wind <span class="highlight">generator</span> <span class="highlight">vs</span> <span class="highlight">solar</span> panels

Another few knots of wind and you can hoist the sail and save on fuel ha ha.

I think the idea is good but would be a pain in the but to pack up when you wanted to move on.

Oatleys electronics have some cheap kits.

I do most of my camping on the beach, howling winds are common. I'm thinking they're getting to a reasonable price.

Will be looking at them again soon. You'd need a serious regulator though, but i think setting up and taking down might not anymore troublesome than constantly re-directing my solar panels or putting up with the noise and petrol refueling requirements of my petrol charger.

Shaggy mounting them mobile is a major problem. Stopping people walking into the wind generators and cable supports etc; and putting them up and taking them down. With the price of small wind generators of the 2 amp type being over $AU1,000.00 does not make them attractive.
This is the Aerogen website in the UK
This is a conversion table for wind speed
This is a price-list for wind generators in Australia.
I think that will change your mind. The price of wind generators has always kept me away from them, and also not knowing where the wind is. Pity we do not manufacture small wind generators in Australia as they could be substantially cheaper and consequently used more. Presently it is much cheaper to put up solar panels for small installations and a better known and more reliable quantity.
Another issue is getting the data for wind as the Bureau of Meteorology want to charge a you big heaps of cash for the information.

For a 400w wind generator it would cost well over $4,000.00 with mounting equipment

I saw a smallish set up on Fraser in August that a camper had set up looked to be about 1 metre dia with the propellor caged like a fan. Was sitting on a tripod type base about 1.8 metres of the ground... i thought it may have been off a yacht....

Hi Shaggy,
the other disadvantage of wind over solar and their noisier cousin the generator, is regulating the output.

When you are charging batteries for example, the operation of standard regulators is to disconnect the supply once the required charge in the batteries is reached. This is fine for solar because they can go open circuit and then back on line with no detrimental affect.

However, consider a wind generator spinning at say 300 rpm. It will be outputting a nominal 14.2 volts at lets say 20 amps (a 300 Watt generator). If the batteries are fully charged, the regulator disconnects the supply. Now because there is no load on the generator, the blades will gain speed because there is no resistance. The affect of this then is that now the output from the generator is a much higher voltage and quite potentially a higher output current.

This in itself is not a problem either, that is until the battery voltage drops and the regulator switches back in. Now you have a higher voltage, high current output being fed into the batteries. In addition, the blades will act like a flywheel and will take a little while to come back down in speed.

So the offshoot of it all is that unless you have a sophisticated regulator which can maintain a load on the generator, you would very quickly cook your batteries or damage any sensitive equipment you might have hanging off them.

I have considered one myself but unless I actually get stuck in a situation where my solar setup lets me down, I think it is an idea that will just be in conceptual mode.

Cheers