Equipment - Power Supplies

Charge controllers can contain many things, including meters, fuses/breakers, and even MPPT devices but their main function is to control the way the turbine charges a battery so as to prevent overcharging it. Solar charge controllers mostly ‘turn off’ or ‘turn down’ the power from the solar PV panels when the battery is full, but most wind turbines (and hydro turbines) need to be kept on load which means the energy needs to be diverted to a heater to prevent noisy over-speeding of the turbine and harmful over-voltage in the wiring. I have published plans for building ‘dump load’ controllers using relays: You can also buy controllers that work using relays from a variety of sources.  The Morningstar ‘Relay Driver‘ is a software driven version with numerous options including both thresholds and delays. This relay-based type of controller has some advantages – you can switch AC heaters on and off at grid voltage (via an inverter) or you can switch the turbine over from the b...