On Oct 24, 2019  we had a 40 mph wind gust that caused the turbine to furl and it got stuck. The guy we bought it from said that was the only thing wrong with it, that it gets stuck in the furling position occasionally.

  We had beautiful weather on Saturday so we took it down to unstick it, plus to see if we could figure out why it was stuck.   I googled it and I does seem to be a known issue with the South West. They found it to be furling bearing friction.  But when we inspected it, it was still well greased and moving fine. But it seems there is a point you can reach that it sticks in the furled position.  There is a rubber pad that seems to be there to stop it from going that far, but I suspect it is worn down.  We improvised by epoxying a metal washer on top of the pad, hoping that the washer will stop the furling from going too far.    The turbine is back up and running fine so far. I guess we will see when he next high winds come if our kluge of a repair worked. 

The hydraulics on the tower were very slow raising and lowering the tower, it took about twice as long as usual. 

Now for some stats old vs new wind turbine

I'm happy to report the SouthWest wind turbine is running great.


It doesn't make nearly has much power as the Redriven when it is windy, but the south west spins in lower wind speeds and it doesn't use any power to find the wind.  The Redriven in the summer,  used more power looking for wind than it made. The yaw motor would rotate back and forth looking for the perfect direction, which it seems in the summer is a fools errand except in storms.

The the dedicated meter says 57 kWh since January ( but we were down part of Jan, Feb and March the best months)

the Aurora inverters say we have made 60 kwh since Jan 1.  I believe the discrepancy is that we had our water pump plugged into the wind turbine outlet for a while. This makes the meter move in the opposite direction.   I asked my husband to move it so we would have an accurate measurement.

The peak power made with the South West was 1426 watts.  ( unfortunately just a spike durning a storm that doesn't happen often but not bad for a 1K turbine)

It is not true that the South west doesn't use any power. There is a very small voltage needed to keep the relay closed, this is to monitor when the grid goes down it opens the relay to shunt the turbine so no stray wind voltage is sent back to the grid.

We have been connected to the grid for 9 years this month.

The Aurora inverter is showing a life time reading of  4067 KWH.  With the Redriven we used to run two inverters.  So the total lifetime power the 10K Redriven would be ~ 8000 kwhs.

A few difficulties with the new Turbine but we are up and running again.

The wind turbine ran for about 3 weeks in Dec/Jan, without any issues.  One day my husband heard a strange noise and notice that one of the blades was not strait.

We put it in shut down mode and waited for a day in Jan that was not horrible to bring down the tower. One of the screw holes in the CAM ( the part the at the blades attach to ) was stripped.

I had to order a new part ( luckily there is a place that sells them still) but it set me back another 300 dollars and took about 2 months to arrive. Then we realized that we needed new bolts too, since they were stripped too.  That took another week or so.

In early April we were finally back in business. Totally missing March the best wind month of the year.

I'm really happy with the South West Whisper 200 .  It spins with just the slightest breeze and is really quiet. The Redriven  tower is totally over kill, but at least the tower is no longer wasted.
It gives me pleasure to see it spinning almost all of the time now.

Next time I'll tell you about how much power we are making.  Be prepared to be underwhelmed with the total, but peak power was way over expectations.