January 17th 2008
Good Morning
Good golly Miss Molly it is super cold this morning. How cold? Twenty two below zero cold. Yeah this is freaking cold. Go outside with a runny nose and come back in with icicles on the nose. I am recommending to Nell that she delay her departure to work a half hour until the sun comes up. In the midst of this, the heater fan in the Blazer gave out yesterday. The fan had been making a god-awful racket in the morning. I know what you are thinking, I'm supposed to be some kind of mechanic why don't I fix it? Well I did. That's a rebuilt heater fan and motor that is in there now. I'm saying old mechanical equipment wears out and breaks at this temperature. So we wait for nature to give us a break, then we go.
This is what I did yesterday. As I was finishing the newsletter it began to snow, lightly at first, then harder until the valley was fully engulfed in white. I had a service call in Ribera for which I promised to leave at 10:00AM. Even though I was aware that in the morning, Eric from Desertgate and Cary from Energy Concepts were rebuilding the Internet tower to which ours connects, I fiddled with the newsletter tweaking and adding goodies until I passed the threshold and the guys pulled the plug. Whoops. I missed by just a few minutes too. Not a real problem as I was headed for town and I could send the newsletter from there. Well, as it worked out it was more of a problem than I anticipated.
First setback was the snow. It took me an extra twenty minutes to prepare for the cold with an extra layer of thermal underwear and thick socks. Now the snow was getting serious. The Trooper started fine as it wasn't that cold yet, and there was only a dusting of snow on the windshield. By the time I got down to Jackson's house, it was looking like a blizzard. So, I waited there for a couple of hours thinking that maybe I should stay home instead of drive in four-wheel-drive for forty miles each way to the service call. We messed around doing a bit of leather work while the sky filled with snowflakes. As I look out my morning window I can see a couple of inches of snow on the ground. At the time it looked like four inches. After a couple of hours down at Jack's, the sky lightened and I decided that I should give it a try.
As it turned out, the storm was mostly to the northeast of us and it let up as I drove to town. I made a couple of stops in town to buy three items I guess I felt I couldn't live without. A new pair of gloves, a headset for my cell phone, and a cigarette lighter adapter so I could plug my laptop in while in the Trooper. Of the three items, I suppose it is frivolous to determine which was most important. Seemingly the gloves since it was a blizzard at home, though not in town. Las Vegas now has an ordinance banning cell phone use while driving, so the hands-free headset is a good thing, plus I can really use it at work. Nothing like holding on to a ladder, a phone, and a drill at the same time. So the headset is pretty important to me. But the 12Volt DC to 115Volt AC adapter was going to enable me to pull up in front of my son's house and use his WiFi Internet connection to send the BMN. It worked too. I had so many snags sending the newsletter from my laptop that the battery wouldn't have made it. As it was, I had to strip the images to get it out, and there was an awesome image from NASA too.
I finally got moving after fiddling with my new toys, probably around 1:00PM. By the time I hit Romeroville the sky was clear and all remnants of the blizzard were past. In fact, I wondered if the client was going to believe my blizzard story. Ribera is around twenty five miles on the other side of Las Vegas. From there a wedge shaped storm could be seen in the northeast, but there it stayed. I had plenty of time to do all the computer related tasks the client needed of me. One task was pretty cool, Eugene, a pilot explained how the FAA is inclined to scramble an F-15 or two if small plane flies over the wrong area, so he needed to download the latest aviation maps from Garmin GPS web site. It took some doing but we made it work. The problem, (and this isn't the first time I've seen this) is in the USB to Serial adapter. Most of us who bought a GPS did so when laptops had serial ports, which is where the GPS plugged in. Now we need adapters to change the serial cable to USB cable. These aren't simple to setup. Anyway we got it, and I left from the service call at 4:30PM.
On my way back to the freeway I kept thinking about the guy I met at NMSynergy meeting. I asked Eric if I could stop by and see his wind turbine after my service call. He said sure, but he wasn't going to be there. I never got exact directions because I told him, I'd rather he was there. Nevertheless, I couldn't get it out of my head. I wanted to see the wind turbine. I remembered he told me his place was about two miles down a dirt road across the street from La Risa Cafe. I had time, it wasn't yet dark. I made the turn down the narrow road. I came to my first fork in the road about a quarter mile in. Hmmm, "Eenie meanie miney moe" go right. Heck this if fun, my being the nosy guy I am. It feels like I'm driving through peoples' yards, the road is so small and up close to the homes. Two more decisions like the first and about two miles in, I saw it.
A wind turbine standing tall in the field next to a very unusual house. I'm not sure about the architecture, possibly "Story Book," but the wind turbine is a Hugh Piggott design, very similar to the machine we built in Colorado last month.
Now I know I have gone over my standard daily page of chronicling. I will try to make this brief.
The wind turbine sat atop a 65 foot tower, it was not spinning, although an attached halfway up the tower anemometer was spinning.
The tower itself was tube perhaps 6 or 8 inches wide, it looked shiny, like aluminum
The pole was guyed with 8 heavy cables tied to two levels.
It looks like a 8 foot wind turbine (individual 4 foot props.) Eric told me it had fiberglass props, and that we could use the casting forms if we wanted them.
This system has a box on top of the axial flux alternator which houses the rectifiers (changes five phase AC to DC.)
All in all it is a beautiful system, in a gorgeous setting down by the Pecos River.
Also I understand that Eric has a photovoltaic system grid-tied to Mora San Miguel Electric Cooperative. This is the first system I have heard of on our CoOp.
I can't wait to get to know Eric better and spend more time there learning about all the cool things he is doing.
Hasta la vista, baby!
Brian Rodgers
