On 9/11/25 17:40, dep via tde-users wrote:
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.)
LA batteries if properly charged, will last for generations. And it does not matter if its liquid acid or gell cells. Properly treated in terms of charging, I've had 220AH 12 volt batteries switched to series by the starter relays but charged by parallel from a 12 volt alternator, and a battery charger whose limiting resistor put less than 8 milliamps into them. Original resistor put about 2 amps into them which kept them gassing steadily. Destroyed those batteries in under a year. I replaced them but reduced the trickle charge to stop the gassing. 8 years later when I went down the road for more money, and the first where my office door had a Chief Engineer placard on it, those batteries were still turning a 335 cumalong with a 150kw pot on it, wrong side out, first cylinder to hit tdc fired and 1 second later the lights were on again. And that transmitter was down to 50% power as it normally used around 250kwh. Klystron powered tx;s are hungry. I used a 6 volt gell cell that had failed in the burglar alarm, as a standby on an rca 1802 powered computer I built to do commercial prep work for an early station break sequencer. That only had 4k of static ram but it was enough to serve as a backup for 17 years. It just floated across the 5 volt line that fed it. So you could say I know a thing about LA batteries.
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.