On Thursday we started with towers. First a 2 hour talk about tilt down towers, how they work, safety etc. Then we lowered my 20 foot machine to show how it goes, raised it again and started working on the tower. It was rainy so we spent most of our time here measuring out/cutting/assembling guy wires. Once that was done we put on rain coats and brought all the parts to the site. Pictured above we have the gin pole raised, and we're assembling the tower. In building this tower we first raised 20', adjusted the lower guy wires/got it plumb, and the lowered it -put on the next 20 feet, raised it, adjusted it, lowered it, etc - so that when we finally raised the whole tower it was easy.
Pictured above we're raising 40 feet of the tower. Again, nice to raise each section and make adjustments to the guy wires as you go - it makes life easy when the tower is finished.
By lunch time (1:00 PM Friday) on the last day we got the full 60 foot tower assembled, raised, and adjusted.
Actually I lied above about lunch time, we skipped lunch and went right to assembling/wiring up the machine on the tower top. The 6 inch tubing seemed quite rigid with the weight of the wind turbine on the end.
Pictured above is the base for the tower. We just leveled the ground and stuck it down with stakes. No concrete in this installation.
The winch worked really well to raise/lower the tower. We used Ty's 36V cordless drill for the job.
Phil was invaluable during this workshop - very talented with metal work and a good mechanic. Things started getting a bit breezy so we had to wait for calm moments to balance the bldes
This cat 'Mike' has no problem chasing down, and attacking peoples fairly large dogs. One lesson and dogs are terrified of this animal.
About 2:00 PM on Friday (the workshop was officially to be over at 5:00) and up she goes!
More of the same. It's a beautiful place where we put this and the 60' tower pretty much gets him well over 30' above anything nearby (there are 2 slightly offending trees about 40' tall)
Mission accomplished!
A neat picture from the bottom of the tower. (DanF took almost all the pics on this page)
Shortly after raising the tower the wind came up. It never got terribly windy but it's pretty clear that the machine works well. It starts up easily - in light winds I was seeing sustained output between 1000 - 1500 Watts with peaks over 2000. Not bad for a 12 foot turbine. It's also dead quiet, you can't hear the blades.
The agreement for this workshop was that Tom (the property owner) would pay for materials, and the work shop attendees would do the labor. As it turned out, materials for the wind turbine came to about $700. The Tower cost about $1500 (steel and rigging), stop switch, rectifiers, wire for the line and controller came in around $400. So total system cost was just pennies under $2600... not bad.
Loads of fun and very successful! Thanks to everyone who came, thanks to RMSLF for putting on the workshop (they dealt with logistics). Thanks to Tom for being guinea pig/having an experimental tower/turbine installed on his land. Thanks to Lynn for all the good food! Thanks to Hugh Piggott and everyone (well - not quite everyone) here for lots and lots of good ideas. Im sure we'll do this again someday.
