Seen a VAWT before?

It's likely you've seen a Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine before. Looks something like the propellers on some aircraft. If you've seen any of the wind farms in the Midwest or West, then you know what I'm talking about. That three blade style of wind generator is the most commonly used style in commercial wind generation in the states. One reason for it's popularity is simply that it's well tested and works. However, it is not the only practical design. Take a look at this clip.

That's a VAWT, a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine. I haven't done any number crunching to see if the numbers really support that these are more efficient than the HAWT designs, but they certainly look neat. I should add that there are two primary styles of VAWTs, ones based on air resistance, and ones based on lift. The lift types (as shown in the top of the last picture) are made of much smaller fins and operate most efficiently at higher wind speeds. The lower VAWT shown in the picture is based on air resistance. Air resistance models operate at both low wind speeds and high wind speeds, but the lift models out preform them in high wind speeds.

This topic only came up because my family and neighbors are discussing putting up a joint wind turbine. A couple models from different companies have been discussed, but no final decisions have been made. What we do agree on is that we want to tie the turbine into the grid to reduce the about of non-renewable energy we use. My neighbor has a propane powered generator that is powerful enough to power both houses in times that that the grid is down. At any rate, the cost and labor for the turbine and generator will be shared, as appropriate.

Back on subject, I've found a couple companies that produce aesthetically pleasing models that would suite our needs. We had been discussing HAWTs in the range of 800 to 1000 watts. It's nice that the VAWTs I found can greatly exceed that without being significantly larger. Ok, here's the link: PacWind. The other one I like appears to be very similar in design and output to some of PacWind's models, though I haven't studied it thoroughly. Take a look for yourself: Windspire.

Lot more research to do, but my goal at the moment is to bring some alternatives to the traditional to the table. I honestly think that some of these would greatly out-preform the HAWTs we've discussed. Cost is one thing I've not seen, partly because they haven't been listed. We've got a long way to go before anything tangible comes out of this, but any way it happens it will be better than nothing.

That's enough for now I think. Next update coming sometime, I think. Haha, have a great time 'till then!

Another Day of Fun

Well, The Youth Sunday video I've been trying to produce has been delayed somewhat by an unfortunate error. Seem that the program believes that one of the scenes is under half a second in duration, which is simply not the case. I don't know what to do now except restart the computer and hope it doesn't continue to give me errors.

On the blog front, I added some adsense links in the footer of an ekana. Positioning them was substantially more difficult than doing the same for this blog, but all was well in the end. Also interesting today, I was trying to figure out some stuff on adsense that I didn't remember, when I noticed all of the image used in my template were not loading. Abandoning adsense for the time being, I proceeded to upload all of the images to picasa, so that I could ensure their accessibility. Picasa did refuse to accept one of the images, it was the widest, so maybe picasa has a size limit. I didn't want to wast time to determine why it wasn't working. I hosted that image on Imageshack, and I'm glad to announce that the template is back to looking like itself. I need to get around to writing stuff for it now... But alas I have videos to burn.

If you're looking for something new on the web, and have windows, check of Google's Lively. It's some kind of interactive chat room thing. Not really sure. My brother is playing around on it, and it does look interesting. I'm on Ubuntu though, so I don't get that privilege.

until whenever,
Dan

New Blog!

I created a new blog today. It's called αν έκανα. Took me a couple days to pick out the name/url, and then a few hours to get the template set up. I still have some minor tweaks to do, but it looks good enough to proceed for the moment.

You might wonder why I made a new blog when I can't write enough to keep this one full. The answer is simply that I had an idea, and I'm going to see how far I can go through with it. I'll let you try to guess what that idea is though. Haha, you probably don't care because you aren't even reading this, but I'll give you bragging rights if you guess correctly! Not enough incentive to try? I'll give you a hint: It involves the creation of yet another blog! Get your head around that one. Two new blogs by an author how hardly updates his 3 year old one.

I suppose only time will tell if this is all worth it, but I'm excited. Hopefully I'll have enough spare time and motivation to do this. It could be so cool!

... Ok that's all for now. I'll let you know when I have more to say.

oh, and if you're bored, you could always try to figure out what αν έκανα means.