Saturday, July 30, 2011

Happy Anniversary!

Wed July 27th was our one year anniversary of being connected to the grid.





First – This month’s reading.  July is not a good month for wind we made  76KWH



Here is a graph I put together on wind speed vs.power produced. 
















This graph shows the average wind speed for the day and the power made for the day.


The reading from the inverter measuremt which shows the power they made before the loss of the system was 181.7 KWH.


For the year the inverters made 1,719KWH. Maybe not so bad considering the system was down most of the time between Sept and June.


My monthly reading added to gether  is a net of 599 kWH for the year

We’ve been graphing each day – power gained on windy days and power lost on calm days is about 2 to 3 KWHs.  When the wind is ~2.5m/s it seems to break even. The system seems to use about 300watts without any wind.

Monday, July 4, 2011

Were making power again!

We took the turbine down and stuck a coat hanger in the hole at the end of each blade.  On the blade that was continuously in the down position, I couldn't see in the hole.  The hole didn't seem clogged when I stuck in the hanger and the hanger was not wet when it came out.  We thought we were unsuccessful, but when we raised the tower, it started spinning!   Possibly is was clogged and the water had moved to the center when it was lowered?  In any case it is spinning freely and making power again.

Update: at 6PM - Ben said he did he did the same thing to the turbine in Governor NY and it is now working too.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

We've got wind now but still not spinning

We ran for just a few minutes very slowly last week and haven’t spun again since.


Ben from Redriven was here Thursday and Saturday and completely reloaded the software. Of course, as usual, no wind. But today there is plenty of wind and the turbine is not spinning.

My husband just came up with a plausible theory that one blade has water in it which prohibits it from spinning.  I have noticed that lately it always stops in a t -shape with one blade strait down. It didn't seem to do that last fall. That would makes sense why it wouldn't spin without some serious wind if one blade had water in it. A while back Parker drilled some holes in the blades to let water out. Maybe he missed one or it is clogged.

Below is a picture of the new screen showing over 4 meters per second. Right now the wind is at 7 meters per second and the turbine is still not moving. Redriven says the other system in Governor, NY is behaving the same way. Redriven thinks it might have to do water that got into the generator while down for several months.



 
No errors at all, but still not moving.