Sun G has already indicated that the mosfet used will be upgraded but I am in agreement with you that I do not necessarily think it was a manufactuer design flaw but more on how or where the customers are using them. Larry, over the past two years Of our testing we have bought and shared from the same shipments. Four of mine faltered and yours remained working. We imitated the same set ups yet something is different ,, what is it ? We both doubled up on our amount of inverters or used over rated inverters so ad not to use battery clamping , not to experience over volt and not to experience dump load ! Now through conversations we find out that you have installed the surge protection and I didn't . This leads us to why I should ave them installed because I believe this is where our difference is, I seem to have much heavier more constant winds than your location. My winds are also more turbulent due to violent storms. Quite frequently during heavy storms in my section of Manitoba it is not uncommon that our grid service provider has power spikes / outages that last from 2-3 seconds up to 10 hrs. When it is the 2-3 seconds this can repeat up too 4-6 times in a few minutes. It also disrupts other electrical appliances in our area such as satelight television receivers. I think this has been the major problem for my inverters and why the mosfets are not holding up. This also concerns me because even if it is a 2 sec grid failure or a 10 hr grid failure the inverter should be treating both the same with it's Island protection ! Under normal circumstances the inverters function well But our different locations are no where close to being normal and all the crazy ass set ups we are trying to force them into are our Own Failings . Larry thanks again on the heads up for the surge protection, will talk to you more on what to purchase and how to install.
Mur that is true,,I get very high clean winds AND use oversize blades as you get these same high winds..Not to sound like a ass in any way but I think leamy as been sparred because of his low winds and turbulence from them being so close to homes etc.. I have seen 1300+ watts before out of 2 500 pms with strudy towers,larger than normal blades and lots of copper running into the house thus guarenteeing more amps than "average" If you remeber my post about WN slip rings and actually melting the guts of it tells you that serious power is being made here... All truth being told, I have no idea how I could even think of a $2000+ inverter right now..We dont have any credit cards and live on cash flow,when I have a litter of dogs is when I have a few thousand extra to play with until then I have to live within my means and try to make what i have work... I just hope leamy that with you helping sell and install these sun-g's in your systems that if it ever is a wind system(solar no problems except low voltages means higher amps instead of 300-600vc and 5 ampsish) I would hate to see you help someone that might get "good winds like mur and I do to only burn stuff up for a customer. We are all on here to help teach thru our failures and test new waters.. It hurts my pride looking back at all my problems AND posting them for the public but that is how I can help others not make the same mistakes. I have learned so much over the last 2 years but it came at a large $$$..Rather perfect this than pay to sit in college classes and hope there is even a job and not have a ass for a boss
Blue you are so right.My site is different, it would be a horrible to think i would be installing bigger turbines or any at all and a college education is just out of the question. You hit the nail on the head.
Wow oh how a 36 volt large battery bank makes all the difference! 1415 watts out of 2 500's @ 40 volts ..Just bought a 48 controller from WINDYNATION!!!!!! This is the answer for climbing volts...going to use my desuflator on used car batteries to find the ones that can be fixed and make a LARGE bank! Figure I will dedicate One solar panel to run the desuflator and one battery at a time so I can see what will fix and what are junk Diodes to keep the turbines DC voltage seperate and bleed the bank off when it gets close to full.... Even all the losses I have had lately I see how to make this work.. Also see how tom using caps would make production smoother without the climb and fall by the GT's !***Edited*** to ask from my searching Tom and Windyguru didnt see anymore power,then were there any other observations? Do you think the turbine was actually higher in rpm? I want to make a plaque for my Grandmother for the next turbine base, She has helped me with more than I could ever repay in life...
Blue, I am trying to understand your post,,, are you saying you got 1415 watts from two 500 watt turbines, or those watts were produced through two 500 watt inverters ? Either way something is amazing. Poor me, I do not think I have ever seen over 550 watt from any of my turbines running separately in over 40 mph winds .
two 500s ran in parallel(sp?)(DC volts merged) with a charged 6 battery bank(36v till new charge controller comes) load with diode for no backfeeding from batteries)@ 40 volts. 30 mph winds here all day so far and yes no lies a blimp of over 1400 watts produced by 3 22v-60..been bouncing all over today and while I was down there observing I seen quite a few blips over 1000w... Remember I ran 3 times the amount of copper into my house for both these also..8.5 ft blade radius
Hey Blue, I remember reading around here about you running multiple cables in pararell for your turbines. How about refreshing us on that for example, how many cables at what gauge? Can anyone calculate what the total rersulting gauge would be?
All turbines at the gen have a 10 gauge(the bottelneck of the flow) and about 6 foot before it (for twisting,360 movement)branches each leg into its own 10 gauge wire but all 3 strands of the cord are connected to run the ac into the rectifer.So each phase of Ac has all strands for each cord to run in inside. The dc is 3 10 guage solid copper zip tied together to make a nice chunk of solid copper to interlock the GT's.
That post about the caps was in series. It made the turbines run like crazy. I run mine across the DC line like I was told in another post to quiet the vibration down and smooth out the DC from the rectifier. If you get alot of wind all the time you are better off with 22-60 volt GTI. I found that the watts jump at 21-24 volts and then again around 30-32 volts. I got the switch hooked to the dump resistors all hooked up and had some better wind last night. Here is what I found after 4 hours. Switch set points 30 high 24 low When it dumped it had spiked to 53 volts. GTI came back online. Set point high 27 volts voltage spiked to 42 volts GTI came back online. Now have it set at 26 volts high and 24 volts low Spiked at 30 volts. After 12 hours the GTI is still going. At first the wind was smooth and all was well.Then the cold front went thru and the gusts from 10-30 rolled in like waves again. Thing was going over volt every few minutes. Most of the over volt was when the GTIs got caught sleeping. WORST CASE Both GTIs sleeping. Wind hit. Turbines took off and switch went to dump. Voltage dropped right off. 10-8-30 volt GTI came on and took over. The 22-60 volt never woke up. It just sat there and did nothing to help. So now I see why you guys are burning up GTIs. Thanks for all the info. Hope my system survives the winter. Will keep you posted. My dump load is two 24 volt 300 watt resistors for these two turbines.
Tom,I have been mulling over in my mind that when I get a good large 48v battery bank and the new charge controller set up,next year instead of trying to hook and unhook a 10-30 gt to capture low winds,I will run the 2 500 in series so I only use 22-60 with everything.Thinking that the bank will absorb the higher volts and cap it..Might actually bring the output down though. I dont know if there would be enough amps to just keep it switching and dumping but the thought of feeding the 22 gt's at 45 volts seems way more efficient... Just some more playing and learning I might try.
Good morning Tom, thanks for the update and good to hear you have some winds again. Ours have not let up for over the past two months ! I had four Sun G damaged during this big wind period BUT in my case not due to over load or dump load nor using batteries for clamping . For the past 6 months I changed my system over and was using as an example on a WN 500 ( 2 Sun G 10.8-30 500,s). Never a volt overload nor reaching a dump mode. Same set up for two WN 500's. WN 750 I used a Sun G 10.8-30, 250 with a Sun G 22-60 1000, again never an over volt nor dump mode. I also never experienced the term you call the sleeping inverter, they always kept up to speed and had a smooth transfer of power between each other. My inverter failures seem to be a result of my service provider having momentary shut downs, some lasting for hours while other times seconds but repeating up to 6 times in a 2 minute period. My inverters never recovered from these grid failures. That is where my concern for overall safety had been as well ad losing the use of the inverter. I look at a one sec grid failure being the same as a 10 hr failure, both require Island Protection and a start up when the grd resumes! Apparently four of mine have said "screw you Mur" Next year I hope to try a bigger blade set like Blue mentioned on my 750 I am still working on getting my inverters repaired properly so that I can sell them with confidence to someone.
Blue what you are considering is why we quit using battery clamping completely , we decided to allow the turbines to seek their full potential. All we had to do was over rate the amount of inverter capacity or double up on inverters , or use them in parallel from low to high voltage. We wanted to eliminate batteries , volt over load spand dump load mode. It was successful, all we had to do was separate some of our turbines and make sure we matched each group of inverters to the correct amount of turbines or run a turbine on it's own ! Bottom line is I think you are bang on with your thoughts of running the higher volts fir more production. That is what we experienced .
Well I watch my inverters all the time and they both take up to 5 secs to start up when a big gust comes in. They hit so hard here that it shakes the house. I just cringe every time it does. Waiting for the turbines to fly off the roof. I was home all day and watched them most of the day during gusting periods. BORING and SCARY at times. When it is a smooth increase you should not have any problems. They work like champs together.
Tom is right,Dont care if you have 20 of them in a bank,power goes off a second while you have 25 mph winds,your volts with a free wheeling turbine will skyrocket in seconds and kill the gt's.All it takes is a flash of power loss and you will pop the caps. I know I HAVE to have a battery bank now but at 40 volts currently there is no loss in output until you hit that mark and with the 500 and 750's rated @ 24 v,they must be spinning hell fast to hit that. My battery bank will be shared by all turbines with diodes to eliminate back feeding to let the 56v run where it wants to be at. I will NEVER use a 10-30 sun-g again..one gust and that hundred dollar bill is on junk..Not just the sung brand,any,its just to low of volts. UNLESS the cap can be changed to work with the 50v 4400uf replacement with no worries.
I have a little wind here and I unplugged the grid tie. The voltage went right up and tripped the dump switch. So my best guess is it disconnects when power goes out. But when the power comes on and it connects and the voltage is 50 volts or higher. I am sure it would burn up. But on what Leamy has surge protectors on his. I believe it would help. Because there is a surge voltage when the power comes back on. Not sure what it would be but maybe Leamy would have some kind of idea.
Also forgot to bring up BROWN OUTS. I have no idea what a brown out would do to one of these SunG GTIs. And it has only happened to me once in 50 years. But I was in the house during an ice storm and all of a sudden the lights went dim and stayed like that. I grabbed my volt meter and got 62 volts AC out of the outlet. This was after running around and unplugging electrical stuff. Motors hate 62 volts and can burn up by not having the voltage to start up. After that I just turned off the breaker box till the power was on for more than an hour. Lots of loud buzzing from transformers arcing and sparks flying when a few blew up. Not a fun night. No fires in the neighborhood. This was about 5 years ago before I started all this with renewable energy.
Tom you are right, there is a surge everytime the utility power comes back on. The more power the house is pulling the greater the surge at the time. I have always had surge protection on my main electrical panel. I also have it on the D/C side of my turbines. A D/C arc is much greater then an A/C arc. Each turbine as i have stated before has a lighting arrestor which also acts as a surge protector. It was not until recently when i heard of Mur having problems with grid outages vs his Sun G's that a bell went off in my head as him i dug into the problem togehther why his mosfets may be frying due to the surges. We still can not confirm this is the real reason but it may be. Our power goes out alot for me but for moments at a time rather then long hours and from me having those devices in place i beleve it has saved not only the China inverters but my home devices as well. I also have Enphase Micro inverters for my solar system but they are UL and have all the necessary devices built in to survive. I also experince gust's, 50 MPH winds, and abusive winds. I have had the power go out when we have winds although i am not sure of the wind speeds but they were not to low.The dump load controller closes and kept them under a load, the power came back on and so did all the inverters. I have seen this happen about 4-5 times so far since i have had these inverters. I will try to do a vid when this occurs to give more insight but, you kow how that goes bucause you have to be at the right place when all of this is occuring. This is what is working for me but all sites are different.
Caught it Sleeping or Recalculating again. This only happens when I get those rolling gusts. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIbQ7ziV1A0
Tom,I have experinced it too. I just did as a matter of fact as we have some light winds so i went down and checked. I have noticed this before but when running two different volatge inverters 10-30v and a 22-60v if the volatge gets to 22-60v inverter the volts then drop and watt conversion is made. It seems this is more common on using 1 inverter for 1 turbine or multiple turbines. Running two inverters in paraelle will casue this not to happen. I do not mind it because i get the watts anyway and the 22 is right there to engauge for help. I was wondering if you or anyone else other then Mur and I have tried running your turbines with a 10-30v in the front of a 22-60v Sun G wind GTI, wirring them in paraell. Wires coming off the buss bars to each inverter rather then daisy chaining the inverters? Have any of you tried the wirring methods i have posted?
