I have a used computer fan that I’m using as my base generator. It’s got minimal output potential – 12v and about 0.12A, or about 1.5 watts. It’s a good test bed though as it doesn’t take a whole lot to turn it, so I can focus a little more on design first rather than just coming up with something that will actually turn the motor. It may seem a little backwards, admittedly, but in my attempts in the past I was unable to successfully build an efficent VAWT that would turn itself very well, let alone a motor at the speed needed.

I initially created a VAWT using a tp roll, but it was way too small. I then turned to an empty oatmeal container. This is showing to have a lot more promise due to sheer size, but it is way bigger than the motor so it’s not as efficient as I would hope. Below is a picture. I put it all together using paperclips, an old cd, cardboard under th
e cd to raise it up a bit, and double sided tape to secure the base to the motor. I’m still going to do more experiments with it and try some other configurations, but for
now this is where I’m at.

• Tank 1 = 45.6 mpg
• Tank 2 = 45.3 mpg
• Tank 3 = 43.2 mpg

On tank #3 there were two factors that worked against me. One was that I didn’t keep as well to the speed rule as I was supposed to, and the second is that about 40 miles were with my wife on the back.

Now for the next three tanks of gas I’m going to add hypermiling to the test and see what happens. My initial hypermiling tests showed I got about 46 mpg, but I don’t think I had integrated the shifting part yet. We’ll see what happens.

On a side note, I’m looking into two new projects (but don’t tell my wife ):

• One is to try to fix a heat issue. Our garage easily gets to 90 degrees now that we’re in the midst of summer in the San Fernando Valley. Unfortunately that’s where the treadmill is so it’s really been preventing me from using it. I’ve been looking at a lot of personal cooling device ideas – most of which consists of a fan attached to a cooler filled with ice and water that gets pumped through copper tubing attached to the fan. I have some ideas on that design.
• The second is designing a 50w micro-vawt. It’s small enough to be portable, cheap enough to have several of them spread around, and not some big monolithic eyesore. Well, at least some people might think a big vawt is an eyesore The one concern I have about this project is my previous attempt and failure. I’m going to do some better testing before I start building this time though.

The problem with what I’ve been doing is that I’m not certain which one has added the most benefit. I’ve attempted hypermiling before but haven’t had much success on the Harley, so I suspect the added 6mpg has been due to the speed limiting primarily. To gather more useful data, I’m going to forgo the hypermiling on the next few tanks of gas and see what the results are. Any deviation from my current improved mpg will at least indicate that hypermiling does have some benefit.

Two side notes that I feel need to be added to this post. First – I am far from impressed with the coasting abilities of the bike. On the freeway when I take my exit to go home, going downhill, I go from 60mph to 45mph in about 300 feet. This may be improved by putting the transmission into neutral in addition to pulling in the clutch, but I shouldn’t have to do that.

Second – dropping my speed down 10 miles an hour (going from 80 down to 70) has done two things. 1) has afforded me a MUCH more relaxing ride – I really appreciate the time I spend on the bike now instead of focusing on just getting where I’m going as fast as possible. And 2) has shown me just how f**king crazy the drivers are on the road in L.A.. For some reason, when I was going 80 then most of the other drivers seemed somewhat sane. Now they all seem to ride each others asses, drive like they are vying for pole position at Indy, or are just plain rude.

Be back to report in a couple more weeks on this topic.

It’s been a little over a year and a half now that I’ve been riding a motorcycle as my daily commuter. My commute is just under 45 miles round trip in mostly heavy traffic, so it makes sense to “ride” rather than “drive” for me. Not only is it better in the fuel economy department but it’s also great for cutting down my time in transit (in California it’s ok to “cut lanes”).

The first bike I ever bought was a 2008 Harley Dyna Super Glide. I had never in my life driven a motorcycle when I bought it – I didn’t even have an endorsement. I know, crazy – but that’s how I roll sometimes. There is more to the story, but it doesn’t need to be told here. After finally learning how to ride it, and having taken the certification class, I had my endorsement and could hit the highway. Unfortunately about eight months later I got in an accident and totaled the bike. I then replaced it with a 2009 Dyna Street Bob (I *love* this bike!). Both bikes are rated for about 48mpg on the highway – we’ll get to my reality on that later.

I started out doing a little hypermiling but never really was consistent with it. I was always doing freeway driving and was also more focused on not turning my face into road pizza to be concerned with hypermiling. I’ve since become a much more confident rider and I’m now at a point where I’m going to try to improve my average mpg. It’s not that I’m getting bad gas mileage – I’m averaging about 40mpg now – but I know I can do a lot better. The reason I know this is because of one thing: when I first started riding on the freeway consistently I was getting 46-48mpg. Now I’m getting consistently 40mpg. The reason for this is because of my driving style – since I’m a lot more confident I’m driving much faster which is decreasing my efficiency.

I’m now at a point where I’m ready to slow down and “cruise” more. This alone will help my overall economy, but to further enhance it I’m going to start re-implementing my hypermiling experimentation. The little testing I’ve done so far hasn’t shown any change at all, but I haven’t given it a fully concerted effort to make an educated evaluation. I’m going to truly focus more on seeing what I can do with this and if it can ultimately add any overall improvements in efficiency.

I have had a lot of success in my (former) Dodge Charger. If you’d like to read up on my findings and tactics in the four wheeled arena then please check my other posts on the subject.

The one thing I was surprised about though, is that we left with a bunch of pamphlets, stickers, and general paper stuff. Makes me wonder if there’s a better way to give out take-home information. One place I ate at – A Taste Of Life – had coupons available but they made them about twice the size of a fortune cookie fortune. At least they were trying to be conscious of waste.

I wish there was a Worldfest every weekend – I’d love to go more often. It was a lot of fun and pretty educational.

Admittedly it does work better, although not by much. it seems I’m running into a common problem with the design, going by other tutorial sites I’ve read through. I’m going to continue working on it though and hopefully I will have an easy solution. I’m trying to make it as easy to assemble as possible.

I had mentioned before that I was working with pvc tubing and 5 gallon bucket lids as the materials of choice for my contraption – well forget all of that. It wasn’t turning out to be as practical as I had hoped. I was trying to use easy to find and cheap materials for the project but I just couldn’t seem to find a good solution for attaching the blades to the lids. I ended up going to my local electronics junkyard (Apex Electronics – amazing place) where I found literally hundreds of wheels from electric scooters that would be perfect for the blade mounts. Unfortunately the wheels are only about 9″ in diameter, but they are good enough to use for my prototype VAWT. I bought four of them at $5 each, which was a little more than I wanted to pay but still within budget and they would end up making the assembly process much easier (even more than I had imagined – as you will see later). I only needed two, but as they say in the movie Contact – why build one when you can build two for twice the price.

Today I started the assembly process. A month or two back I bought 2 – 10 foot long 2 inch diameter pvc tubing. I cut the pvc tubes into thirds (i.e. 3 feet 4 inch long each) and then cut them in half, which left me with 12 – 3 foot 4 inch long “blades”. As luck would have it, the blades fit very snugly between the spokes of the wheels, which meant that I didn’t have to use any fasteners at all. Here’s a grainy phone picture of the blades set in the spokes:

VAWT blades wedged snugly in the wheel spokes. Click image for a larger view

The hardest part to this whole process was attaching the blades to the second wheel. Once I got that accomplished though then all I needed to do was build a quick frame to mount it in, which was made from scrap wood I had laying around:

Completed prototype, with my dog Loki running by trying to generate a breeze to start it moving.

So it’s completed and ready to go… but there’s no wind. There’s a storm heading in to SoCal tomorrow that’s supposed to bring lots of wind with it so hopefully I’ll get some decent feedback on its performance. I already have some doubts about how efficient it currently is, but I also have some improvements I’m thinking about as well. No matter how good or poor it performs, I’ve only used about $15 in parts on the project so far – 2 x wheels @ $5 each and 1 x 10′ @ 2″ diameter pvc at about $3.50 each. I’m going to use the rest of the parts for a second VAWT eventually.

UPDATE: I cleaned up my math a little – I was a bit off on the tube sizing and the amounts.

While researching different plans for building an oven I came across this site. My favorites are the tire cooker and the Fresnel parabolic cooker. Seems that a lot of the plans on the first page are of an open air funnel design using things like a reflective car windshield shade. I’m not sure how well that might work….

I’m going to find one that I think is practical, easy to make, and has the potential of baking something and start working on it this weekend. I’m expecting to be able to cook at least part of a meal by Sunday afternoon.