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48V DC Wind Turbine wired directly to DC Immersion heater

  • 21-02-2014 8:32am
    #1
    locky76
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 867 ✭✭✭


    Hey folks,
    I'm thinking of installing a small scale wind turbine on a shed beside my house and wiring it directly to an immersion heater in my hot water cylinder.
    I was going to go for a 48volt DC system as this is quite chunky and could cope with the various wind speeds etc...
    I have a big hot water cylinder as I have solar panels also.
    Any comments on the above would be appreciated ;)


Comments

  • #2
    [Deleted User]
    Posts: 5,238 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    Have you got a hot water heat dump? If the turbine is spinning fast enough to boil your tank you'll have to divert the electrical load also. Taking the load off a running turbine causes significant and dangerous over-spin.
    It's more common to use a tertiary immersion element as a turbine diversion load or electrical dump load. Probably the system you are proposing would require provision for hot water and electrical diversion control, it'd be a shame to go to all that effort to throw it away. Turning hard-earned electrons into heat always seems like a waste to me. More useful in batteries or feeding the grid imho.

    For a resistive load like a water-tank element it wouldn't have to be regulated to a particular voltage, an expected range would suffice nor even DC, any attempts to do so would just be wasting energy. The way I'd imagine to achieve what I think you're suggesting is to send the AC generated turbine power straight to the tank element that's suitably rated for anything the turbine can throw at it. As far as I understand we can turn energy into heat with 100% efficiency (unfortunately we're still struggling to go past 60% the other way around) so I'm doubtful you'd get more heat from tiered elements. After that you'd need to link a diversion load controller to a tank stat to detour extra generation away from the tank probably to a dry heater elsewhere when you reach your max temp and keep it away until the tank has settled to a more reduced temperature.

    Better off with an autonomous turbine on it's own tower closer to clean air. Mounting it on a building will create noise and extra wear and tear from turbulence and reduce it's ability to perform.


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