The homemade wind turbine is made of three main components that include the wind turbine, the tower, and the battery bank along with its associated safety, control switches and circuitry. Installing a wind turbine energy system requires you to have knowledge, proper materials and proper planning along with maintenance of the system compared to the solar power systems. However, wind turbines have more advantage than the solar power system in terms of location especially in windy climate that are prone to cloudy or having daily rains. Wind turbine has the capability to supply supplemental power to your house. Before you can start to use any form of a wind turbine system, it must be connected to a battery bank and through this piece you would be able to learn in order to ensure that the system works accordingly.
To connect a homemade wind turbine to a battery bank, you need:
- Wind turbine
- Battery bank
- Charge controller
- Dump load
Connecting a homemade wind turbine to a battery bank
How to Connect a Homemade Wind Turbine to a battery bank
- First thing that you need to do is to acquire or build your charge controller that is an electrical system that has the capability of monitoring the amount of charge in your batteries.
- This function is important because it helps prevent the battery bank from becoming overcharged and in the end damage the battery.
- There is also commercially built charge controllers that are available in the market if you want to purchase it.
- If you have the knowledge in electricity and wiring, you would be able to build your own charge controller. It must also be build along with an automatic switch that will dump power to a dump load whenever the battery bank has been fully charged.
- This function is important because it helps prevent the battery bank from becoming overcharged and in the end damage the battery.
You can simply bought the wind turbines as a complete built in units or even as pre-fabricated wind turbine kits where you need to follow its detailed instructions to assemble it accordingly.
- The next step for you to do is to connect the battery bank to the charge controller. In order to cater for your wind turbine, you need to use deep cycle batteries.
- Make sure that you connect the battery bank to the controller where the connection of the positive and negative feeds must be from two different batteries.
- For instance, in the row of batteries that you see in your battery bank, you have to connect the positive feed from the top of your battery to the controller. As for the negative feed coming from the bottom battery needs to be connected to the controller. This is to provide an evenly distributed amount of charge to all the batteries.
- Make sure that you connect the battery bank to the controller where the connection of the positive and negative feeds must be from two different batteries.
- The diversion port on your charge controller needs to be connected to a dump load.
- Whenever your battery bank is fully charged, the controller will immediately dump any of the surplus power to the dump load.
- The reason for doing this is to prevent the wind turbine from becoming too noisy or even preventing it from destroying itself. Wind turbine would be able to operate safely by using an open circuit.
- Whenever your battery bank is fully charged, the controller will immediately dump any of the surplus power to the dump load.
- Then, you need to hook up the wind turbine to your charge controller.
- Whenever there is any wind, the wind turbine will start to move and begin generating electricity that will charge the battery bank.
- Whenever there is any wind, the wind turbine will start to move and begin generating electricity that will charge the battery bank.
Most of the wind turbines are designed as stand-alone system that always require pairing with a rechargeable battery bank which include rectifiers, circuit breakers, propeller brake switches, excess current diverters or controllers, heat sink or excess current sinks.
Always remember that whenever you want to connect a homemade wind turbine to a battery bank,
- You must first connect the turbine to the controller right after you connect the batteries and the dump load. By doing this is, you would be able to prevent voltage spikes from the turbine to damage the controller.
- If you want to disconnect the system, the first thing that you need to do is to disconnect the turbine.
- The system wiring starting from the wind turbine, tower, the battery bank and also its control components require proper consideration and if possible to have approval from qualified electrician. Make sure that the support tower and the battery bank are properly grounded to the ground.
- For you to do a complete installation of a wind turbine facility is very difficult. Though, it can be assembled on your own but the hard work such as installation on the tower and also the task of attaching the wind turbine onto the top of your tower requires you to have assistances.
