Forgetfulness, a blessing or curse...
I'm used to misplacing my keys, and forgetting why I went to the shop - distracted by unplanned tasks along the way - but my latest oops turned into a good component test.
I drove in the yard a week or so ago, and was startled to see the turbine running, and near full-furl. The prior weekend had been near calm, and I'd furled the tail and closed in the load bank while I puttered on the tower. What happened was that I'd left the tail actuator in the more automated mode where it monitors the input voltage (PV V High), but resets at a user selected Vlow. The controllers always "see", and display, some 70-75% of the battery voltage even when at rest. So the logical is after a big wind, or prolonged wind & PV, day subsides the aux relay resets so we start flying again. It did, but I had left the load bank in the manual ON mode.
The winds were pretty steady, and the result is that about 2.5 kWh had accumulated into the batteries, but the load bank, which is on the 3-phase output, chewed thru a chunk of the would be production. On a positive note the load bank seemed to handle the load, and the cooling fan had managed to warm the crawl-space with the waste heat. The coils weren't red-hot, but had surely seen more sustained load than anything I'd seen to date. A good test...but Lord, I've got to keep even more notes to myself to remember what I've done the day before.
~ks