November Results

This month the wind turbine was down more than up but in the last two days we have made more power than we did last month. The new Redriven system seems to be much better at reducing the parasitic power needed to just keep the system up.



This month the production meter that tracks the power that we can use read 85KWH.  51 KWH were produced  just yesterday.

The inverts combined for the month made 131 KWH. I believe a lot of that power was used to raise and lower the tower. I think we lowered and raised the tower about 5 times this month. I'm not exactly sure how much power that uses but with the weight of that tower if has to be significate.


Here is the wind chart  from a neighborhood weather station. We missed a bunch of great wind days this month but last two days were really windy.

Thanksgiving day

Happy Thanksgiving United States readers! I’m very thankful that both Rural Wind & and Electric (Rodney and James) plus Redriven (Dave and Scott) were here for the last two days working hard to resolve the issues with our wind turbine. They replaced a cable that was 6 wire unshielded with a cable with 2 shields and 2 twisted pair cable. This cable replacement significantly reduced the noise and raised the control signal. Dave from Redriven also programed some checks (firmware 2.05) so the system will automatically reset on the over-speed error that we just started getting.

Now our wind turbine is back making power better than ever. Since they left yesterday, we have had no errors at all. Plus now at 3.75 miles per hour the meter stands still (no gain no loss). If you remember, with the older system, the meter stood still at 8 miles per hour. This means that when the wind turbine is slowly turning we will now have a net gain rather than a loss. The parasitic loss is now about 300 watts, we think it was about 600 –to 800 watts with the older control system. This should do great things for our power production.

Redriven was here this week.

Redriven was here Tuesday and Wednesday this week. They got the wind turbine running Tuesday afternoon but night we started getting contiunous nacelle faults.  The next day they came back but couldn't get the errors to stop.  They now think the wiring between the controller and the nacelle is picking up interference.  They said they would be back this coming week to work on it again. I think replacing the controller cable to the nacelle.   It kills me that we are missing all of this great wind, this would have been the best month ever.

We're off line again

The wind turbine worked for about two days.  As luck would have it no wind days.  On the third day a little wind and we got a Nacelle fault.  Resetting it got it working again for a whole day.   The next day we got a DV error (Dog Vane- I think?) and then another Nacelle fault.  We have been unable to get it started back up.  The anemometer shows no wind even when there is wind.  So now we have everything turn off and are waiting for the next fix.

Windturbine back on line

Parker came back Wednesday afternoon and work past dark getting our wind turbine running again. He put in another external power supply in the nacell. Of course since that time there has been no wind at all to test it out.  Hopefully, there will be some tomorrow.



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.

Three issues with the wind turbine but fast response to our call

Yesterday, my husband noticed that it was windy but the wind turbine was not moving. He called Rodney and he came out today. They found three things that were wrong:


1) The Yaw break was burned up. Apparently it had been permanently on for the last two months, but this break will not be used until we get the new controller card.

2) There were some loose connections on the Yaw relays.

3) The a power supply needed to be moved in order to get more ventilation in the head.


It was impressive that Rodney came the next day after we called him. We are about 3 hours away from him. Hopefully, fixing these things will also help to reduce the power needed to run the turbine.