Energy Matters Forums

[davidg]

looks pretty good

[offgridQLD]

This water flowing 24/7 365 days are year is so tempting to use for hydro. The volume is strong all year but the fall is only made up of several short sections of 1m drop over short distance and perhaps 4m drop over a few hundred meters.

Water flow video link 483 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn6_jTxHudc

[australsolarier]

Kurt,
there are other electricity generation system just for you. they are working similarly like when you pull the plug in the bath tub. they are creating a circular flow and just needs like a meter or so. also the fish can swim through it. now i forgot the proper name for it.

[offgridQLD]

That is a consideration as there are lots of rainbow trout and other fish that I see swimming up the stream to waterholes.

[australsolarier]

yes,the fish can just swim through the turbine blades as it is spinning in a relatively slow rpm.

[offgridQLD]

I got the Able Generator this week. It's exceeded my expectations . My old man and I picked it up in his truck as it was little hard to side load my box trailer. Its bigger than I was expecting and 590kg.

When we got it home we where going to unloaded it hide it and use some of the pallet wrap to wrap up my old mans 3kva Yamaha generator and put the little Yamaha on the truck.....Just to see my wife's reaction when see inspected it later that day. To see the tiny genset she got for five grand. Would have been a good laugh but to much work .

We started the generator on the back of the truck parked inside a big shed and even in this location it's very quiet. Overall it's a lot of generator and features for the money. For how many hrs a year it will run its hard to justify a Big brand name unit. Though time will tell.


Will give a better rundown later on.

[Privatteer]

For how many hrs a year it will run its hard to justify a Big brand name unit.

I recently got myself an Outback GenTrax 3.5kW unit with the remote start. Already been used during one longish power outage and ran the house well.
Little bit more noisy compared to a current version brand name but still usable even in town.
Seem to have a reasonable rep, time will tell if it was a good investment.

[34by151]

I have an able as well just a bit bigger, Im also on the Sunny Coast

Decided to get one after we purchased a bunch of 1100 kVA units for a mine site I was working at.
These were synchronous units and combined with battery to deal with some very specific brown out issues.

Re the ratings on the lower end <20Kva, and this may have changed over the past few years.
All the stated ratings were peak ratings
Air Cooled Diesel was 50% continuous were water cooled were 80%, from memory they refereed to this as "Prime Load"

The critical factor that dictated this was the engine oil temp, from memory its mentioned in the booklet
On an air cooled unit I would fit a temp switch on the sump, that's optional on the water cooled units.
If you keep your continuous load down a bit you will never have issues.

Fuel use has been better than quoted but we are not loading by up to the 80%

As for other changes,
Added a switch for the men link so it can be used both as hardwired and portable.
(Sometimes need the big plasma cutter out in the field).

Added a relay to the 12v charge wire (on the 4 pin auto-start plug)
This cuts off the charge wire to the pug when the engine is running.

I have a small float charger connected via the auto-start plug to keep the battery ready

[offgridQLD]

The motor on this one is water cooled. Its engine is a 1350cc 3cyl diesel rated at 37kw max output. Its output at 1500rpm (what it runs at) is 10kw and the continuous rated output of the generator is 8kw prime.

I think its reasonable safe to say it would do that 8kw without issue. That said I will be charging at less than 8kw.

The Autostart controll panel has some good features that monitor oil temp, water temp, oil pressuer, cranking battery voltage and a few other things.

Good advice on the charger for the cranking battery. My last generator J108 kabota had issues with the cranking battery going flat as I didnt need the generator very often. I solved that issue by installing a 40ah calb lithium battery as a cranking battery. No self discharge to worry about. (though I allready had this battery seconhand wouldnt be worth the cost new) I like how they installed a very solid looking battery isolator switch I have it isolated to avoid any phantom loads on the cranking battery in storage.

I did hear of a lot of the Able gensets being sold for remote mining operations. I figered that they would have optioned them out with the much more expensive Perkins or Yanmar engines (as this is a option) worth it if your running them all the time.

[34by151]

It's the controller that draws down the battery (over months)

If you are not using autostart, use the isolator or switch it off the controller
I use the 2 wire autostart, so have a float charger connected

The bigger stuff is Perkins Diesel. Smaller stuff is a mix of Chinese, Kubota & Yammar

I went Kubota but in reality in the long term was a bit of a folly.
As I dont have storage installed yet, it needs to run the place for days at a time, so I went the Kubota motor
If I had storage installed would have saved the money.