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Now for the Wind Turbine

abundant renewable energy ARE 110 2.5kw wind turbine
The first thing that had to be done was to clear enough land in order to accomodate for the length of the tower (106 feet tall) when it is laying down flat on the ground and also the guy wires that are attached . I was fortunate enough to have a father-in-law (www.collinsmountaingrading.com) who owns a small skidder and was able to clear all the trees out. I ended up using alot of the trees to build what I call the power station. I just used a framing hammer, nails, hatchet for debarking and a chainsaw for cutting. With those tools I was able to frame the shack up with no problem. As far as the roof of the shack, I used some tin from Lowes and sheeter screws. The intersting thing about the tin is that I got about a 60% discount on it. The reason was that the tin looked like it had been left on the flatbed truck and in the rain for a few days after delivery. It developed some sort of white scale all over it making its appearace look bad and unsaleable. Turns out that Lowes and other home improvement stores usually have a good bit of materials that are damaged or can't be sold at full price. Ie scaly , rusty tin, busted concrete bags, bent boards, cracked plywood, pressure treatedwood, chiped concrete blocks etc. What I do now is whenever I am Lowes, homedepot, etc, I ask them if they have any damaged building materials they are trying to get rid of. Alot of times they are. If this is the case I usually get anywhere from a 50 to 75 % discount on these. You can ususally negotiate more when you tell them you want it  "all". Thats less work for them to have to move it, throuw it away, load it back into the truck, etc... The twelve sheets of roofing tin for the power station were bought for 7 bucks a sheet. Normally they are $17 a sheet. I saved a bunch Of money that day. Also regarding electrical wire at Lowes and others, if someone gets wire cut there and then they just decide not to buy it, then this wire is usually sold at 1/2 price. Pretty sweet deal if they have what you happen to need at the time. I always look around to see precut / taped up wire laying around. If I need it I grab a lowes person and have them mark it down 50%. Thats their policy and my savings.

Once the land was cleared I had to lay out the footers for the tower. There are 6 footers all together. One in the middle to support the tower itself and 4 that surround the middle footer for the 4 sets of turnbuckle assembly's that attach to each section of pipe going up the tower. The tricky part was calculating how much concrete to order. According to the A.R.E tower manual the footers needed to be 3 feet by 3 feet by 4 feet. To calculate the amount of concrete to order I used a concrete calculator found at http://www.concrete.com/calculatorsmaterials.htm#volume
You need to know how many yards to order so that you have enough but you also want to be careful not to order too much because it can be a waste of money (I ordered too much - oops)  I ordered my concrete from Pugh Concrete out of Silk Hope/Pittsboro North Carolina (919) 542-0321. I ended up ordering 12 yards of 4000 psi concrete at $108 dollars a yard plus $5.50 a yard for fiber so really $113 a yard.  Fiber is fiberglass and they mix it in with the concrete and it makes it very strong. I guestimated 12 yards because some of my footers were 4x4x5 and 3x4x4 and so forth which are larger than the recomended 3x3x4 in the A.R.E manual. The concrete guy said said that there was about 3/4 of a yard left in the truck after we poured the six footers and was wondering what I wanted to do with it. He offered to take it back to the office but said I would not get any money back of course.
I had an idea. What if I just got some of those logs left over from clearing out the land and build a square on a flat part of the ground somewhere and have him pour the extra concrete right into the makeshift form. Thats what we did and I took another board and pushed it right down the middle to make 2 sections within the log square on the ground. Now I have 2 squares of concrete about 6 feet by 3 feet by 8 inches. I now  plan to use these two footers in the future to mount more solar panel frames to. I guess it wasn't a waste of money after all. I'll need to borrow a tractor or skidder to move them around of course.

The sixth footer is for mounting the winch which is used to pull the tower up via the gin pole (the shorter part of the L ) -- see drawing below.

If you follow the manuals for the tower assembly and footer layout, it is pretty self explanatory. 
Here is a link to the Turbine Tower mechanical manual. ARE110-48V_Owners_Manual_Mechanical_Ver5.0.pdf

For the footer layout, it was crucial that we had a "transit level" so that we could make sure to build any concrete forms to the same height so that when we poured the concrete, the tops of the footers would all be at the same elevation in relation to each other. If the footers are not at the same height then lowering and raising the tower would be harder to do since you could have one set of guy wires on one side be shorter or longer than the other. These guy wires act as the hinge for raising and lowering the tower.

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Below are a few pictures of the turbine tower's slip couplings and guy wires that came preattached to the slip couplings.
In the picture to the right you can see part of the tower and gin pole has been installed.

wind turbine tower kit   n

The next phase after tower assembly was assembling and mounting yaw head to the tower's top flange and then attaching the turbine alternator  to the yaw head. The yaw head contains the wires that you have to connect to the wires that you run up the tower. I just used straight crimp terminals to connect the wires.  The yaw head allows the whole turbine to rotate around  into the wind (using slip rings and brushes) and not twist up the wires running down the pole. The one problem I had was that during testing the turbine, this is before you raise it up into the air, you are supposed to have one person at the bottom of the tower with a volt meter measuring the voltage coming out of the wires while someone is up at the turbine, spinning it by hand as fast as they can to make sure you get consistent voltage readings between the three wires. Measuring from a to b and b to c and then c to a. The voltages should be close. I my case , it turned out that the turbine would not spin freely. Basically the only way that the turbine will not spin freely is either you have the wires at the bottom of the tower wire nutted together (shorted out) or there is a short in the yaw head. In my case there was a short in the yaw head. I was able to measure continuity between two of the plates in the yaw head which is not good. I had to send the yaw head back and they sent me a new one. As far as mounting the turbine alternator (wieghs about 120lbs) to the yaw head, it took the use of my pickup. I just lifted the turbine into the back of the truck (with help) and then lowered the tower with the winch into the back of the truck and kept lowering it until the yaw head was barely touching the alternator. I sat on the end of the tower to push it the rest of the way down to meet the alternator and then bolted the yaw head to the alternator.

The other issue was getting the 8-3 with ground down the tower pipe. I was so excited about putting the tower together that I put all the pipes together without running the wire. I ended up spending about 45 minutes trying to get my fish tape down 106 feet of pipe and unfortunately hitting every single coupling all the way down. What a bear.
I finally got the fish tape all the way through and pulled the wire through to the turbine to wire it up. My advice is to run the wire through each 21 foot stick of pipe before you put the next pipe on and so forth.

At the bottom of the tower I mounted a 4x4x6 pvc junction box so that I could break the wires and install two squareD lightning arrestors model SDSA-1175. Each lightning arrestor will protect two hot wires. The turbine has three hot wires. The way I wired these up is: see picture below.

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Here are some pictures of the base of the tower. You can see the two square black colored lightning arrestors mounted into the pvc box. The other box to the left that says "kill switch" is the stop switch. This switch basically stops the turbine from spinning during maintenace or during hurricanes. It is a squareD 40 amp disconnect switch. Remember earlier when I spoke of shorting the turbine out. The ways you stop the turbine is to short the hot wires together.  The way I wired the disconnect switch is I extended two of the turbines hot wires from the pvc box into the disconnect box. I wired one hot wire to the breaker and the other hot wire to the load terminal. When you turn the breaker to  "on" it shorts the two hot wires together thus stopping the turbine.  When using this switch when the turbine is spinning, it is better to bump the switch on and off an few times to ease the turbine into slowing down. If you just turn the switch on and short the turbine out when the turbine is really spinning  you can imagine that the turbine will do some serious jerking/ bouncing , abrubt stopping, and so forth. --  (the turbine controller box in the power station also has a stop button/switch as well)--

y  tower base


are 110 wind turbine      n

The picture above is of the turbine. See how the tail is furled to the side. This is what happens in 35 mile an hour winds. The tail furls to the side to keep the turbine from over spinning.  The picture to the right is a nice shot of what the turnbuckles should look like when the tower is raised and the turnbuckles have been tightened.


Here is a link to a site that gives good windspeed data:
http://www.usairnet.com/weather/maps/current/north-carolina/wind-speed/

Here is a link to a site that shows you how to build your own turbine: This is my next project.
http://www.otherpower.com/17page1.html

Here is a site to where you can get good deals on magnets:
http://www.magnet4less.com


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