range goal is to get a 'lister' type engine and go with technology that will last decades.

We have a battery bank that consists of 16 L15 type batteries (130# each and 6 volts each) they're tied together to form a 24 volt battery bank (4 strings of 24v). Each string has a 2 gigahertz pulser to prevent sulfation of the batteries. I hope to get 15 years out of our present set. The common house is connected to our house with an underground wire, but it has a switch to let it run off it's own small system. The common house has two sets of batteries- I bought one set of 6 deep cycle marine/rv batteries and the next day a friend dropped off 25+ deep cycle batteries (AGM Type!) that had been surplused at his job. Phil has 6 deep cycle 12v batteries from Sam's Club hooked in series for a 12volt system. THe common house has a 24v system to be compatable with ours.

Each house has an inverter. Ours is an Outback 3824 (3800 watts continuous power and 10,000 watt surge) it is a puresine type inverter (this means that it produces power with almost no harmonic distortion). The common house has our old Trace 3524 modified sine inverter. Both of these inverters have a built in charging circuit that will deliver between 70 and 80 amps of charge. Our big battery bank only takes 2 hours to fully charge when it gets to a 20% to 25% depth of discharge and we don't have wind or sunshine to charge. Phil's place works off of a cheap ($35 from Harbor Freight) 400 watt or so inverter and a NAPA battery charger. Phil's controls and monitors are all salvaged junk that I rewired...hey, it works!

I built a 6" pelton wheel type microhydro turbine with my students several years ago and it'll eventually go into the waterfall area we have about 700' from our house. It needs a shaft that connects it to a military 100amp vehicle alternator, a housing, the weir, and pipe and heavy enough wire to run to the generator shed without too much loss to get it up and contributing to our power network.

We have no wires that connect us with the road. We have cell phones, satellite tv, and a wireless phone thingy that hooks into the side of our laptop computer for internet work.

I'm estimating that when all of the people that live here are actually here we use up to 6 KWh of power a day. A sunny day or a windy day will just about replace what we use. Many times we have a surplus of power, especially after a series of windy days and I'll run a crock pot or bread maker to use up the surplus. If we're using a lot of lights or power tools or doing multiple loads of laundry or vacuuming and my batteries drop below 24.8 volts I'll throw the generator on for a few hours. It uses around a gallon of gas per hour. If all of the renewable stuff was gone we'd have to run the generator for around 2 hours every three or four days. As we start to develop more home based businesses here I anticipate we'll bulk up both our renewables and mechanical generating systems (i.e. the waste veggie gen sets or more PV panels or more wind turbines)

I teach workshops on how to build axial flux wind turbines from locally available materials and have several under construction now. One of these home made units will go to the area that we're building guest cabins near the water falls site. Our/my goal is to show people that is really isn't hard or complicated to make enough power for a home or group of homes...it's a matter of getting over the brainwashing that you've had since birth about power companies.