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Wind Turbine install from start to finish - a photo diary

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bmannz:


I have always had a bit of of a thing for otherpower, water turbines as a kid, PV systems later on, there was this thing with a methane digester but thats probably best left in the past...

We recently bought a bit of land up north and it was miles (literally) from the grid, so on went some Jinko PV & Outback Inverters thanks to my man Dwayne at Taspac.  We had it up and running just in time for Christmas, which is bang in the middle of summer here in NZ. 

The $50.00 worth of recycled 300AH Sonnenschein batteries from the local scrapppie lasted great until winter when they started to go down more than they went up.  One afternoon with a cold beer by a hot fire while struggling to hear the rain on the roof over the banging of the ancient Genny I started dreaming of wind power. 

Now I have had a tiny bit of experience with this thanks to a very clever chap by the name of Mike Lawley from Eco Innovations, you may know of his outfit as Powerspout,  I attended a "live in" course at his training facility in Taranaki years ago over a weekend and during this we got to setup PV, Wind and check out some Micro Hydro.

I did a bit of research online as you do, and settled on a 1.5kw Chinese Turbine from Crystal at HYE Energy - dont judge me!  The price was right  (not a lot) and as an importer and distributor of electronics from all over the world I was ready for a pretty shady MTBF from the get go.

So this thing arrived and we chucked it up on pole in front of the house to test it out while plans were made for its final mount over a couple of bottles of bubbles.

I bought an anemometer and after a few months of gathering windspeed data I had a spot in mind.  Now I expect NZ is like the rest of the world and theres a permit required for breathing, so I called the nice lady at the local council and they had no idea what a wind turbine came under in the regs.  We decided the closest thing it resembled in the building code was an aerial and no, there was no permit required for that.

From the wind data I knew I needed an 8m tower and liked the idea of a tilt up.  After checking with a reference, I brought one from Aaron at huayaturbine.com for US$850.  The freight from Quingdao port in China to Auckland NZ was US$30.00, yes thats THIRTY DOLLARS.  Unbelievable. 

Excited like a kid at Christmas to get this up and running, one of our big national carriers Mainfreight then quoted me over $300 to get it just two hours up the country and I still had to collect it from their depot.  Because they had earlier cocked up the shipment date they then billed me holding charges over Christmas - As5h0l3s.  never again.

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Aaron sent me the engineering drawings for the base foundations, he had provided the starters and I needed to arrange the mesh cage.



Instructions were a little sketchy at first but it turned out the factory boy forgot to include them in the package - A couple of emails later and we were off and rocking. 

A quick trip into town to Busck Concrete who nicely bent me up some hoops and starters, the neighbour popped by to say Hi and gave us a hand with the wire ties

bmannz:
We popped up the hill and after pacing a respectable distance from the boundary, marked the hole with some pretty orange spraypaint -



Aarons drawings called for a 1m x 1m hole that was 1.2m deep, I'll be buggered If i'm going to dig that big a hole in clay by hand so rattling and clanking up the side of the hill, the old 5 tonne CAT digger crawled into place.



Alex hopped into the hole to finish off the sides by hand as we didn't want to make it too big and leave ourselves with a low tide when the concrete truck came up the next day -just look at the smile on her happy little face - I think she might have missed her calling



After a fun afternoon in the sun on the side of the hill we boxed it up with some timber that I had won for $1.00 on trademe  (thats ebay to you fullas from overseas) If you don't own a nailgun yet, go out tomorrow and buy one, they are worth their weight in gold.



Next we dropped the reinforcing cage into the hole and ran into the first problem of the day....

bmannz:
The challenge was the cage needs to be halfway down the column of concrete and fairly level but not touching the starters Aaron sent over

A quick planning session was called (yes it involved beer) and we figured out we could dangle the cage off a couple of bits of timber sitting over the hole.



A bit of head scratching and an email to Aaron and we figured out the correct order of rods, washers, nuts and adjusty tube thingy



A couple of pipes were laid into the foundation to carry the wires and that it was it for the day

bmannz:
Concrete Day.

Early the next morning our concrete truck arrived, my engineering friend Tracey is very excited by things like concrete trucks and i'm not sure she had slept a wink.



We had dropped the fence to get the digger in so he just drove up the hill in super low gear then backed this thing as far back as he dared go before the airbrakes let go - this guy had balls of steel.



We used a variable frequency hydraulic vibrator to ensure even distribution of the concrete around the reinforcing members (just kidding it was a long stick)



With the help of Josh, Helen and Aiden we had the deed done in no time and it was back down the hill while the concrete set for some well deserved refreshing health tonic (hops are natural you know)

bmannz:
The Duct...



Thanks to a friend at an electrical wholesalers I had secured some 32mm duct at a very good rate, however it came in 1000m lengths and weighed about 200kg



The trick was going to be rolling it out as we mole ploughed it with the tractor.  Using a spare cable drum as a spindle with bits of timber bolted onto the side we rigged up the tractor as a duct laying machine.



We had a bit of a fail getting the mole plough deep enough into the ground.  I wanted it down 600mm but even with Ivans enormous weight on the back of the tractor it just wasn't cutting it  (haha see what I did there)



A quick look around and after some consulting with a professional rigger we mounted an old cast iron bath to the mole plough with timber posts and ratchet tie downs and then filled it with dirt - that did the trick nicely.



After a couple of practice runs on the beginner slopes we took the John Deere up to the wind turbine site and with the "Roll Over Protection" bar engaged and assh0le firmly clenched I put the tractor into the lowest gear I could find and off we crawled down the precipitous slope.

I have to say the pictures simply do not convey how steep this hill was!

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