"pipedown" wrote in message
t...
Its a bit more complicated than just hooking a generator up to a lamp and
waiting for wind. Uunless you want unreliable variable brightness
whenever mother nature feels like giving it to you.

Think of it this way. You want to operate a 6000W load for say 8 hours,
thats 48kWh of energy you need to store and deliver on demand. So now you
need a battery pack that can hold that much energy and a power converter
to charge it and convert it back to whatever your lamps need (wise to use
12VDC lamps and avoid an inverter alltogether). If all you wanted was one
hour of 12V lighting then that 6000W will need a 500Ah battery and for 8
hours you need 2000Ah of battery capacity. Thats probably what 2-4 car
batteries to be safe (my guess).



It's a lot more than that. A typical deep cycle marine/RV battery is about
80Ah. Fortunately the battery only needs to have enough capacity to carry
over during times when there isn't adequate wind.



500W of incandescent or halogen lighting is inefficient, ballasted halide
or fluorescent lighting (anything called high efficiency or HE) will put
out as many lumens for less watts. When evaluating the best type of lamp
consider the lumens par watt, bulb lifetime and compatibility of the bulb
voltage with your system voltage. Some lighting has a turn on surge
current rating you need to account for at some level of the design




Usage pattern also needs to be taken into consideration. HID lamps (of which
metal halide is one) don't like to be power cycled. They take several
minutes to warm up, and if shut off, need several minutes to cool down
before they will restart.