High winds and cold temperatures.

Now that we are in the coldest of the Illinois winter with some pretty high winds like we all know and love here, the turbine is stalling. We did have someone already install a new soft ware to make the skystream not stall at 32 degrees F. Now it stalls at 19. We contacted Southwest wind and they are working on the problem and will let us know when a new software/hardware solution has been made. We are not looking forward to bringing the turbine down and may get a bucket truck to do the install.

Winter in Illinois and solar panels

We found out today that the panels don't generate anything with a thick coating of snow. Our roof is about 42 degrees pitch so you can't stand on it in the summer time with out having ropes so it's very difficult to climb up on a 10/10 roof and remove snow off of the panels. We bought a extention rod with a squeegy on it to stand on a ladder and pull the snow down. This works well if the snow is light. We had a large snow fall and was almost impossible to clear. After we did get the snow off the power gernerated was even greater than ever. I think the reflection and the cool temperatures warranted this. We did have a second row of panel on the opposite side of the house and the snow just fell off of them.

Monitor for Skystream

We received our monitor and tried it out. I could not get the display to show me the Skystream. It was transmitting out but not back to the moniter. Then we started to have stalling moments with the skystream and couldn't get it to restart correctly. I tryed shutting the power down for 10 and 30 and 60 minutes without any change. I had to unplug and take the battery out of the moniter to get it to spin freely again. We called SouthWest Windpower and he had us turn the moniter on again and it did the same thing. They sent a new moniter and the same thing happened. I ended up sending the product back to Alter systems which they were gracious to let us since they did have a 10 day return policy. But we still were charge shipping to and from Alter systems and they deducted a 15% fee for restocking and 5% fee for canceling an order. So the all awaited monitering device and we still don't know what we are generating.