Somewhat sad news, I have lowered the Spirit of Zubbly-II for an extended break.
Nothing wrong with the turbine! It's a bit frustrating to have a turbine that will run for years but can't use any more until the equipment around it is upgraded. It is in fact the infrastructure around the turbine that is no longer up to the task. There are many problems that have literally been growing around it:
- A wall of poplar trees to the west
- A wall of pine trees to the south
- Failing battery cell
- Excessive twisting that I can’t get out of the drop-cable
These small problems have combined to major problem that I can only fix properly by relocating the tower and replacing the battery. For that I have to completely dismantle the system.
I will have to live without this living, breathing machine in my yard this summer.
The deciduous trees to the west side have grown from a meagre 30 feet when I moved here to a staggering 60 feet tall – much taller than any poplar trees in the county. They are a minor obstacle in the winter when they shed their leaves, but for the summer months they block 1/2 of the prevalent winds.
The pine trees south of the turbine are more of a safety issue. Planning to cut them down when they were small many years ago, they have proven to be a good snow barrier in the winter and we no loner want to remove them. They now entangle the tower’s guy wires as I raise and lower it, making a dicey operation even more difficult.
There’s not much I can do to stop the weakest cell in the battery pack from failing that doesn't require me to disconnect everything from it. The battery pack is the only load on the turbine, and this turbine is not designed to ever run unloaded/disconnected. It is nearly 20 years old, now. They are already living in grace but this was inevitable. The bad cell is now several percent weaker than the rest and falling quickly. If it remains connected it will draw down the rest, which is suicide for battery packs.
The twisted cable in the tower should be simple to solve but some shortcuts I took when I first built it now prevent the pendant cable inside the tower from twisting freely. The winds here turn almost exclusively clockwise, at least once a week, so many twists build up. Because of where the cable is, and how the bolts that assemble the tower lock the cable in place, the only way to get the cable untwisted is to dismantle the tower. When the cable is as twisted as it is now, there isn't even any slack to allow partial dismantling. The turbine has to come off to allow any slack at all. This time, it's gone too far and the cable jacket is also damaged by all the twisting, so the whole cable just came out. I counted 75 full rotations of twist in the cable, judging by the rust prints that go around it for its entire length.
