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.) -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/ ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
