One thing that I am excited about from this past week is a project that I have been researching a bit. As you know from many of my blogs, we have two diesel generators here which provide all of our electricity. In the course of a year, we go through quite a bit of fuel and the costs are very high. We have talked quite a bit about an alternative source, at least something that can offset our fuel costs a bit. We may not be ready to convert completely over to a different system, but we would like to reduce the costs. We are right on the coast (the school is about 30 yards or so from the ocean) so we get quite a bit of wind. I have been doing a bit of research to figure out the correct sized wind generator for us. I had contacted a few companies who have software that will generate wind averages based off of our location. Unfortunately, these aren't as accurate as we would need considering they are computer generated. So, to get accurate measurements, we have purchased an anemometer (which measures the wind speeds and direction). This will log all of our wind speeds and store it within the unit. Periodically, we can connect a laptop and download the data from it. Roger and Grant installed it on top of the school. It is about 20 feet above the roof and therefore about 50 feet off of the ground. This will allow us to get great wind averages so we can figure out if it is feasible to purchase a wind generator. It may turn out to be too costly for the benefit, but there are many days where we get great amounts of wind, so hopefully this will be a good option for us. Below is a picture I took of the anemometer on the roof. It is attached to a pole that is connected to one of our internet satellites.
1 comment:
Doug, is this your last blog?
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