Solar & wind powered crunchers?

[Assimilator1]

I've often wondered whether it would be feasible & worthwhile to run a PC using micro-generation (your own wind turbine & solar panels etc).

Well I stumbled across this article trying just that at the website of one of my favourite mags .
The cost returns is marginally & it's expensive but it is do-able.
I'll comment more tomorrow when I have more time ,btw don't ask me what his thing is about a pre-historic mac laptop! lol.

Hope you find it interesting.

[edit]
Annoyingly the author doesn't report whether it generated power consistently enough to keep the setup going indefinitley, which surely is a large point of the exercise!:roll:
I'm going to see if I can contact him in their forums.

 

[sduguid]

Though I've never used Wind or Solar, I do have a cruncher running from AC power generated by a Micro-Hydro setup.

My cousin owns a farm at the base of a mountain - he has a 6 inch pipe running down the mountain and a small turbine hooked up to a somewhat specialized Ford alternator.

It then goes to an inverter which supplies AC power. It's not a great amount of power but is enough to run a fridge, a couple of deep-freezes, various other small appliances, a desktop system, and a laptop.

There were obviously costs to set it up but it has long since paid for itself.

So, in a way, it is free crunching! (Except for the horribly expensive Satellite Internet connection :shocked: )

 

[Assimilator1]

Now that's cool!, I'd just love to have a setup like that .
How much power does it generate?

 

[RaySun2Be]

 

[sduguid]

It varies depending on a number of factors....it seems to be able to handle 5 amps on its own and we also have a battery bank hooked up to it so it can usually put out about 18 amps on a consistent basis before the batteries start to drain too much. Anything more and the system eventually shuts down.

So, one has to be careful to make sure things don't run all at once but it does do its job fairly well.

Of course, I can hear the bearings going on the alternator so I hope for a bit better once that's taken care of...

 

[sduguid]

and it is not well set up - I'm sure if it was started from scratch and had decent parts it could produce double, with the amount of head and pressure in that location.

 

[Assimilator1]