January 2, 2013

And so it begins…

2013 that is!

 

but what an absolute sh1t of a couple of weeks though, i think the only day that’s been half decent up here in the sticks was yesterday. We had no rain and a drying wind for a change.

the trouble with all this wet stuff is the ground is that saturated it will take months to dry, i mean just look at this

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this is a well drained hay field, it’s more like a swimming pool. Thumbs down

all this water makes mole catching a bit of a gamble, the pesky little critters disappear when there tunnels get waterlogged. needles to say i still manage to get a few even in these conditions.

Yesterday (New years day), because the weather was ok Paige and i set of to put some traps out near one of my favourite view.

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this is biggy haugh, but from a vantage point that not many will see. there’s a campsite on the other side of the burn and a picnic site further up.

the afternoon was spent doing now’t much, until later on when a trip to see MIL and the niece turned into drinks with the landlord at the Barrasford arms http://www.barrasfordarms.co.uk/ Tony Binks is a great chef and all round nice guy. Helps a lot when he smothered us with bottles of port,,,,mmmmm   luckily Mrs R was driving Thumbs up

Today has been yet another wet day, low cloud causing us to get a soaking…. again… but it has not been without a success or two, firstly apart from getting wet, the mole catch was up, but secondly progress has been made on the renewables front. my contact within the forklift industry has come forth with prices for OPz2 battery’s, along with a great deal of technical help.Thumbs up

Enersys http://www.enersys.com/ have furnished me with a great deal of knowledge and have pointed me down what i hope is the correct path for my particular application.

It seems as if when my system was installed, the battery bank may be incorrectly sized. the upshot of this is, when i replace the battery’s the sizing will be more apt. the other thing I’ve done today is alter my ailing whisper H80 and made it a “downstream” instead of an upstream wind turbine.

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basically all I’ve done is turn the blades around and turned the tail from vertical to horizontal. it works, it works very well actually, so because the thing is nearly dead I’m going to re engineer it and make the spare set of blades furl out of the wind as a Proven turbine works. my pals in the cloud factory will be able to cut weld and hinge things as appropriateFingers crossed. so in the mean time the test continues.

if it all goes pear shaped then, a new Kingspan Wind 6kw will be on the cards, wish me luckFingers crossed

Categories: Northumberland (the peoples republic of)