I have had an Southeast Windpower (Air Marine) unit for years, started life as an Air 303 but was upgraded several times as blades were broken and the electronics were damaged from nearby lightning strikes. The early units were noisy, I didn't think it was bad but many did, now though the 2006 model is very quite. It makes 400 + watts, has its own very clever regulator that doesn't waste power as it uses its own power to brake the blades in high winds rather than using excess power to heat up resistors or similar methods that make lots of heat and risk runaway like many types of wind gennys do, can be easily stopped with an external switch, and weighs only 11 pounds.
I think very low speed start up is sort of a red herring as very little power is made in low winds, even a quite moderate solar panel will do much better than a wind genny in very light winds, so you do need both. Also I added a very large capacity and fast acting gas tube/zener diode surge suppressor to try to mitigate lightning damage. That cost me thousands of dollars in wind genny damage alone over the last ten years or so, I also have smaller zener type surge protectors on most small loads in the boat which have demonstrably helped in the past. -Ken _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
