I’m getting quit excited (well as excited as your average grumpy old man in his 50s gets) as Hugh Piggot is coming to stay today. It was Hugh of Hugh Piggott – Scoraig Wind Electric that supplied and commissioned my ‘Proven 2.5kw’ wind turbine and my neighbours ‘Harris’ water turbine and today he’s coming to reconfigure the dumps in my wind turbine charge controller so the DC ones come on after the AC ones. At the moment I have 6 dump loads, these come on sequentially once the battery bank is full. At the moment the DC ones which just heat the air in the shed come on first so they are switched off in preference to the AC ones which switch on 3 oil filled radiators in the house. The problem being I can’t switch the AC ones off in summer gales when the house is too hot unless I go down to the shed and put on the DC ones. A much better system (and it will happen eventually) is to dump the excess into heating water via an immersion heater but our plumbing is just not up to it at the moment. Hugh who is probably the worlds leading expert on small scale renewables is then going to show me how to ‘tweak’ the field (whatever that is on the ‘Harris’ turbine and wire up the solar charge controller and dump on the turbine I fitted at Torran. Then tomorrow we’re off up to the island of http://www.isleofrona.com/ to put up another 2.5kw ‘Proven’. My mate Bill has already done all the ground work so it’s just a matter of fitting the head and raising it. I’m really looking forward to seeing the changes on Rona as I’ve not been since I stopped clam diving 5 years ago and there’s been some big changes since then with holiday cottages and now 2 wind turbines.
Probably be quiet for a couple of days
With all these goings on I’ll probably not be on here tonight as I’m looking forward to a glass or two of red wine and picking Hugh’s brains for a while.
And now I’m going to feed the ‘grunters’
The darlings were all waiting and Shona’s had even decided they liked the look of the big wide world and had gone exploring.
Hydro pipe couplings
To most regulars the rest of this post is a probably a but dull but anyway here’s the various couplings I used on my penstock pipe.
This is a ‘Plasson’ and is a wee bit more difficult to use requiring a good chamfer on the pipe and perfect allignment.
This is a ‘Phillmac’ and is a little easier to fit and more tolerant of miss allignment.
And this is a steel one and was by far the easiest one to use, though I’ve no idea of costs and if these were more expensive I’d get the plastic ones as there’s not much in it.
Life at the end of the road 
