Wind Generator

[Henry J Fate]

I was sent the service manual for the Ampair 100 and the Aquair 100 this morning. There are some variances in the manual because of the early version I have and the product development in its age group which is in the 1985 - 1990 range. I am currently leaning closer to 1985 than 1990 for this generator.

It is a 2 stator rotor with packed bearings front and rear. There are 2 bridge rectifiers one for each stator converting the AC power to DC. The wafer is in fact a varister which was previously mentioned in earlier posts. The Varistor is inserted after rectification at the DC output. There is no spec for the threshold rating and no test procedure for it. There is a test procedure for the bridge rectifiers which is a fairly common procedure.

The Varistor has a voltage rating. At some designed voltage, it begins to decrease in resistance and continues to decrease as the voltage increases providing a certain amount of over voltage protection above the varistor voltage rating. It would be helpful to know what the voltage rating is but so far no information on that. At some point I may change it to an MOV type which is a more durable version and I can use a known voltage rating and be able to have an idea of what it should be doing.

As mentioned above, there was a Hydro adapter kit for this unit. The kit provided a tilting stern mounted bracket that the generator mounted into and a prop tail shaft that connected to the generator shaft. It was basically titled down into the water or tilted out of it. I suspect the idea was that if you were stationary, use it as a wind turbine and if you were moving, drop the prop in the water.

There isn't a whole lot of things that could go wrong beyond bearings, brushes and the rectifier assembly. All of which I think I can purchases from several suppliers and probably not too expensive. The blades are the biggest issue. Still sorting that out.

Henry