Finally went back to this place again. All plans for laying in a mains supply have been abandoned.

Running power from the 3-ph xfmr is out of the question due to cost. Getting power from the the xfmr behind the pond is out, as the owner of the land on which that pole stands won't budge in his stance (yet he's been complaining about the noise from the generator again [Linked Image] ).

The plan now is to just replace/upgrade the existing battery/inverter setup.

It seems he's been using three or four old car batteries, and running a 5kVA diesel generator to charge them via a small trickle charger. Hardly surprising then that he's running the genset for 6 hours per day!

The "installation" is really nothing more than a lashup, with alligator clip battery connections, undersized wires draped everywhere, and even the ground connection for the inverter is just a large alligator clip on the rod (I suppose I should be grateful that it has even that much!).

I've figure that we should install about 350 to 400Ah capacity of deep-cycle batteries along with a good heavy-duty charger so that the genset needs to be run for a much shorter time. He also has a much smaller 1500VA generator which should be more than adequate.

The existing small wind turbine is only about 10 feet above ground level, so I reckon that by raising that and installing a couple of PV panels we could also gain some useful trickle charge from those as well.

Ideally, I would have liked to change from a 12V system to 24 or 48V, but that would entail replacements for the inverter and turbine/regulator, so we're going to be stuck with 12V.

I reckon a charger which will deliver 30 or 40A into the battery bank should allow the genset to be run for a much more reasonable length of time.

Any recommendations for a heavy-duty charger with appropriate regulator?