Towers

	Towers Wind is wonderful. Sometimes. What we are talking about here is more than a gentle breeze. If you live where there is a fairly steady breeze you may have more than you imagine - forty feet up. No matter where you are you want to build a tower at least 40 feet high to get away from ground effect. The wind blows much smoother and steadier (and often times stronger) higher above the ground. This one is at a nearby friend's home who actually has a half dozen. He is in his eighties and his father built them when he was a boy. Sort of "grandfathered" because it is something we couldn't do today. The point here is that towers can be complicated and dangerous. Can you imagine climbing up and down one with a heavy generator that needs repair.

		The towers that I have been admiring (like this one at Bob Budd's) are poles built out of Schedule 40 pipe. (Schedule 80 is too heavy to handle and anything less than Schedule 40 gets pretty weak. Schedule 40/80 measures the wall thickness of the pipe.) Guy wires should be well below the blades so a blade doesn't get chipped. The bottom of the pipe pole is hinged between a couple of well planted (concreted) H beams and a pipe extends 15 feet out horizontally from the bottom of the tower pole with a diagonal pole to a spot 20 feet up the tower pole to strengthen it. This pipe triangle is then anchored out at the front and released (along with a front guy wire) in order to winch the pole down backwards or back up again. This arrangement makes repairs and periodic maintenance much simpler and one could get the wind generator down and protect it if they had enough warning about a big storm.

Overview: Forcefield on Tower Design.

Forcefield also gives a good explanation here about tower design.

SEALED: Forcefield on Tower Design.
This is the SEALED mirrored version of this site from Forcefield that won't be opened until after The Great Catastrophe.

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