Turbine Raising

After months of work, the big day finally arrived to raise the new turbine. It was a perfect day! The turbine had been tested on our test tower and was running perfectly. We had done some of the preparation work the night before, so everything was ready to go bright and early the next day August 6, 2005.

Charge Controller. The charge controller controls the battery voltage. It is hooked up to your battery system and when your batteries are full, the charge controller sends the excess power from your system to a dump load to protect your batteries so they don’t over fill. This is very important, because if your batteries get too full, it can severely damage them and could possibly cause them to explode! Not good!

The charge controller will have different settings on it that you can change depending on what voltage your system is putting out and at what voltage you would like to have the charge controller kick in to send the extra power off to the dump load. Please, if you have never done this before, get some advice from someone who is familiar with the controllers. some of them can be tricky to set and if it’s not right, it can lead to a potentially serious problem!

We also recommend that you have a back-up controller, hooked up in series with the first one, just in case the first one fails!

The charge controller also has other settings on it to float the batteries and to equalize them occasionally. These two functions are important to keep the batteries happy and performing their best and to last as long as possible.

Dump Load. Also known as a diversion load, is a unit that is set up to the charge controller to take the excess power from the system. It is usually some kind of a heating element, either for air or water. Just make sure, again, that whatever you choose, matches your system voltage.