giga small wind generator anyone used one ?

[dunkelly]

these look a very neat solution to adding more charging capacity off the grid - at 400 £ not particularly cheap but wondered if anyone had any experience of them as i am not sure how long they have been around .

 

[William_H]

Unfortunately power from a turbine depends on the area of blades so not likely to give much useful power. Especially for the price. Certainly not as good as solar panels. One of the difficulties of turbines is the generator. For cheapness and reliability they usually use permanent magnets for field magnetism. They then use a 3 phase set of fixed coils the output of Which is rectified to give DC. This means that the output is essentially unregulated. Now you need up to 14v DC before you get anything into a lead acid battery. To get this voltage at low wind speeds you need a lot of turns on the coils. This in turn limits current possible at max wind lowest battery voltage. So compromises. Claims that it generates power at low wind speed amy be correct but that does not mean it generates enough voltage to put anything into your battery. The only alternative is to use something like an MPPT regulator which will take whatever voltage is generated and transform it into a voltage suitable for battery charging at whatever current can be achieved.
Lastly actual robustness of the unit is a concern. I had a friend who bought a cheap Chinese wind gen which had all the above problems then finally dismantled itself in a strong wind. Just a few comments ol'will

 

[dunkelly]

Thanks for the advice , i was thinking it may be a useful addition to my small solar panel set up , but i think being imaginative and finding additional space for more solar panels is more cost effective .

 

[Mistroma]

Thanks for the advice , i was thinking it may be a useful addition to my small solar panel set up , but i think being imaginative and finding additional space for more solar panels is more cost effective .

Guesswork required as no size detail or output graphs on their site.

1) Quoted startup is 2mph (Rutland 913 is ~5-6mph)
2) Output 30W at 30m/s (Rutland 913 is ~3W)
3) Regulator is 5A so expecting max. output ~70W (Rutland 913 ~250W)

It actually looks about the diameter of a Rutland 504 (and diameter determines theoretical maximum wind it could capture).
The Rutland 504 only manages less than 1/3 the output of a 913.

I think that the Rutland 913 has about 25% efficiency and theoretical maximum is limited to under 60%.

I doubt the Giga manages to double efficiency of the Rutland. However, it looks as if it has been optimised for low wind speed and will max. out at much lower speeds. Still very little energy to extract at low speeds and I'd doubt you'd average more than 5Ah/day during a UK summer.

Even if Giga manage to approach the average output of the much larger Rutland 913 (and that's highly unlikely), you'd be better off with a 30W solar panel. Much cheaper for similar output.

I'm surprised that they thought it worth designing and marketing it. It isn't likely to compare favourably with solar in UK even if optimised for lower wind speeds.