Spark Chasing and Angry Pixies, Frustrations With Electricity

I don’t know if it has a data plate, all I saw was the sticker on the side.

This might help.
Typical wiring is number 1 and 4 for the main winding, 2 and 5 for the AUX winding.
Colours are up to the manufacture if they did not choose numbers.
A 120 240 volt motor will have a 3 and 4 and two extra wires for 240 volt.
If that is the case the low voltage connection will be 1 and 3 together 2 and 4 together and 5and 8 ( connected 1 3 5 together connected to Hot and 2 4 8 together with Neutral… Change rotation by switching 5 and 8 ).

For 240 volt L1 and 1 are connected to one leg and L2 is connected to 4 and 8.
Lines 2 3 and 5 are connected together.

Like I said this get weird and complicated if you let it…
There are even some motors with 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 wires.
You need a lot of Marrets to wire them up HA HA…

image

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The motor only has 4 wires, it doesn’t look anything like other induction motors that I’ve seen as far as wiring.

Not a problem I can walk you through it.
Before I was an electrician I used to be the guy that rewound the motors.
I was also the guy that painted the dots on the dice, stitched up the baseballs and cut the slots on the end of the screws.

For a brief period of time I was the guy that mixed the different colour of fruit loops together before they went in a box…
Ya that was bad job…
I started to see little round coloured hoops when I closed my eyes at night.
I took it as a sign to get a better job.

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Here’s the wiring harness for the washer. The wires going into the motor, and notice it doesn’t immediately branch to the capacitor. Also a little synchronous motor.




I didn’t really look at this but I believe this is the wiring diagram for that motor in the washer. I have to get my computer working right again.
582ccafa2ea6493f929bf426a53a73cefab0c7984582533b2cb2d3e3d16d4431.pdf (313.1 KB)

At first glance I just assumed it was a normal split phase.
I should have looked a little closer.
Whirlpool uses some small drives on modern washing machines and that might be a polyphase motor of some kind.
I had one out of my wife’s old front loader and I kept the drive too thinking it might be of use later ( it never was )

For some reason I thought I read presure washer motor…

If there is one thing about farms I notice its most farmers keep everything because they have space and might "need it again someday ".
If you are living in a rural area and there are some farmers around ask if they have any large single phase motors they are willing to part with.
I have seen some as big 10 HP used on farms because most guys don;t have three phase power.
These big motors are generally still good long after what they were used to drive has been worn out so it might be worth looking at that.
If you find motor you want it to be about 1/3 the size of the engine you intend to power it with ( as a Generator ).
This will leave you lots of wiggle room.
You might even be better off at 1/4 the shaft power if its a wood gas driven engine.

Looking real hard at that winding it looks like a single phase motor at first glance.
But that winding could be a 3 phase.
There’s a short cut some manufactures make called a consequent pole motor.
When done right they can make a motor with 4 poles but use only two sets of 3 coils that buck each other…
That winding type might be what you have rather than a normally four pole 2 coil set winding.

It isn’t those have like 6-8 wires and are common on multispeed washers. It looks like from the wiring diagram, there is one wire for CW (clockwise?), CCW(counterclockwise?), neutral, ground.

From the connector picture, I assume that is red for CW, yellow for CCW, black/white for neutral, and green/yellow for ground.

If you want to be ‘careful’, put a multimeter between the terminals and measure the resistance of the coils. You will probably get small 2? ohm resistance between black and red, and yellow and black, and a higher one (probably the first two added together) between yellow and red. I don’t think ground should show anything because that is really there to keep you from getting poked from a short or a floating ground, which does happen.

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We’re guessing.
The cap would seem to indicate its single phase.

My Wife’s GE washer from not so many years ago was three phase.

And this?
I don’t know…
Could be a consequent pole motor in single phase with two speeds only.
Could be as that print suggests a poly phase…

One thing I can be sure of its not suitable for any use other than a wash machine at this point.
There might be a useful water pump for something there…

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So it’s a use as designed sort of motor, not spin to make lights run sort of motor.

Good to know.

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No. I bet it is a capacitor start ac induction motor, there MAY be one more capacitor somewhere, which would make it a start and run capacitor motor. If you switch the direction the current flows, then it reverses for the agitation cycle, which removes the need for a transmission (which are both expensive and have issues) The motors Wallace is talking about have up to like 9 wires going to them, one for each set of coils*. you only have 4, and the diagram clearly shows CW and CCW.

This is a pretty easy to read explanation.

*they are typically pancake motors with several like 12 or 24 coils, they were originally made by a company in Australia, they are used almost exclusively in front loading washing machines. They basically shift the phase angle like a start/run capacitor motor, for 3 or 6 phases so like 4 or 8 coils are energized at the same time. kind of like an airplane radial engine. I think the newer ones use a pulsed dc or pwm controller for each phase that mimics AC, that gets rid of all the caps and you can get better speed control.

Its also only a 3 amp motor at best you get 500 watts out of it

This guy shows a couple of pitfalls for induction generation.
As load increases you want to figure out how to compound the governor and increase engine speed if you can.
The drill is Highly INDUCTIVE at start.
You want to add capacitors to compensate all your loads.

Once you get all your ducks lined up this is still a very simple and reasonable way to generate power.

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It also makes sense to convert it to dc with a rectifier and a (big?) cap, then use an inverter to stabilize the frequency if you are going to use it more generically, some equipment is more tolerant with out of spec voltages then other equipment which is why the hairdrier was fried in the video. :stuck_out_tongue:

If your goal is to generate electric, poke around for a 240v or a small 3phase motor. 3-phase is the best because it has constant output, but 240 has smaller gaps in the output.
Here is a graph that shows what I am poorly trying to say:
120 is one of the lines say the black above 0 in the bottom graph, 240v would be either of the lines above 0 and 3 phase is the upper graph and anything above zero.

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I found this looking for the phase graph and forgot to attach it to the last post, which is basic ac electric generators.
AC_Electrical_Generators_ASOPE.pdf (1.6 MB)

As your load increases you must apply more torque to the generator and this causes the engine RPM to increase.
This is the only kind of generator where you need to increase speed with load.

Next you need to use caps to power factor correct all your loads.
You have to be the VAR nazi here and make sure everything is corrected and accounted for.

You can charge batteries with it.
I never gave that much thought but as long as your PF is correct and you watch how much your charging batteries this seems reasonable.
Now you have to watch that torque, PF and RPM close too because you can over charge a battery as easily as fry a hair drier…

This is a systems best used to add power to a weaker system.
You can add 50% more power to a generator by adding a parallel Induction generator.
Start it up, shut it down as needed more easily than run it alone.
You can grid tie this without any worries because it can never fall out of sinc .

There is a lot more to this stuff.
No magic bullets.

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Well, if someone had a smaller one they could rectify and run through a PWM charge controller, depending on the amperage. The PWM would be the smarty-pants. Or use a purpose built 115/240v battery inverter charger that shuts off supply when the battery is full.

I’m guessing a pwm charge controller actually has a rectifier built in. i was just more thinking about over current frying it, but it might not be the case.

Utilities don’t like you it when you do it. :stuck_out_tongue: It supposedly can add noise or harmonics to their system. But if the grid goes down, then you end up islanding and adding power to the lines when people are trying to fix them. IF you rectify it to DC and feed it through solar inverter that prevents backfeeding when the grid flops , then they can’t say anything because they already approved the device. :stuck_out_tongue:

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The Island thing can be a concern.
But once the Utility mains go down the Induction generator will stop producing power unless you did some significant tinkering with power factor correction.

Harmonics are created by everything.
But they don’t ban electric motors because they create them.

Did you get permission to install a grid tie system that is the real question.
As long as you never reverse the power flow they would be very hard pressed to prove anything

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or someone else is backfeeding the grid with say a portable generator. I think there is a case where if two people have motor generators, they energize each other, but the delay in transmission starts causing frequency drift.

The harmonics they are typically worried about are usually from bad bearings.

No, but they have a long approval process for them. They want to make sure you know what you are doing and aren’t just screwing around. They need to have cut-offs and fuses installed, and if it is over like 20kw or 50kw, you need to get their permissions to start and stop generation.

You have to for grid-tie, or else you never get any net metering credits. And in the states the utilities are required to switch to the smart meters. Some of the newer ones are networked and can block backfeeding. The older spinny disk ones they typically catch you if you spun it backwards too far.

If you have an offgrid system that doesn’t backfeed, I don’t think they can do anything, but they are concerned about people killing themselves. Messing with AC can kill you, and it doesn’t do much for their reputation.

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I don’t know how likely this is to happen and in any event your set would start to slightly over speed if you lost the utility with an induction generator ( until your governor picks it up and then its the protection systems you build into that are needed to prevent you from trying to push power back on the Utility. )

I don’t understand this.
Can you explain a little more detail?

I never said anything about net metering.
Years ago I thought about building a simple MG set power by batteries, solar, wind and what ever I could throw at it that may stick.
It was not a cost effective idea I admit and I realized it, but the idea was not to net meter but just throw some VA at the peaks of my energy demand when it costs the most.

That was still not a cost effective idea…
I also think a lot about a home in the woods without road access that you can only reach using an electric trolley.
Maybe lay track around the whole property so when I am bored I can play with the trains and ride in circles
This is a project in development I just need a lottery winning to make it happen…

I know I am throwing a lot of ideas out without really talking about the costs and regulations that govern them.
Don’t take any of my suggestions too seriously ( except the train I really want my own narrow gauge battery electric railway )

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