Hi. I live in a low wind area but I have a stream in the back that flows in the winter. I can power a water turbine with a 10 or 12 inch pipe and at least 20 feet of head. The flow is variable but I get maximum flow from November to the end of February. It's basically dry in the summer. I'm wondering if a Windy Nation PMA would work to supply power for space heating. I figure that I can set up an overshoot water wheel with gearing to the PMA to bring up the RPM to a higher value. I need 120 feet of wire so I thought 3-phase AC power would be good. This would go to a rectifier and some dump load resistors. Cost would be low due to the system not having batteries or a charge controller. I've also thought of using this servo motor: 90 Volt, 6.6 Amp, 3100 RPM I would appreciate thoughts and links. Thanks, Vaughn.
Vaughn, What you are thinking of doing well definitely work but there is one set back I think. If you have the generator hooked up directly to a space heater, the generator will be fully loaded. Suppose you have it hooked up to a 600 Watt heater. This means the generator is hooked directly up to a 600 Watt load and the generator will have a hard time starting from a dead stop. Why? Because the generator is basically shorted due to the large load that is directly attached to it. There are circuits boards that have been designed to deal with this problem. The board is designed to keep increasing the load to the generator (from your heater) as the rpm's of the generator increase. And the board will back off the load from the heater if the rpm's decrease. I am sure this type of circuit board is commercially available but I do not know who sells them. What you also could do is use a battery bank with a charge controller. The dump load could be your heater. You could set the charge controller to dump to the heater anytime the voltage of the battery bank was above 12 volts. With a constant power source like hydro, you would be powering your heater quite often. I would not recommend a DC servo motor for this application. If the generator/motor is going to be located near a water source, a DC servo motor would probably "rust out" fairly fast in the damp environment. I would recommend something that is designed to handle an outdoor environment.
