New Best Day Ever! Sept 13th

We learned during hurricane Irene that constant change of wind direction and gust are the enemy of wind power making. Although there was a lot of wind, the hurricane was pretty useless for making power. The big gusts would shut the turbine down into protection mode and when the gust stopped the constantly changing direction made for inefficient capturing of the wind.



However, September 13, 2011 “The NEW Best Day Ever” had a near constant moderate wind speed of 9 miles per hour and a constant direction from the south west.

We measured from 6am Sept 13 to 6am Sept 14 we made 60KWH with an average that day of 8.9miles per hour. Looking at the graph, it looks like the power was really made from 10am on averaging a steady ~12mhp.

Wind graph for Sept 13 2011

Wind direction for Sept 13

New best production day ever – In August?

Things are looking up. Some of you might remember last August we had a net loss of 67 KWH of power running the turbine rather than making any power. With that in mind, we were shocked to have our “best production day ever” this month – 40KWH in a 24 hour period


My husband measures every morning so in order to see the wind you really need to piece together two daily measurement graphs. The best day ever was from 8am august 24 to 8am August 25th.

 

 






The new Redriven programing and brake design must be working. We had a net gain of 108KWHs for the month of August.


Here is the graph for the whole month. Although average wind speed is a very low 1.5 mph, there were plenty of gusts this month.

A hurricane is on its way up the eastern seaboard.  Let’s hope it tracks so we only get a steady ~20 MPH.  I'm hopeful we can beat that best day record soon and get a new best month ever record too.

Improvements with the new version of software

We had a surprise visit from Kyle / Redriven Friday. He gave us an upgrade to Diagnostic HMI Version 3.18

We’ve noticed a few improvements in the software and were told about a few others.

The settings all save now in Flash. There is new flash program that seems to upload and download software. In the older version there were 3 setting that had to be re-entered when you lost power. These should hold now after a power outage.

The screen now turns off when you are not actively looking at it that should improve on power consumed by the system. Also the main screen shows Voltage, RPM and Wind speed all together on one graph displaying the last hour of readings.

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.

We’re still spinning!

 Yesterday we made 13 KWHs with average wind at 8.3 mph. 

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.

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.