Originally Posted by Stoned Engineer  Thanks for the comments Syrus. I'm going to read up on the spectrums these grow lamps put out and the spectrums that marijuana needs to grow properly. As for payout, lets just assume that I smoke it all then, and instead don't have to buy it.
If you can afford and find blueberry or NYC Sour Diesel, what I've got right now, then get some. I ain't selling mine.
Makes sense. You looked into it years ago, right? Just 10 years ago solar cost about double what it does today. Wind has been feasible for about 15 years, cost competitive with coal and natural gas. The problem is that it is less reliable due to shifting weather patterns, requires some maintenance due to rotating parts, and the generators used don't generate reactive power but only real power. However, with current technology, we could be hacing near 20% of our electricity from wind and consumers would save shitloads, but wind energy has less profit margins than sources like coal or natural gas and therefore the utility industry has widely shunned it. Less than 1% of America's electricity is wind today, which is sad.
It's not as expensive as you'd think, at least if you build your own rotor, generator, AC to DC converter, and other components. With a properly sized battery bank, you don't need no charge controller, and the rectifiers in the AC to DC converter are usually good enough to prevent stored energy in the battery bank from causing your homemade generator to act as a motor and waste your energy. I've built a wind machine out of spare car parts and NdFeB magnets and it worked. 500W(at 30 mph with 8 foot diameter blade) peak machine for ~$500, not counting batteries and other ancillary components. $1 per installed peak watt! If I got more data from testing it, I would have been able to properly size a capacitor and place it in series with the armature so that the resonant frequency of the circuit matches that of the cap, causing the machine to track the optimum performance curve for a given wind speed(Asynchronous AC induction generator). This would double the peak power output to over 1 kW at 30 mph. Then there's laminations that could be added to the stator to reduce eddy current losses.
A 22 foot diameter machine could probably be done for about $2-3k. The trick is to build your own. Depending on your electricity demand and grow op size, it would probably provide way more than you could ever use.
In low wind speed conditions, vertical axis wind turbines show their superiority over horizontal axis wind turbines. HAWTs usually stay stalled until the wind reaches > 10 mph or so depending on design, tip speed ratio of the blades, and other factors. VAWTs, while they use rotors such as Darreus or Savonius which are very inefficieint, have an advantage of high starting torque and can thus made usable electricity from very low wind speeds ~2 mph or so.
It's all about plotting the Rayleigh distribution of the wind speeds in your area, crunching a few integrals, and figuring out from there which design is the best for your situation.
I'll look into the feasibility of this a lot more. In the future, if it seems workable, I'll have to make a topic showing you guys how to build your own wind machines from scratch just for the purpose of growing the sacred herb. After all, we wouldn't be here if it weren't for the herbage.
Toke on man! |