Wind/Water generators

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carolinelouise

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I'm thinking of purchasing a wind/water generator, to fit my 38' westerly, although there are not that many of them around, it's not easy making the right choice, especiallly when you are only reading the sellers blurb. If you have any constructive or informative info from experiance with these I would much like to hear it so I make the right choice when I buy one.
 
G'day carolinelouise, and welcome aboard the YBW forums.

I did a delivery trip from Cairns to Brisbane a wile back, 40 foot Bennie, she had a wind gen fitted. Now it could be just me but I found the noise very annoying during the day, shut down at night due to noise.

Also thought it could / should have been mounted higher to avoid finger losses.

We never had a towed generator, too many sharks and marlins around.

Our own boat has 3 large solar panels and a hi tech charging and monitoring system, twin engines so 2 starter batteries and a bank of 6 house batteries.

2 fridge freezers running 24/7 without problems, we put an extra portable freezer on for fishing trips, the small amount of motoring we do seems to be enough to keep everything running OK.

Hope this helps.

Avagoodweekend......
 
There have been many debates on this forum about this subject. I suppose it depends very much on what you are planning to do and where you are:

1) If you do mostly w/e sailing out of Poole with the occasional week or two cruising in this corner of the world, then a wind generator will be very useful (we have a Rutland 913 and it is marvellous)

2) If you plan long distance cruising with long transatlantic stretches pushed by the trades, I suppose a water trailed generator and solar panels may be advisable.

3) If you are going to bake in the Med, then solar panels are probably your best choice.

Note 2) and 3) are not drawn from personal experience /forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif. This month, in one of the sailing mags, I saw an article comparing combi generators (water/wind). It sounds like a good idea but the feeling I get is that they are quite complicated to deploy and probably also more liable to go wrong... just my prejudice here, though.
 
I've used an Aquair 100 by ampair
web page
and a friend used the one on a pole where you stick the end of th epole in the water off the transom.

Aquair was great and by far the best bit of kit I've bought for cruising, it can be deployed quickly so you can use it for coastal trips of a few hours. We had more power than we needed to run fridge, lights, computer, nav gear radio etc. I also think that when it got a bit rough it steadied the stern as the loads are quite huge. You have to be a little careful deploying and retrieving but you get better with practice. From friends comments I didn't think the pole one was as effective.

The Aquair as a wind generator was also great in the Carib, we hoisted it above the boom off the back stay (as the electrical plug was on the transom) so it was above our aft cabin hatches which were open and it was not noisy even in 25knts.

A very good product and with very good support (I blew up the voltage controller) It's sat in the garage waiting for the next trip or delivery.

We never had to run the engine and had no solar panels or other means of generation and the fridge ran full time for over a year.
 
Depending on your budget, deffinately have a look at a DuoGen ( http://www.duogen.co.uk ). We had an original on our last boat and have the MK2 version on our current boat. Depending on how fast you can sail, you can get huge output and its a doddle to switch to wind mode once the anchor is down!
 
Although it is the most expensive of the combination one's the Duogen certainly did what it said for us and was very easy to set up and deploy and change back to wind mode again, even for short'ish journeys. It was worth every penny, its also worth getting the spares kit to go with it.
 
I've got a D400 which is a non-towable Duogen - same blades and generator but not the gubbins in between. Compared to other units of a similar output i've been any where near it's much quieter. There's an air x on a boat the next pontoon down from me (about 30m away) and it drives me bonkers...

as others have alluded to it really depends on what stuff you're running, how large your battery bank is, and what weather you'll be expecting/ where you are going. A combination of charging methods often works well - wind/water/solar/alternator etc.
 
I have a AIR-X generates loads of power but very noisy..I often turn it off if other boats nearby in harbour etc.

Good thing is that it is poss to turn off with a switch in the locker ...also it shuts down when the batts are full..less wear on the bearings and so on.

All good except the noise.

Regds Nick
 
Well thanks very much for all the reply's, it's given me lots to think about. I did not know of the Duogen but will check out the web site now, I have been leaning towards the Aqua/air4 generator, nice to hear good things about it.
 
Hi,

You might care to think twice about buying a combined unit, bearing in mind that with some (e.g. Duogen) if the generator packs up you've lost BOTH sources of power generation.

We cruised for almost ten years full time using a Rutland 913 wind generator (do a search for lot of info) and an Aqua4gen towed generator so giving us a DUAL charging most of the time. Obviously if one unit went wrong, there was still the other to provide power.

We did do an Atlantic circuit using a unit that could be adapted from wind-gen to water-gen (Aquair?) which was fine, but took a relatively long time to convert from water to wind, AND of course, again only uses one generator.

It's a very personal view of course, but I think the Duogen is a spectacularly ugly piece of equipment and extremely expensive.

Good luck with what you decide on. /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif
 
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