"what product does every one buy for the sole purpose of throwing it away? Need a hint? I only use the ones they give me and I still have to many..."
Hey ya know if you collect the ones with the pretty pics you can sell them on Flea bay sometimes. I saw a couple go fairly high for being free giveaways to begin with.
Personally I get all I can, sometimes 20-50 at a time. Gonna build a giant mirror out of them someday and fry something. I like the ones that come in the neat DVD cases, I make alot of DVDs and that saves me alittle money. About 15-20cents per case.
I like the idea of making heat from wind. If we think about it, we can live without electric if we have too, but many people cannot live without some type of heat in the winter!! As for as the hydrolics, I think that's posibly alot of work and expence for little return though. As mentioned already, pipes, containers, restricters, insultation, ambient temps ect all come into play to make it complecated and expensive.
I do wonder maybe about a Hybrid system. If you could pump hydrolic to build a pressure when winds are too low to produce with a gennie, and also if you could just keep on pumping building pressure when winds are to high for a gennie, then use that hydrolic presure to run a gennie at a constant rate.
I don't know any real numbers so I'll just rattle something off as a example and if anyone knows the numbers please feel free to pop them in!!
Lets say it take 7MPH winds to produce 200watts with your gennie, but most your wind is only 5mph. Durring the 5mph build a pressure pumping into a hydrolic tank like an aircompressor, when you hit 150psi it is released at 20psi over time to run a geninie. The gennie will run till the psi drops below the 20psi then stops. Now if you had 16hrs of 5mph wind you would not have produced anything from the wind gennie, but by pumping into a storage tank and building a presure for latter use you have produced some power.
Now when the winds hit the 7mph mark and the gennie will produce power, kick out the pump and produce directly from the gennie and get all the power you can durring that time, say 2-4 hrs a day.
Now you have high winds also to consider. Say after 30mph you have to use some type of braking system to prevent over speed. Now kick back in the pump for the extra load to slow the mill down. You would be both producing power with the gennie direct and pumping a pressure for later use. If the hydrolic system had it's own gennie both gennies would be running at the same time producing alot of power on high winds.
Most or at least many hydrolic pumps are motors, motors are pumps, just depends how you use them. So another thought could be durring the 5mph winds build a presure up, then send it back to the pump to drive it as a motor. Being the pump is already running in the 5mph wind you only need to bump it up the extra 2mph to get it to produce. Should run longer on the same pressure and volume than running a seperate gennie, when the pressure drops below a certain level then change it back to the pump to build pressure agian and start the cycle over. Course if doing this then using it as part of a braking system would not work too well in constant high winds like a storm.
Don't know if that would work that way or not, but my thoughts and ideas on it. I think it would work well if you could build the pressure in low winds that are needed to run a motor to power a gennie. Even if it had to pump for 1 hour to run the gennie for 10 minutes you would stil have 240 minutes of power during the day you would not have had otherwise, if your using winds to low to run a gennie directly.
That's how I would try hydrolics myself if I was going to. Transfering the electric to anywhere else then is easy and can be changed easily also if need be. Not much worry of leaks all over the yard or house, just near the tower and alot less to leak too.
