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.

We're working again, but now no wind!

The Redriven guys, Ben and Dave, finished up Saturday morning.  The wind turbine spun for a few minutes Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, there hasn't been any wind since. Yesterday, the wind came up to 3 meters per second - starting speed, but didn't last long enough to really get going.   The new way that the system yaws is much slower, so you need some consistent wind to get it started.   I'll write more about the new yaw system soon and show the new display screen.  The forecast for today is 1-2 miles per hour.

Today is also my monthly reporting day.  Since we only made power for a few minutes this month and raised the tower a few times, we are in negative territory again.  - 4 KWH this month.

Ben might be back today or tomorrow to grease up the turbine, he didn't have the grease with him on Saturday.

Redriven is here!

Yesterday, they replaced the controller hardware in the nacelle and began wiring the new controller parts. They also replaced our yaw break that had been taken out last year.  Dave Vandermeer ( the programmer) said we are going back to code 0. This code will be a light version with just the basics. It will just do the primary functions of on, off , moving out of the wind and fault protection. When there is a fault, we will have to manually restart it. Those higher functions like restarting will come with new code releases. The code and system is still not ready to for internet  up or down load, so they will need to come back to upgrade for that function.


I told Dave that my expectations have been lowered. Last summer, I complained when the system was using a lot of power to sit there with no wind. Now, I’ll be very glad to just see it spinning. Dave said that is one of the improvements we will see right away. Now when it sits there with no wind it will go will use much less power than it did last summer. Perfect timing since we are headed into the no –wind season.


I’ll post more details later. They think they will get it running today!

Redriven says they will be ready in a few more weeks

We have heard from Redriven that things are going well with the new software and that they are still working on the remote uploading of code from the Internet. They should be here to get us working again in a few weeks.