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Phill's RE setup.  


Phill ( known as fillm on the forum ) has built a grid tied RE system using solar and a dual stator F&P windmill. Phill lives in the Logan City area, near Brisbane, Queensland Australia. In Phill's words....

 

I found this old electrical cabinet in the dump which saved the cost of having to buy a suitable cabinet big enough to mount 2 inverters and the wind and solar controls.

Cabinet now painted, mounted, and the two Latronics PVE1200 Inverters fitted. I picked up some plastic cable tray to keep it all looking neat, tidy and safe. A small company in Brisbane “Sundriven” did the all the associated work with mounting the 1kw solar array on the roof and wired the inverters to the meter box. The standard of work and service was excellent and would recommend them to anyone in the Brisbane area.

With the 1kw PV array now connected to the inverter and wired to meter box, I had to wait for Energex to come and hang the feed back meter which is separate to the house meter, this took an agonizing two weeks, lost paperwork and a few phone calls.

But during this wait, because of a wire that was not connected to the main meter, the house was on free electricity which I had informed  them of, bit of a bonus.!!

With all the checks now done the system was turned on.  A couple of points to note – These are specifically grid feed inverters and shut down if the grid power is off. They have to be compliant to an Aus Standard and installed by an licensed electrician. If not correctly installed and the power supply linesman are working on an area which is isolated and picks up a live wire feed by your inverter, causing an injury or fatality, then you would be liable, so be careful if offered a deal to good to be true or buying inverters of  the internet which claim to plug into a wall socket and turn the meter backwards.

Picture shows wiring up the wind and solar controls as well as the Piclog and laptop for logging the windgen. The plasmatronics pl20 is dedicated to the second 4 x 80w PVs which keep the lower inverter on all day so any extra power made by the windgen is straight into the grid via the pl60  and 48v batt bank . With the MPPT off  the PVE1200 connects to the grid at 54.4 V and disconnects at approx 53.2v, it takes approx 2 min to connect to the grid when the 54.4v point is reached and then slowly ramps up the current drawn from the batt’s depending on how much current is coming in, it seems it will stay connected with as little as .2A / 10 w coming in but at what efficiency rate at present  I do not know. The PL60 is controlling the wind gen and is set to 62V to switch on the dump load ( if grid is down and wind blowing / sun shining ) it can internally switch up to 30A which should be more than enough to handle 2 or even 3 wind gens, then if the voltage keeps rising, at 64 V the PL20 disconnects the solar and will activate the 48v relay to the right of it and short the wind gen windings and bring everything to a screaming halt because everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, but murphy's law stays and when that time comes I will see what happens.


Everything in and running , PL60 is also monitoring input amps via the pls2 and shunt and records Amp/hrs  in over a 24hr period , but for the purpose of wind it only reads in 1A/hr via a 1mA = 1A shunt but  I  plan to try to modify so 1mA=10A  to give a higher resolution. The Piclog works great “ Thanks Glenn” hopefully will be starting on building my own soon using the allegro current sensors. Got the laptop of E-bay for $90 , it does the job


Anemometer  constructed from  F & P agitator  conditioner  cups,  an old motor from  a trashed  record  player   and   magnets  from  virgin  blue  ear  phones. The  reed  switch is  a  F&P  lid  closed  switch  .  The  mount  is  the  base  of   the  conditioner  dispenser  and  fits  into  100mm  PVC  drain  pipe  perfectly.

Looking back at everything , 1kw panels just sticking out over the roof , the 4 x 80 watt on the back with adjustable legs for summer and winter , the controls can just be seen under the tv antenna and No 1 wind gen and anemometer in front .

© TheBackShed 2011