On 9/11/25 17:40, dep via tde-users wrote:
said William Morder via tde-users:
| I may try attaching sails to a car.
Would be tough. You could, though, replace the wheels with a rounded
surface, put in a fin keel to keep it stable, add a motor for when there's
no wind, and use streams, lakes, oceans, and rivers instead of roads.
Though, seriously, I know of a couple of things I've actually seen that
people I have done, successgfully, not for transportation but for power.
One is a small paddlewheel-driven generator in a stream at their house.
It's mounted on a float to account for variations in water depth, and is
held in place by long piles, in the fashion of floating docks.
The other, and I think that this is cool, is a vertical windmill: Cut a
50-gallon barrel in half longwise and weld it back together offset, so
that the halves overlap. Mount it on a shaft vertically, and put a plain
old automotive generator at one end of the shaft, then put the whole thing
on the windiest part of the property. The beauty of it is that it collects
wind from every direction. Problem is, it takes a decent breeze to spin it
at all.
In both cases the power was stored in banks of car batteries. Though I
understand that the popular choice nowadays is golf cart batteries,
probably because they're sealed and fairly easilt replaced when one goes
bad. (There are gadgets that detect this, which is better than the usual
way of determining that lithium-ion batteries have gone bad: your house
burns down.)
LA batteries if properly charged, will last for generations. And it does
not matter if its liquid acid or gell cells. Properly treated in terms
of charging, I've had 220AH 12 volt batteries switched to series by the
starter relays but charged by parallel from a 12 volt alternator, and a
battery charger whose limiting resistor put less than 8 milliamps into
them. Original resistor put about 2 amps into them which kept them
gassing steadily. Destroyed those batteries in under a year. I replaced
them but reduced the trickle charge to stop the gassing. 8 years later
when I went down the road for more money, and the first where my office
door had a Chief Engineer placard on it, those batteries were still
turning a 335 cumalong with a 150kw pot on it, wrong side out, first
cylinder to hit tdc fired and 1 second later the lights were on again.
And that transmitter was down to 50% power as it normally used around
250kwh. Klystron powered tx;s are hungry. I used a 6 volt gell cell
that had failed in the burglar alarm, as a standby on an rca 1802
powered computer I built to do commercial prep work for an early station
break sequencer. That only had 4k of static ram but it was enough to
serve as a backup for 17 years. It just floated across the 5 volt line
that fed it. So you could say I know a thing about LA batteries.
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
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