Vertical Wind Generator

[Steve Tobin]

I am new to the site, to this type of communication via 'talk forum' and I am not technical, which so many in the forum seem to be. I blindly followed a good friend into wind power with the purchase of a 5kw VAWT from Techwellpower in China. Other than the permit process in Boulder County , CO., that took 3.5 months to get, the installation went relatively well and both my friend and I have working units. (picture attached, I hope) We purchased the Aurora Inverters from Solacity; Rob, who sponsors this site and has been a great help with everything. We are currently testing wind speed to AC volts produced and trying to figure out what is too much and when to set the electromagnetic brake via a home made resistor box; the Chinese are not much help as they don't deal with the grid etc. My first electric bill was very disappointing and I'm in the process of making adjustments to the Aurora Inverter and hoping we see much better output results and reduction in electric bill.

That's my intro and wondering if there's anyone else out there who have installed VAWT or have used equipment from, or heard of, Techwellpower..?

[Andy Rhody]

I blindly followed a good friend into wind power with the purchase of a 5kw VAWT from Techwellpower in China.

I also blindly purchased a Chinese (HAWT) windturbine but shortly found out that the voltage was designed for battery charging and was too low for grid-tie. The factory representive told me it wouldn't work for grid-tie but the "Rob Guy" modified the MPPT curve, programed my Auroua 3Kw inverter, and made it work.

My first electric bill was very disappointing

My bills are too but the problem isn't that the wind system isn't working well, it's just that we in the West use so much power. Our windmill made 95 KWh in Janurary but we used 800 KW.

anyone else out there who have installed VAWT or have used equipment from, or heard of, Techwellpower..? ]

Being from the "West" is really hard to understand China. My cousin's son went over there as an exchange student and he told me that he was riding a train and it passed through a city of 9 million people. That's almost as big as New York City yet he had never even heard of it before. Here in the United States there are probably less that 10 windmill manufacturing companies, ( and I just heard that Southwest wind power went bankrupt) but in China, there may be 100's and 100's or more.

I bought a Chinese 2000 watt windmill from ebay. In the auction it stated that this windmill was used by the Chinese Military so that made me think that it might be a good one. I paid 910 dollars USD. In some ways it's kind of crude but it seems to be built really solid like a tank. I'm real impressed with it so I went on the web page and would ask questions and I would always get an answere from a female (Linda Peng) and she wouldn't always directly answere my questions. She might say something like, " We have improved windmill now. Please see our new windmill), so I would click on the photos and it wouldn't look like the same windmill design. Then after maybe 8 months, when I'd "click" on the same site, I'd get all these pictures of American wemen wearing wigs.

I think that the manufacturing company was under a holding company that switched from windmills to wigs but if that was the case, it's really sad because my windmill is a Chinese windmill that really seems to work well but after a year and a half, I still can't figure who made it.

So anyway, your VAWT looks really cool and hopefully we'll all be able to learn something about techwell power.

Nice post.