May Measurement Day

At least the results for the Month for May are easy to calculate.  0 minutes of up time 0 KWH.

One good thing, my turbine was on the ground for the big wind storm that passed through two days ago. My local weather station is not showing up on the weather underground site. I wonder if the wind took down their anemometer tower.  I hope they come back on line, it was great having that very local wind speed reference.

Hopefully, Redriven will be here soon to program the new equipment so I'll have have some results for June.

New controller in today

A new Redriven installer was here today and completely replaced the controller in the garage. He also worked on the nacelle but we are not sure what he did in there.  He said a full crew would be back in about a week to get it running.

Letter from Chris Grant saying new Cards are ready.

I got an email  May 17 from Scott O'Brien (Redriven Sales) with a letter from Chris Grant. It recognized that the new design was taking longer than expected, but the new cards are ready for deployment. They will be scheduling upgrades in the next few weeks.




Also, they will reset the warrantee period to the date that the new controller cards go in.



We are ready for that upgrade and hope that this one is the one that will keep working

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Measurement day

This month we made 4 KWHs with an uptime of ~8 hours.

Still waiting for that new card for the nacelle

Up again but only for 8 hours

We mailed back just the Nacelle card to redriven for re-programming.  It only worked for 8 hours this time, before it got another Nacelle fault.  Now we are going to wait for the new nacelle card that is coming out in about a month.  Hopefully, this one will hold the code

Another Nacelle Fault

We were up and running for almost 24 hours before we got first an “over wind” and then an “over speed” and then the dreaded “nacelle fault” error.


We took the tower down and determined that the programming on the card in the nacelle was lost again.

Today is the monthly measuring day Feb 27 – March 27 we were up for a total of 1 day for the month and made 13kwh for the month, but lost 1 KWH  lowering and raising the tower. Net gain for the month was 12KWHs. Average wind speed that one day was 10 mph with wind gusts at 28mph.

We are up and running again after being down for 42 days!

Now I know why most people are just happy to see it spin. I really missed looking out there and watching it go. I can enjoy windy days again instead thinking of them as missed opportunities to make power.


When Parker was here last he diagnosed it was the computer cards that had issues so we sent both the controller card in the nacelle and in the “long board” back to Redriven to be checked out / refurbished.

Unfortunately, Parker is no longer working for Redriven, but my most excellent husband spent the whole day yesterday putting the cards back in and troubleshooting wiring connectivity issues. Being a wind tech or wind smith is a really hard job, in the summer. In the winter, it is just no fun at all. Lucky for us, my husband does this type of continuity checking for his work and has all the tools and he had time to do it. I had to work and wasn’t much help at all. Now we are back up and running again! There are only a few days left in March, the best month of the year for wind. It seems the winter just won’t give up this year so maybe the wind will continue to blow too.