Fire !!!!!
We had BIG wind yesterday, Easter Monday. I turned my back on the turbine and went up to Dries's house and an unusually strong gust attacked the turbine in my absence - not fair !!
Anyway when I opened my front door a cloud of pungent plastic smoke greeted me and I knew ............
With handkerchief over my face I opened doors and windows and then surveyed the damage. Actually very little - Thank Heavens !! Two 12 V EnergySaver lamps that I'd wired in series to make up 24 V had burnt out and open-circuited and only the bases of the lamps themselves burnt, their sockets did not. It could have been the whole house ??!! I was grateful.
Still I've got the story backwards because to get that amount of current we must have got the turbine working.
I'll get all the photos sorted out and I'll post them but yes, it was the tail.
In the morning before the wind got pumping we brought the turbine down and pop-riveted on the extension, got it back up and ........ only slight improvement ??
It appeared to us that the wind force on the tail was being dissipated in swaying the tail instead of pushing it so .... we brought the turbine down and tied the tail so that it could no longer sway much (cable ties are not the perfect solution). Hoisted it back up. Big improvement !!!! Now the turbine found the wind direction much easier and started turning however, as the wind picked up it eventually started to break away. Sometimes it recovered and sometimes it did not.
My brother has come down to visit and I felt duty bound to pull myself away from the turbine. The fire still provided for a bit of excitement though.
Before I packed up I put two 60 W 12 V filament type globes as a load on the battery. I felt that a big contributory cause of the fire was that the battery was fully charged and the turbine only had to overcome the dump controller, 300 W, before being able to run away with the voltage and burn the EnerySavers. That appears to have worked and even though the wind was pumping my periodic checks revealed that all was working OK. When the wind died I switched off the load because 120 W continuous at 24 V means a drain of 120 / 24 = 5 amp and that's quite considerable.
Got to attend to my guests so everything's got to wait but now the turbine stays up and can do it's thing. I'll only attend to it if the wind builds up but right now, Tuesday morning, it is dead still.