… disappointed today.

In the last 24 hours we’ve had 21 hours of recorded wind and the turbine has been going round like ye veritable clappers.

And do you know what?

There’s not even one watt recorded on the dial.

A quick check revealed that there’s no current reaching the battery bank. That’s sad.

I checked the two joints to the wind turbine and they seem to be working fine – I connected up a little piazo buzzer and that was ringing like Big Ben – and so it’s either going to be the final joint or else there’s a break in the cable somewhere.

That’s going to be a job for the multimeter on Monday morning

But it was certainly encouraging to see how the thing was going around today. And of course, all the time that it was going round, the big AIR 403 wind turbine didn’t move a muscle. It proves the point that I’ve been arguing with everyone for years that a small turbine can quite often produce more energy than a large one.

Why this is so is quite simple.

Feel the weight of the motors. The heavier a motor is, more powerful it is (generally speaking, of course. There are always exceptions). And the weight is made up of the copper coil and the magnet in the motor (it’s not this simple, but for the purpose of this discussion we’ll leave it here).

So the more powerful the motor, the bigger the magnet and the more magnetic resistance it contains. And so the more wind that you need to overcome the magnetic resistance. A less-powerful wind turbine will have less magnetic resistance and so it will need less wind to make it work. In low-wind situations (which is what I generally have here) two smaller wind turbines will pump out more power than one large one.

This afternoon I went to St Eloy-les-Mines where I spent next-to-nothing again but I did do a mega-wash at the launderette. That’s cheered me up. All clean clothes again. All I need to do is to find a way of getting me nice and clean as well, and then I can have nice new bedding. I shall work on that.

It was the Annual General Meeting of Pionsat Patrimoine this afternoon and interesting as it might be, I still can’t deal with the egos and the people who take 100 words to say either yes or no – and then say it 10 times over.

No footy tonight at Pionsat – Gerzat couldn’t raise a team to play the 2nd XI. But there was a game on at Marcillat, and that provided me with the biggest laugh that I have had for quite a while.

A goalkeeper and a forward went for a 50-50 ball and the keeper came off worse. It was a foul but a genuine attempt to play a loose ball with no malice whatsoever. The ref,in his wisdom, shows the Gannat forward a yellow card.

Outrage from the Gannat bench – and quite rightly so if you ask me. “We have to protect the goalkeepers” shouted the ref.

30 seconds later we have an almost-identical situation and this time it’s the forward who comes off worse And no yellow card. And in the silence of the still night up on the plateau where Marcillat play, the  Gannat trainer bellows out (and I mean Bellows Out- he could be heard back in Gannat I reckon) “and you have to protect the forwards too!”

At that remark, the whole ground collapses in laughter, except for the ref who clearly has no sense of humour whatever and goes over to talk to the trainer

Well, I wasn’t the only one who thought it funny. And doesn’t that makes a change for round here? 

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