Tag Archives: southwest wind power

Tuesday 24th December 2013 – TOTALLY ASTONISHING!

Yes, I should say so. The wind here has been such today that I’ve had more wind energy in the last 24 hours than I’ve had in the preceding 12 months. According to the anenometer on the barn, we had gusts of up to 52mph. I was in the barn as a little of this was going on, a quick glance at the wattmeter attached to the ageing 400-watt Air 403 that I bought from Southwest Wind Power in Flagstaff, Arizona in 2002 was showing that at that particular moment I was receiving 280.3 watts of power and I have never before seen anything even approaching that amount of power.

And even as I type, I can hear the hollow tube of the turbine mount whining away, which means that the wind turbine is still churning it out. All in all I’m overwhelmed with this and I do wish that I could have this amount of wind every day.

shelving unit upstairs lean-to les guis virlet puy de dome franceMeanwhile, back at the ranch, the shelving unit is finished – or, at least, it’s finished as far as it will be for the next few days and I’ll add the doors and siding in due course.

It took me about 4 hours to finish it off and to screw it down, and the hardest job was to set it all in tension. It’s not just a floppy old wobbly shelf unit but something quite structural.

The shelving planks are a little warped but firstly, it’s cheap concrete shuttering that I buy at Brico Depot. Rough and ready, very solid, very thick, and very cheap. And secondly, of course, it’ll straighten itself out when it has some weight on it. I don’t mind it being like this at all – it’s not as if it’s for the inside of the house, of course.

When I finished it, I started to load it up, but called a halt for lunch – rather later than usual but I was enjoying myself.

After lunch and a brief siesta (I really don’t know what’s up with me these days) I went round to Liz and Terry’s with their Christmas presents, and they very kindly fed me and also loaded me up with a pile of goodies too, more of which tomorrow.

And now I’m back here. All of the alarms are switched off and I don’t intend to be doing anything for the foreseeable future. After the year that I’ve just had, I deserve a really long break.

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Thursday 26th January 2012 – I DON’T SEEM …

… to have done very much today.

Mind you, that’s not very much of a surprise considering that I managed to sleep through all of the alarms in here this morning and was … errr … somewhat late in raising myself from the dead.

In fact, much of the morning was spent sorting out the wood that is leaning against the end wall of the barn, and then sawing up a dozen or so lengths.

two storey wood shed les guis virlet puy de dome franceThe strange thing is that while the woodpile is slowly increasing, the number of lengths of uncut wood standing up against the wall doesn’t seem to have decreased.

Perhaps I have hit upon the secret of the self-reproducing wood supply – something that reminded me of the story of the Irishman, granted two wishes by his fairy godmother, asked for a bottle of Guinness that refilled itself every time he poured some out of it.
“And your second wish?” enquired the fairy godmother.
“I’ll have another one of those bottles”.

LED light 12 volt domestic circuit electric wiring les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis afternoon I carried on with the wiring in the upstairs of the lean-to.

Most of that time was spent looking for equipment of course, but I now have two lights and two pairs of 12-volt power sockets. They are all wired up, but they aren’t wired into the circuit of course – I need to drill a 40mm hole right through the stone wall into the house to do that, and that’s something that is going to have to wait for a bit.

I’ve a drill that will do it – a 1050-watt SDS drill, but with the current that it draws, you need a brilliantly sunny day. And while a strange golden thing did pop out from behind a cloud for 5 minutes, it’s been about 9 days since we have seen the sun.

It shows just how lucky I was with that little dry spell earlier in the month that enabled me to do the roof of the lean-to.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its several predecessor forms will recall that I bought 2 x 400-watt wind turbines from the manufacturers in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 2002. One of them flies proudly above the barn but the other one is in the back of the barn because the blades on these turbines are rather brittle and I’ve ended up having to make up one set out of the two that I had originally. And the manufacturers never ever replied to any of my mails asking about buying s new set of replacement blades.

So a couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and contacted a company in the USA that makes parts for home-build wind turbines, and I’ve bought a set of blades from them, complete with hub, to fit on the other wind turbine.

In what was left of my working day, I’ve assembled the blades onto the hub unit and what I intend to do tomorrow is to resurrect the abandoned wind turbine and stick the blade and hub assembly onto it, and then shove it onto a pole somewhere where it will catch the wind.

These blades have the lowest drag co-efficient of any after-market wind turbine blades and so I’ll be interested to see just how they perform.

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