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How to build a hybrid solar/wind energy harvester?

Green4 charge controller: wiring diagrams part 2

Wiring diagram: wind turbine to dump load In contrast to solar panels, a wind turbine can’t be disconnected in case it generates too much power. We need to brake it by attaching a load to it. However, wind power can’t always flow through the charge controller: high volts and/or amps might damage the internal circuitry […]

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Green4 charge controller: wiring diagrams part 1

Introduction Instead of endlessly listing requirements and specifications, we prefer to demonstrate the architecture of our Green4 charge controller by means of wiring diagrams and other illustrations. The Green4 is designed to be a versatile device that enables you to evaluate different charge controller architectures. Call it a charge controller emulator. There are several reasons […]

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To smarter battery charging

Each battery(bank) has properties such as voltage and maximum load amperage and It also behaves differently (in our context of energy harvesting) depending on its state of charge (empty, half, full). To charge a battery efficiently and safely the (average) voltage and (average) load current must be measured, filtered and checked continuously. First thing a […]

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Recycling a VAWT as a HAWT

A few years ago, I bought a Chinese manufactured Vertical Axis Wind Turbine from a vendor in Canada. After it travelled the world, and was delivered at my doorstep, it seemed it had fallen down or been thrown about a couple of times. Anyway, a bit naive, I then thought it would still work well […]

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Investigating the Wind-turbine to dump load switching – part 3, other alternatives

An alternative relay we have not looked at, until now, is the latching or bistable relay. This kind of relay will only use power when changing state from open to close or from close to open. Also, it keeps its last state. Those properties could be interesting, because one of the problems we face in […]

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Some basic hands-on experience with a dump load

Introduction The dump load (already introduced here) is used to burn the excess energy of our battery charger. The excess is typically generated by the wind turbine in windy conditions. In contrast with solar energy, the battery charger must accept wind energy in order to protect the wind turbine. For that reason the dump load […]

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Domain knowledge and application information

Introduction Building the right product requires customer input and domain knowledge. Building the product right requires a technical expertise and (possibly) a development process. In this post we focus on improving our domain knowledge. As mentioned in one of our previous blog articles, the more domain knowledge we acquire, the better we can define the […]

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