Results for Jan and Feb

Today is measurement day. I didn’t post results last month since I was out of town,  so this is my very sad two month report. 

From Dec 27 to Feb 27^th we made 134KWH.  Keep in mind the turbine was only running for 16 of a possible 62 days.     

No word yet from  Redirven on when they are coming back to fix it.

Still down but with a new problem

Parker came back on 2/10/11 Thursday morning and it definitely wasn’t the same old problem of losing code.  This time something went wrong in the dog vane reading that caused the wind turbine to spin around and around in the same direction.  There are normally fail safes that keep this from happening, but not this time.   The cables wrapped around and twisted the cables around the hydraulic cables and the tower wouldn’t come down.  The power cables came off the terminal and must have sent some power back to the control panel computer at the house. The computer is not talking anymore and appears to be dead.   I guess another lesson learned is to look through the door at the cables before trying to lower the tower.    It was bitterly cold when we put the tower back up Thursday night. This tower raising gets really old when your fingers get stiff from the cold putting all of the bolts back in.  Parker said someone would be back next week to replace the computer. Let's hope it can be fixed without taking the tower down again.

Down again :(

We were only running for 1 day and we were back down again.  The good news is they have a plan on how to fix this, the bad news is yesterday would have been huge wind power day and we missed it. Let's hope we don't miss many more days like that.

Up and running again

Sorry I haven’t been updating the blog, but there hasn’t been much to say. I was out of town for training and now I’m studying for a technical certification in my “spare” time. Parker was here from Redriven last week and tried to upload the code back into the Nacell card, but with no luck. Just has he suspect, The card would not load in the field. What we have been waiting for all this time is a new card that can be swapped out for the one we have. They don’t know yet why these cards loose their code.


Parker finally came today but late, so my husband and I lowered the tower before he got here. We’ve never done this with a large amount of snow before. My daughter cut a path with snow shoes, so it wasn’t as hard to walk in the snow to the turbine. Next time we know bring a bucket for the bolts so they don’t get lost in the snow. You also need to clear out the path for the piston. Neopreen gloves are handy too. The tower is so cold your bear hands stick to it and normal gloves make it hard to handle the washers.

 The snow and ice packed in the space between the base sides. The ice blocked the piston so it couldn’t line up with the hole for the bolt to go through the base. It sure is a lot easier in the summer.

While we had the turbine down some snow piled on blades and the tower. We used a heat gun to melt some of the ice off of the blades so it wouldn’t be unbalanced when the wind got going. I also worried that when the tower went up that the ice might come down from the tower on us but it held for the time we were out there putting the bolts back in.


Now we wait for wind . . .