Repairing a seized wind generator
I confess, I’m frequently guilty of surrendering to the old adage, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!’ But I got caught out in hurricane Dorian in October last year. Scheduled maintenance is one thing, but shinning up a 17m (57ft) mast just because a hurricane is expected is another.
However, my laziness meant I consequently had to dismantle and restore my Kiss wind generator – though I also installed a few slight improvements at the time to make regular maintenance easier in the future.
The Kiss is a big, heavy wind turbine that has been around for 21 years and can still be seen churning out electricity in nearly every marina in the world. It had worked flawlessly for the ten years I have owned my schooner Britannia, and goodness knows how many years before that.
When I modified the rig (PBO August 2017) I mounted it high up my main mast for two reasons: to escape the noise of the spinning blades and to improve efficiency (there’s usually more wind aloft). The downside is that it
