Failed Again!

I’m just back from a weekend away with a friend, not an ordinary weekend as I will explain in a moment. But while I was away, on the Friday night in fact, the wind was blowing a treat, probably the most wind we have had since the turbine has been up. I was busily rubbing my hands and making mental calculations of the amount of money that the turbine was generating. Then, in the morning, I received a text from my brother who lives close by, to say that the turbine was not running. To say that I was disappointed does not capture a fraction of what I felt. To try and do it justice would probably cause some internet bad language filter to overload.

However my brother was able to go down to the turbine and re-start it, and the wind continued to blow quite well most of the day. By looking at the fault log, it appears that the turbine was off for approximately 7 hours out of the 24. Despite this, we managed to generate 473 kWh in the day, a new record! In spite of all the problems, this has given me some encouragement that everything will turn out alright in the end.

I will just explain why my weekend away was no ordinary weekend. The friend who came to collect me actually owns and pilots a small private helicopter, and needless-to-say, I took rather a lot of photographs including these three here.

Output Limit Removed

The turbine has continued to run without shutting down, other than when it is supposed to due to lack of wind, so we have decided to remove the output limiter and allow the machine to generate to full capacity. However this may be academic as wind conditions have continued to disappoint. Our best day this month so far has been just 252 kwh.

Despite flurries of increasingly impatient emails, none of the outstanding issues have yet been sorted. Nobody’s fault really, but so frustrating!

September Report

The turbine has kept running I think without interruption since the output was limited. We haven't had a great deal of wind, though on the 24th September it generated 339 kWh, a record so far. For the whole month of September we have generated 4,149 kWh, enough apparantly for one average household for one year. However we have got to do twice that to achieve budget.

No other issues have yet been resolved. Nothing has yet been done about the noise from the tower, about the electrical interference (we haven’t been able to make a loaf of bread for weeks now!), and we still haven’t heard from Manweb about reducing the mains output from the transformer. Also despite telephoning the man in the Scottish Power Microgeneration department every week, we still haven’t got our Clean Energy Cashback contract in place, and Ofgem still haven’t been able to produce their registration certificates. Oh well!