HyMini Wind Turbine (Portable Charger)

[Human]

I'm not planning to build a wind turbine, but after a lot of thought and looking on the Internet, I have nearly decided to buy a HyMini wind turbine. It is a hand-held device that can charge its own inbuilt battery with a breeze of wind. It is also possibly to connect an included solar panel to it, but I only want to order the HyMini itself (and only go for the wind.)

It can recharge cell phones and I-pods (if it has generated enough energy) but after looking in to actual experiments with these HyMini products (and not only the advertising descriptions), it may be a little too much to expect your cell phone to be charged by the HyMini alone... But I have something else I can power it with, and it needs much, much less energy. These are LED lights to light up either laptops or netbooks (I have 2 different types of those lights), and it usually gets energy from any USB on laptop or netbook. But the HyMini comes with a USB device, so I can probably just connect it to the HyMini to get light from it (hopefully after just a slightly breeze out in the wind.)

These LED lights don't consume much energy themselves, but there are 2 major points why it still can save me some energy:
1. I don't need to have either laptop or netbook on to get light from it. (Obviously, there is no energy going out from the USB ports when the computers are turned off.)

2. Having a device or cable plugged in on any USB very near the air ventilation opening may block some ventilation and make it more difficult for the laptop to transport out the heat, and thus the fans inside the laptop will use more energy to keep it cool.

Those LED's are originally designed to light up laptop or netbook, but I can use the lights for other purposes too.

So I'm now looking for the best prices on a HyMini hand-held wind turbine. (It is much cheaper without the solar panel.) All the research I have done on the HyMini has been online, and I don't expect to generate a lot of energy with it, but it would be a practical gem gadget to have.

We haven't had many sunny days yet this summer, but the breeze of the wind is going strong, and there isn't any signs of the wind suddenly stopping up. This will be a very interesting experiment for me this summer. I think I will give it a try.

[Human]

There, I ordered 1 HyMini from EcoHamster for £11.50, which is a cheap price for this product. (I have compared prices.)
Unfortunately, since I live outside the UK, I don't have free shipping, so the shipping was on £6.99.

Besides the shipping, this was a pretty cheap price, since it was on sale. So now I'm waiting for the package, and the fun will begin...

[Human]

Saturday, I received my HyMini wind turbine. This is how it looks like:



I have tested it every day since I received it in the mail, including saturday and today. I have been blessed with wind all these days, and have generated some electricity with it, every day. It is not very much electricity, but I have managed to charge my cell phone with it. That said, my cell phone's battery was not empty in the first place (it was about half-full), and with the help of my HyMini, I got a full battery!

I have also tested its LED lightning. (If you look closely on the picture, you can see 2 LED's on the right.) I also tested my 2 different Notebook LED Lights that I was talking about earlier. To do this, I simply inserted them (one at a time) into the HyMini's USB port and switched it on charging mode, and as I expected, the lights went on.

I adjusted the HyMini, usually while taking small walks, and directed it in the directions I saw the small turbine running. It runs either clock-wise or counter-clockwise, and I basically just let it go with the flow in either direction. (If I saw it go clock-wise, I would try to ultimate its speed in that direction, and if I saw it go counter-clockwise, I would just let the wind drive it in that direction.)
There is a green light inside the turbine that turns itself on, to demonstrate that the HyMini's built-in battery is charged by the wind. However, it takes some speed for the green light to turn on, indicating that it is charging fast. (It doesn't have to turn green in order to charge, but without the green light, it generates much less energy)... So every time the fan goes fast enough to light green, I know that the HyMini is doing exactly what it is designed to do... I was quite impressed by the fan, a very light-weighing plastic turbine, built to rotate even by a very slight breeze of wind. Of all the things with the HyMini, it was its compact plastic turbine that amazed me the most.

Edited to add: Iacchus, would you consider to split this thread? I think perhaps my posts #8,#9 and #10 should be split into a new thread. And I want the thread to have the same title as this post (HyMini Wind Turbine (Portable Charger).
I will probably write a lot more later, when I have more experiences with the HyMini.

[Iacchus32]

Hey, it looks like a bed pan!

Actually it looks pretty neat. How many watts does it generate?

[Human]

Originally Posted by Iacchus32

How many watts does it generate?

I haven't been able to measure exactly how many watts I have successfully generated myself. My guess would be that I generate about 0,3 watts per hour, so it's not that much.
However, if the wind speed is 40 mph, the turbine will reach its maximum where it can no longer produce any more energy. It basically charges every rechargeable 5 volts gadget, either with USB or mini-USB. If I'm not mistaken, I guess that would be 5 watts per hour (as long as the wind speed is 40 mph, and not any less than that). Its output unit is 5 volts, as you may have guessed...

The user manual says it needs 15 mph or more to run. These figures are perhaps a little vague for me though, since I'm using the metric system, and all the weather predictions I use are also based on it. Today, for instance, the wind speed was predicted to be 11 km/h which is only half the wind speed I have had other days. Today, I had a longer walk, and the turbine was standing still a lot of the time. Unfortunately, the turbine tends to stand still at least half the time, whereas when it runs it doesn't reach its green light very often. It has been running its green light for a total amount of seconds today, so I have seen better windy days...

It was actually predicted a wind speed of 30 km/h one day this week, but it changed. But at least, it's rather unusual that we have days here with no predicted wind speed at all... So I will do the most out of the wind I have.

By the way, this picture clearly demonstrates how small it really is:



It fits very well in the hand, and the weight is almost zero... I guess most of it is plastic.

[Human]

I did an experiment to find out how much energy the HyMini's battery has when it's fully charged. It is possible to charge it with via the socket plug like people usually charges their cell phone, and that way I could make use of my power-meter and run an experiment:

1. I made sure that the HyMini battery was completely empty. It was not able to make a red charging light anymore on charging mode, nor was it able to light its 2 LED bulbs on flashlight mode.

2. I inserted a universal cell-phone charger in my HyMini. (This time, it was to charge the HyMini itself, taking energy into it instead of taking energy out of it.) I inserted my power-meter in a socket plug, and placed the universal cell-phone charger in my power-meter. This way, the power-meter would measure the energy going through it.

3. When I noticed that the charging light had gone from red to green, my timer on my power-meter had stopped at 3 hours, 34 minutes and 30 seconds. This means that a flow of energy has gone via my power-meter for that amount of time, and that this is how long it took to charge the HyMini battery from empty to full.

Conclusion: So how much energy was it possible to store inside the HyMini? My power-meter measured that an amount of 0,01 KWh had been used to fully charge the HyMini's battery. This is the lowest measurement on my power-meter (its digits goes from 0,00 KWh and up and doesn't measure lower units of energy consumed).

So with a measurement of 0,01 KWh, it seems pretty low, but is it? The important thing to know, is that more than 0,01 KWh where stored in my HyMini. I first noticed that it had bounced up to 0,01 KWh when the timer was on 2 hours and 45 minutes. But I didn't see when it bounced up, and it could have been when the timer was on 2 hours and 20 minutes when I last checked before the bounce. So it took anywhere from 2 hours and 20 min and 2 hours and 45 min to use charge 0,01 KWh into the HyMini. And with the end result of the timer being 3 hours and 34 minutes, it took totally 214 minutes to charge it. The bounce must have happened anywhere from 140 minutes to 165 minutes. With a falsity-margin on 25 minutes, let's just assume it took as much as 165 minutes to charge 0,01 KWh. That means it charged the HyMini for at least 74 more minutes after the bounce... Considered I just assumed it took 165 minutes to charge it to 0,01 KWh (which is likely a little longer than it took with a falsity-margin on 25 minutes.) I would estimate that the amount of energy charged was actually as much as 0,015 KWh. So, I have estimated that my HyMini could store an amount of 0,015 KWh.
This means, that if I can manage to charge the HyMmini from a completely empty battery outside in the wind, I have generated a staggering amount of 0,015 KWh! So theoretically, it looks good for the HyMini, considering that it is a decent power bank. I have not yet been testing it in wind this powerful yet, but I know it's at least possible. I can do a lot more experiments later, I think this is just the beginning... Hope my maths was not too bad.

[Human]

As a comparison, I charged the battery for my portable DVD player from empty to full, and measured an energy consumption of 0,02 KWh during a charge that took 2 hours and 27 minutes.
My portable DVD player uses 10 watts per hour on average.

Both the HyMini and the battery belonging to my portable DVD player where charged with a 9V device. The DVD player's battery where charged with its original equipment, however, I couldn't use the original socket plug belonging to the HyMini, as it was for English wall sockets. So instead of the original 5V charger, I where able to charge it with my universal phone charger with 9V.
That also explains why it took less than 4 hours to charge it (as the user manual said.)