My bunch of eBay turbines in "realistic" wind. 

The wind here is really great...for wind turbines. Kind of sucks for picnics and keeping dirt out of your house :D

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks!

Have you researched more about this topic. I was wondering about the same thing. Planning on getting a turbine from amazon and was wondering on strategies to extend the radius.

I was running two 1000w grid tie inverters.

Depends on the height and what is surrounding it. If the Wind Turbine was in a field with nothing else around it then it I might get struct by lighting. If you have it near something that is taller than the Turbine you should be fine. Remember lighting is going to go for the tallest object.

At the opening of the video, it looks like they all have 3 blades.

I have not heard of the Pico turbine but I'm reading about them now!

Yeah the batteries are tanked! I have this set up as a total loss system, the inverters are going to draw on the batteries until they simply can't supply the current. If you want to actually be storing power you'll need to have better batteriesand a proper battery management system in place.

@@ToysforWatts Itsabreeze is just a rename on a chinese turbine. This is the one Im running and at 20mph I see over 2000watts. www.aliexpress.com/item/32850156917.html?spm=a2g0o.store_home.productList_235225187.pic_5

@@ToysforWatts supercapacitors?

Correct! I still believe the i1500 is absolutely the BEST bang for the buck on the market. If you live in an area appropriate for wind you cannot go wrong with the i1500.

If you got the wind and need the power there's no reason not to :D

This discusses the pipe towers. I'll be doing an update to this video soon as I expand on teh tripod pipe tower the iSta Breeze is on, as well as the 30ft windmill tower I'm going to be adapting to mount a Heli 2.0.

Whether the noise it makes is bothersome or not is pretty subjective, I think it's pretty quiet. It does make a pretty good bit of noise in very very high wind (50mph+) but at that speed it's hard to hear over the wind noise.

@@ToysforWatts Thanks for the reply. I have one more question. I have a ep500pro generator from bluetti and would like to charge it from both solar & wind turbine at the same time. The problem is it has only 2 input ports. One for mc4 cable and the other for ac wall charging. Would you happen to have any suggestions on any adaptor i could use to get both charging ? im very new to this but excited to learn :)

The easiest and likely the best way to go about charging a battery backup like that is to use your solar and wind to charge an independent battery bank, and run an inverter off that bank which has a suitable output for the wall charging feature on the backup. Considering the load the independent battery bank could be comprised of inexpensive batteries like I use and you likely wouldn't need many of them....possibly just four, just enough to keep the voltage under control so an inexpensive inverter could handle the load. You would have to set up a proper charge controller and brake assembly for the turbine.

@@ToysforWatts Thank you. I really appreciate the help. If happen to have any videos showing how to set it up I would really love to see it

Hi there. Can you please let us know which IstaBreeze model is that? Is it still performing till now? Any problems occurred while you using it? Thanks

Unfortunately it's hard to find that one. Sometimes they pop up on aliexpress, but one of the reasons I do not test generic Chinese turbines anymore is because I cannot get any kind of consistent results. Even if I buy the same turbine model from the same vendor there's not a great chance that it will be the same turbine. It makes all the cheap turbines a bit of a gamble.

iSta Breeze i1500...which is currently the best wattage/dollar ratio you can get in a consumer grade wind turbine.

Looking at the thumbnail for the video, going from left to right, the rubbish one, the iSta Breeze i1500, the eBay 700, and the eBay 400.

I would buy iSta Breeze i1500 or i2000 in a heartbeat. the i2000 has the slightly larger blades and the generator is a little bigger. Three blades is almost always going to be better than five. Five blades will suffer a greater parasitic loss and will perform worse in high winds...the only time more blades is better is when you're dealing with low wind or you're turning a low rpm generator that requires a LOT of torque.

@@ToysforWatts you know your stuff! Thanks for the info... You saved me a fortune!

Hi Marcel! I saw your post, we all learn some lessons the hard way :D. Hopefully it's something you can return. I have played with three different models of Chinese vertical turbines and they have all been complete failures. The only ones I've seen actually work decently were the large Aleko models, but even with them I think you're spending a lot for what you get out of them. Below are links to two my favorite turbines...the 700w model and the iSta Breeze i1500. The i1500 is easily the best value on the market right now for consumer turbines. The 700w turbine offers a little better max watt/$ ratio but on it's best days doesn't produce as much power as the i1500 does on normal duty. If you're on a very limited budget the 700w turbine is a good addition, but if you can the i1500 is considerably a better producer. www.ebay.com/itm/232959000373?ul_noapp=true www.ebay.com/itm/i-1500W-24V-48V-Windgenerator-iSTA-BREEZE/153174401757?hash=item23a9e7e2dd:g:714AAOSwi5Nc64Bz

@@ToysforWatts Thank you for your reply and tips. I was lucky the get a full refund from banggood and bought a 500 W 5 blades and still waiting for the city permit and the bar for monting it on the roof. The link you sent, is out of stock and they don't send to europe. Thanks again.:)

I always recommend the iSta Breeze i1500 and i2000 turbines. They're solid dependable and still about the best watt/dollar ratios you can get on the market.

I'm not charging batteries, per say, so I don't use a charge controller. I have them hooked up to generic grid tie inverters. The batteries that are shown are just there to help keep the voltage under control so that the inverters can track the turbines. Kind of like a buffer or a pseudo voltage regulator. If you're looking for suggestions for charge controllers I HIGHLY recommend the Midnight 150 and a good bridge rectifier.

@@ToysforWatts Ok, thanks

@@ToysforWatts So are you averaging the DC volts by parallelising the bridge rectifiers? Love the setup. Also what brand of inverter are you using? Thanks for the vid, great work. Much app.

It is an excellent choice, I was quite abusive with mine and it always performed well.

@@ToysforWatts thank you for your feedback !

Is your ista breeze 1500 a 24v or 48v, I need it to charge my off grid batteries, I already have solar but want to add this for cloudy days.

Any questions you got you can send them to toysforwatts@gmail.com! I'll be happy to help!

Sorry for the late reply! I don't use an off the shelf charge controller myself. I use programmable voltage switches and solid state relays. www.ebay.com/itm/254790335380 www.ebay.com/itm/391713162983 You just program them to direct voltage toward your batteries when appropriate, and toward your dump load when voltage gets too hot.

Hi sorry for the late reply! That's really a tough question! Assuming you have appropriate wind yes it'll run a 750w heater...but you have to have that wind! If you have it high enough and in enough wind it will probably not be a problem, but if you live somewhere with low or inconsistent winds it's not going to be able to keep up with the heater.

Because I am not nice to my batteries ;)

It really depends a great deal on exactly what you need and where you are. If you can afford a real 10kw turbine and a 120ft tower then pretty much anywhere you can make it work. My area is pretty forgiving so I can see higher peaks at much lower heights. But if you're just powering a small shed or something then you don't need to go to such extremes. I always tell people to first evaluate exactly what you want the turbine to do for you, from there we can determine how feasible it is.

Sure is... you slowly save and buy solar and wind power, storage, etc... then you get to save a bunch later when you get to pull the mains breaker off and never worry about power again.

Putting power OUT helps the big grid operators.... I'm not much for supporting them.

iSta Breeze is manufactured in Turkey. I have since installed a couple of larger iSta Breeze models. I'm pretty pleased by them, I think they're the best bargain out there in terms of consumer grade micro turbines.

@@ToysforWatts Which version do you have, how many blades? And which should I choose, based on average wind speed? Annual average wind speed in my area is reported at 8m/s meaning 18mph. Lot of times faster, often when I need it the most (winter). How high do you have the Ista Breeze?

The black one. There are links in his description to it on eBay. $630 + shipping as of the writing of this comment.

Sorry it's an older video when my followers had literally watched my entire progress to that point and already knew what was what lol. I try not to mention prices much because they change pretty dramatically over time. Looking at the thumbnail of the video from left to right is the eBay 500w turbine (poor), the iSta Breeze i1500 (excellent), the eBay 700w turbine (okay), the eBay 400w turbine (excellent but no longer available). If you look at my playlists you'll find a playlist dedicated to each turbine.

The i1500 is readily available on eBay for about $450 and at that price point I think it is the best you can do for the money with commercially available models right now. It's a real producer and easily doubled my output. The yellow buggy is an ongoing fun little project...what I'm doing with the wind turbines is kind of an extension of that. I like to pick up cheap Chinese go karts and buggies and fix them. That one there started as an 800cc anemic boat. It's now got shocks worth more than the buggy and a CBR954RR engine in the back!

It's not performing because the stator is poorly made and the magnets are weak. To make any reasonable power it would need to run at very high RPM and adding more blades would just make it even slower.

Sorry for taking so long to reply! I've let a lot of my stuff here slip a bit over the summer while trying to address other parts of life and I'm sorry it left such a simple quest unanswered for so long! In the thumbnail going from left to right is the cheap eBay 500w turbine, the iSta Breeze i1500 (high recommended), the eBay 700w turbine (not easy to find these days), and the eBay 400w turbine (great turbine but no longer available).

@@ToysforWatts no worries!! Thanks for replying !!

The iSta Breeze i1500 is EASILY the best bang for the buck you can get for an off the shelf turbine. It's outpaced every other turbine in watts per dollar by a large margin and it's held up really well despite me being very abusive with it. My turbines are toys to test until they break but if I HAD to buy a turbine to rely on it would be an i1500 or i2000.

@@ToysforWatts thanks!

@@ToysforWatts Thanks! BTW you mentioned that you build them, and I was thinking about trying to 3d print one. Do you know where I could get a good motor like the one in the ista breeze model to build my own? If I can 3d print them and get the motor cheap I can make like 5 of these things cheap, that's my goal :)

I've had REALLY good luck with iSta Breeze's larger turbines. The i700 and bigger models. Chinese turbines are a bit hit and miss. The larger one I have mounted by the door of my shop in this video is pretty good, the smaller one on the side of my shop was awesome but hard to come by. Most of the "tail up" smaller turbines you see on eBay and Amazon are rubbish.

For me it doesn't do much. My system is set up to test maximum output over time and it dumps all the power I create through batteries or cheap inefficient grid tie inverters. Most of the time when someone is investing in a turbine they're doing it to run a particular appliance or something and that doesn't always require the turbine to be running at its maximum capacity all the time. With what I have on hand I could potentially power my shop, but that's not my goal.

I'm going to swap the new 400 out for the crummy 500 this week if I can get a calm day to do it.

Hi there, I want your advice, now I'm using my disappointed wind turbine in conjunction with charge controller which came with my turbine. I'm planning to replace it with 3 phase rectifier, but I will add DC booster to maintain the voltage constant, then connect them to solar mppt charge controller. Will this increase the output a little.

From a purely "results" point of view it worked pretty well, but it was VERY hard on my batteries. I now use a voltage switch to turn the inverters on and off to take some of the stress off my batteries, but it can still be pretty hard on them from time to time.

The wind at the time of this video was blowing around 13mph with very brief gusts. That turbine would only make 700-ish watts at just over 25mph. That's one of the catches to a wind turbine...in order for them to hit rated performance they have to be in rated wind.

I have not had any weather related issues with any of my turbines.

@@ToysforWatts good to know

Cuz charge controllers are for suckers! :P Actually, using a proper charge controller with a turbine limits you a little in that you have to have one controller per turbine. In this video I haven't fully updated the system, if you look at my newer videos I am now using a home brew controller for activating my inverters, but it's still a system controller and has very little ability to control the turbines themselves due to their being multiple generators on one circuit.

Get them to send me one and I'd be happy to do it! :D I'd even put a rotor on the thing and toss it up on a pole!

These are the meters I'm using in this video, but I do not use them anymore. They're unreliable and do not record total output...once you hit 1kwh they reset. www.ebay.com/itm/222129924444

@@ToysforWatts Thank you sir. Appreciate your response. I currently am setting up a cheap ebay turbine. After watching some of the videos on here including yours im feeling like i wasted money but ill give it a shot and see what it puts out. Starting to save for my ista now. Thanks again.

Sorry for the late reply! It is an i1500.

So long as the wind's blowing!

@@ToysforWatts baked beans is best for normal wind Lol

The iSta Breeze is an i1500. It has peaked at over 2000 watts but it was in VERY high wind. It's only of the few I've reviewed that actually hits its rating. It actually hits somewhere between 1500 and 1600 watts in a 25mph wind.

@@ToysforWatts Appreciate all the quality information you're giving out on this platform, what would you estimate your Wattage output to be in 15mph winds for the i1500?

@@ToysforWatts An hour?

Waxspunds like old trolley buse starting and stopping

Well "noisy" is a bit relative. It's by far one of the quietest turbines I've played with...if not THE quietest, but you can certainly hear it if you're under it. There's not harsh chop or singing like most of the Chinese turbines I've dealt with. It's not considerably louder than my Chinese 400 turbine, which you can see here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE--PzCqV-SyMk.html It's a bit more difficult to get up to the i1500 for a similar video :D

Toys for Watts. Awesome. Thank you. I want one. I have a 400 watt vawt that peaks out at 1.5 amps in 20 mph winds lol. I want a real one to go with my 700 watts of solar

It depends on where you are, solar is almost always more reliable and formulaic, but turbines will always have a higher power density than a solar panel.

eBay or Amazon if those options are available to you, or directly from their website: www.altinelenerji.net/

@@ToysforWatts please some links Amazon and eBay 48v 500 to 1000w thanks in advance thanks 🙏🙏🙏👍

No one makes an MPPT that actually works with wind turbines.

yeah that turbine was awful lol

A wind turbine is always suitable...if you can get it high enough in the air. I'm limited to 40ft, they still work for me because I DO live in a very windy area. Anywhere you can make a solar panel work you can also make a wind turbine work and wind turbines are always going to be cheaper per watt. The trade off is that you might need a very large turbine very high up in the air, or you might need a huge plot of your land to accommodate a solar array. There's pros and cons to everything...personally, I feel the best option is to have both.