I had to fly a few valleys over to get some shots of a wind farm going up, and on the way back poking along down low I mosied into one little valley with an abandoned farm with yet another wind turbine. A "Wincharger" from the '30s, I used to have one that powered my first place, long before solar panels came along! 6 volts, so a little awkward with a 12 volt system but better then nothing. I collect old wind turbine memorbilia and need to see if I could buy this thing, first thing the owner would wonder is how the hell did I know about it as it's real secluded back there and with a locked gate a mile away? My past experience has been that anyone interested in wind turbines is partial to small airplanes for some reason, we'll see.

Landing back at my place my grid tied 2.5 KW wind turbine seemed pretty futuristic, no batteries either!

Used to be a lot of these old wind chargers in this area back before REA. I believe most of these were 38VDC and they used a large bank of batteries to store the energy.
HC

hicountry wrote:Used to be a lot of these old wind chargers in this area back before REA. I believe most of these were 38VDC and they used a large bank of batteries to store the energy.
HC

Close HC, the larger farm units were 32 VDC, and could put out some useful power, the little 6 VDC Winchargers (brand name) were for the poor farmers just getting by, they were good for keeping a radio battery charged or one or two lights used sparingly. Nowadays a single 50 watt solar panel does the same job, simpler and no moving parts. ANYTHING beats NO power at all, and the REA sure helped the rural folks out, though it did put the kabosh on a thriving farm wind turbine industry.

Most of the rural folks couldn't afford 'store bought' wind generators. Some of them did what Americans do-improvised. When my dad was a young teenager (early-mid '30s) he bought a 1926 Dodge starter/generator from a junk yard and carved an ~10 foot propeller for it (he roughed it out on his uncles band saw in Walla Walla). He says it started charging at 100 rpm and just got better from there. This power went to a bank of auto/truck lead acid batteries and worked very well. It powered lights and a radio (radios were 'high tech' at the time). Some of the neighbors followed suite. Dad did this in rural Idaho near Ferdinand (Grangeville area) where wind was plentiful.

Just for interest.......a snapshot of earlier times.
lc

Very cool stuff! I'm a bit of a history buff myself... Funny when you think now people can't survive without their Iphone for 20 minutes.