Just back from a trip to the Adriatic where a good friend has some land that is off grid and have been, for the last year, trying to improve on an earlier project to produce enough power for a 12V system - a lot of help received with thanks from many on this board.
We set off from the U.K. with a badly overloaded car and only managed half a mile before being pulled by the police at 02:30, some talking and managed to get away without a ticket but had to leave some parts behind. These being an additional pivot mount, tower scaffold and a 3/4hp ECM conversion. We did manage to get away (or the suspension did) with one pivot mount, the converted experimental Brooks Hansen motor (original diary http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2009/7/11/111054/365) and a 1/3hp ECM conversion, so all was not lost.
After a twenty one and a half hour drive and a couple of hours on a ferry we made it across to the island and land. Now to put the last six months of experimentation into practice...................and learn valuable lessons!
The mill had to be built to be easily transportable, quick to dismantle and reassemble, I had a friend make up this pivot mount:
The finished mill on test:
A few lengths of scaffold gave a 15' tower and a 10' gin pole to assist raising. This was the theory and where the painful lessons started. The motor had had more magnets added on top of the existing to reduce the air gap and this had increased output so things were seeeming OK and ready to attempt to raise.
Several things were overlooked:
We reckoned on being able to haul the tower and motor into the air by hand and had turned down the idea of buying a hand winch to make life easier.
We had not added cable from the tower to the gin pole - this resulted in the tower bending whilst trying to raise.
We had not done a test lift on the tower to check guy lengths - big mistake with hindsight.
Anyway this was the end result of the above "errors of judgement":
It all came crashing down, we had considered this option and were thankfully nowhere near the fall zone
Six months work that never got to do more than two rotations having travelled over a thousand miles, but there you go live and learn!!
All was not lost as we did manage to get the 1.3hp ECM in the air and saw a consistent 5A in 15mph winds, enough to keep our 100amp hour battery topped up!
!
And as a Mr C Eastwood said "adapt, improvise and overcome" so we bodged the B-H blades back together with Gorilla tape and got her into the wind as best as possible. Even with the blades in such a bad state and in a terrible wind position they still spun up enough to give 1A!!
Anyway, a good learning curve and enough to digest before we go again, not sure when this will be so time to learn from the above and make the necessary adjustments. Hand winch or winch of some description is a must, check guy lengths and do a test raise without fail.
Onwards and upwards!!
