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CWAVE
Newbie

Joined: 15/06/2006
Location: Canada
Posts: 3

Posted: 09:21pm 12 Mar 2007

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I've just purchased an Inspeed Anemometer Data Logging Kit to do a site survey of my property. It logs CSV data (comma separated values) into a text file that gives you

Date / Time
Current Speed
Minimum Speed
Maximum Speed
Average Speed

The interval can be as little as 1 minute.

Was wondering if anyone has developed any software or perhaps an excel spreadsheet to perform analysis on the data. I've been searching the web and have not found anything of any use. I thought for sure someone had developed something for doing analysis on this sort of data.

It'll be some time before I have enough data to make a suitable evaluation of my site but would like to have something in the can for when it's time to start doing my analysis of the data.

Thanks for your time.

CWAVE

RossW
Guru

Joined: 25/02/2006
Location: Australia
Posts: 495

Posted: 12:34am 14 Mar 2007

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Samples at 1 minute intervals are little use IMO.

I currently sample every 5 seconds with a commercial weather station, and it's not really good enough. My old home-brew station sampled 3 times per second and stored max and avg data every second.

Wind power is a function of the 4th power of wind speed, so recording the average speed over such long intervals doesn't really give you any substantial data about wind power available. In hindsight, neither does a "wind run" meter, although they can give you an idea if one site is generally more windy than another.

What sort of "analysis" do you want to achieve? I've written tools to parse and work out various bits of information from my own station(s), happy to share.

CWAVE
Newbie

Joined: 15/06/2006
Location: Canada
Posts: 3

Posted: 07:15pm 26 Mar 2007

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In terms of data analysis, I was thinking possibly of charts showing the following things would be of interest:

- Perhaps a line chart showing minutely wind speed averages plotted on weekly accumulated data.
- Then similar hourly over monthly blocks of data
- Then similarly over annual data.
- Perhaps other analysis that tracks highest periods of sustained wind speeds over monthly periods to track windier times of the year.

I've lived at this particular site for 4 years now, and without any imperical data collection, the site seems to be windy enough... but I'd like to collect some data to see if it's true or not.

I'd be interested in knowing what kind of analysis you've done with your wind data.

I'm not looking at trying to get too specific really, but want to determine whether I can consider my site windy enough to put up a wind generator, and if so, what kind of start-up speed would best suit my location (I plan on building my own generator). This kind of data collection I believe would give me a good enough idea over the run of a year or two.

I purchased one of the inspeed anemometers that connect to a PCs serial port and will be using this to collect data for me.

Thanks for your help.

CWAVE

CWAVE
Newbie

Joined: 15/06/2006
Location: Canada
Posts: 3

Posted: 04:17pm 10 Apr 2007

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I guess nobody does this sort of thing eh! Hmmm, ok.

CWAVE

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