Thursday, October 28, 2010

October Results

Unfortunately, this  months results were worse than last month – Only 49KWH.   I can't give you the amount of power the Inverters made  this month, since they need to be powered up to get the stats. The inverters have been off for the last few days.  As you can see from the weather chart, there were some good wind gusts, but we missed a lot of days too.

This month we had a couple of issues with the wind turbine. My job (that pays) has been very busy, so I haven’t had much time for posting. The weekend of Oct 9th, the turbine would turn its self off. At first every few hours and then every hour. My husband set up a camera on it so we could easily watch it. We hoped we would see some kind of pattern or symptom just before it stopped, plus with the camera,we would know when it needed a reboot. It would always come back with when you power it off and back on.   Rodney, our installer was convinced it was the power supply, but it was Canadian Thanksgiving on monday, so it would be hard to get an new power supply.   Then on Sunday night it just died and wouldn't come back. It was off for about 5 days, then one windy day we tried it again and it worked. It would work for about a day or two at a time for about week. I think we made all of that 49KWH that week. 

Parker from Redriven came out last weekend and gave us the upgrade to the “long board”  they have been working on.  He worked all weekend to get us going on the new system. 
It included replacements of almost everything in the controller box, and upgrade to the controller program, a new Anemometer and a new power supply.  ( I'll write more about this when I have more time)


The new system ran for about 2 days (with barely any wind) the good news is that the new power supply in the nacelle uses much less power. So when there was no wind those two days we hardly lost any  power. Parker also made us a switch and taught us how to take the turbine up and down.  the first time it went up I was was to busy taking pictures ( that didn't come out ) to pay attention to how to bring it up. 

Parker say he will be back tomorrow with a fix. Unfortunately, today was one of the windiest days we’ve had since we got the turbine.