David Sharman's blog

Delta Zeeland small wind turbine testfield update - March 2011

2011-04-28T15:04:00.000Z

The latest March 2011 results are in from the Delta Zeeland wind trial:

http://www.zeeland.nl/digitaalarchief/ZEE0801257

These are a bit difficult to find - the easiest way is to go to

http://www.zeeland.nl/zoeken/

and search for the term 'testveld'

The reason I say this is because we are making changes to the Ampair website and I may move my blog to a separate location to make it easier to deal with press releases.

The Black 300 has been put up in place of the AirDolphin. A second anemometer has been put up at 17m, as well as the existing one at 12m. If my Dutch is correct the Turby has not been producing due to faults for a 3-month period but is now back in operation. The Ampair 600 continues to chug away.

Ampair 6000 update (III)

2011-03-14T11:56:00.002Z

We had a query from bracken50 on the blog entry of 22 March 2010 asking about progress with the Ampair 6000. Firstly we’d rather that people were open about who they are and with luck bracken50 will trouble to tell us.

Anyway, back in March 2010 we had resolved the blade strength issue arising from the production process, and we were simultaneously trying to refit the installed units and move the factory. Ultimately we got through both those exercises and throughout the rest of the year we kept our heads down and slowly nibbled our way at the order backlog. As we did so we uncovered a series of other issues with the Ampair 6000 and progressively resolved them – not always an easy thing to do as some sites exhibited multiple problems simultaneously.

In mid year we had a tower failure and we carried out a very thorough investigation into why this happened. For a while we shut down some, and then all of the Ampair 6000 units as a precaution. Then we released some back into service with particular precautions. It took us several months to work through the failure investigation and we concluded that there was a design issue that needed a substantial change, and near the end of the year we requested all the units be shut down. We can only request as of course units belong to end-users and not to us. At that point there were about a dozen units out there in four countries, all within about 500 miles of our factory.

Since then we have been working through a design review process and conducting tests of various options. That included building some pretty substantial test rigs and complex computer models, all of which were major projects in their own right. Last week we decided which of these options we would go with and now we are working through the next round of detailed design and test prior to releasing units back to the field. Please excuse me if I do not go into technical details about which options we explored and why we took the decisions we did. In due course it will become clear when units go public and I am sure you can appreciate that we do not want to give free training to others.

Similarly please excuse me if I do not go through the commercial aspects of how we have handled the units in the field. We have to recognise that there are a series of distributors, installers, and end users and it is not our business to discuss their business.

Meanwhile we have settled into the new factory (yippee – flat floors, a roof that doesn’t leak, and some heating in the winter, plus enough space to move around and get work done in an efficient manner) and roughly doubled the number of staff. All the senior design engineers are dedicated to the Ampair 6000 project which receives pretty much their undivided attention. The remainder of the team runs the day-to-day operations with the mature product lines and carries out various other projects so as not to distract the senior engineers away from the Ampair 6000. Our sales for 2010 were substantially up on those for 2009 and one of the important things we are delivering to the 6000 team is space within which to work in peace so that they can take the right decisions in a methodical manner. That’s an important advantage of having real and ongoing business rather than just being a single-product company. Ultimately the Ampair 6000, and the wider business, will both end up stronger for the very thorough work that is going on.

I didn’t really want to post about the Ampair 6000 progress until I’d seen the results of some key tests that took place recently, and which were part of us taking the key decisions we took last week. Now I have seen those I feel confident enough to post this update and so bracken50's question is in a sense a welcome jogger as I've always got too much to do in my day. I think that’s enough for now but I’ll try not to leave it so long before I put up the next update. Also I didn't really want to talk about some of the other work we had going on until I was sure where we stood on the Ampair 6000, so maybe I'll say a little more about that in a while.

Before I forget we've just updated the website for the other arm of our business which manufactures and sells single to three phase converters. See www.boost-energy.com and I reckon the team have done a pretty good job.

Rory & Cookies' Jester Challenge

2010-05-09T14:47:00.000Z

As I am sure anybody who reads this blog realises we have a soft spot for anyone doing anything seriously challenging and risky in a good cause, and because they enjoy that sort of stuff. The latest one to cross our path is Rory McDougall who is sailing a seriously small catamaran called Cookie solo across the Atlantic on the norther route (i.e. into wind !).

They have entered into the Jester Challenge 2010 to sail Cookie 2800 miles singlehanded from Plymouth UK to Newport USA. They take off on 23rd May and hope to take 4-5weeks. For more info on the Challenge go to http://www.jesterinfo.org/thejesterchallenge2010.html

Rory is raising funds for the Sir Francis Chichester Trust which is a very worthy cause. The Trust send disadvantaged youths on outward bound courses to help their self development through adventure.

If you want to help them raise funds for this charity as they sail across the North Atlantic on Cookie and set another benchmark as the smallest catamaran to do so then please follow the link http://www.justgiving.com/RoryandCookiesJesterChallenge for a safe and easy way to donate online.

Please follow the story of the voyage as it unfolds on the blog - http://roryandcookie.blogspot.com/

We've helped them out by loaning them an old Aquair 100 for the trip. In return they've helped us with testing something we're experiementing with.

Ampair announces investment from Sigma

2010-04-20T15:44:00.001Z

Ampair Energy Limited is pleased to announce that the Sigma Sustainable Energy Fund II has committed £1.5m to Ampair Energy Limited (“Ampair”).

Ampair is a new company based in Dorset, which recently acquired the business and assets of Boost Energy Systems Limited, a company that designs and produces wind turbines, currently ranging from 100W to 6kW. Ampair wind turbines have been manufactured in the UK since 1973 and the latest model, the Ampair 6000, is a 6kW device which has been designed for worldwide use in grid-tied applications, commercial off-grid applications and rural electrification. Customers who have bought Ampair turbines include Shell, Cable and Wireless and Scottish and Southern Energy, who have purchased two of the first batch of Ampair 6000 turbines to be produced.

Sigma Capital Group plc, the managers of Sigma Sustainable Energy Fund II, are a specialist asset management and advisory group focused on venture capital, property and the commercialisation of university IP.

The investment will be used to support further development of the Ampair range and the expansion of the company’s existing commercial activities.

Patrick Graham, a Director on Sigma’s investment team, said, “Having looked at a number of compelling opportunities in the small wind sector we were drawn to Ampair due to the fact that the overall performance of the Ampair 6000 is comparable to that of the top manufacturers in the industry but it comes at a lower price point, and hence a lower cost per kWh, making it potentially the most economic small wind turbine on the market. It was also important to us that the Ampair 6000 has been specifically designed as a platform technology that can be used to produce larger turbines at minimal additional cost, thereby further reducing the cost per kWh.”

David Sharman, CEO of Ampair, said, “We are delighted to have Sigma on board as our lead investor, they are clearly committed to the sector and were very supportive throughout the process. We look forward to working together with Sigma as we build Ampair into the world leader in small wind turbines.”

Ampair 6000 progress update (II)

2010-03-22T16:18:00.002Z

It has been some time since we updated everybody about our progress with the Ampair 6000, in fact since the 23 October 2009. Because of this I may get some of a rather complicated history out of sequence.

At the time we were waiting to switch on one Scottish site where they had not completed the local wiring; we were having major difficulties with a site in eastern England; and a site further south was nearly ready to commission.

The site further south was in fact in northern France. We switched on there and the inverter would not connect to grid.

We continued to investigate the eastern England site and it turned out that a major underlying issue was the inverter. We found it very difficult to get technical support on the issue we were seeing and we were beginning to wonder if it was not the inverter at all, in fact we believed we were chasing several different issues simultaneously. Eventually after almost two months we were able to find a work-around for the inverter. The people we were buying these from then announced that they had parted company with the manufacturer of the inverters. The manufacturer tells us that the problem we are experiencing is not their fault, we beg to differ and think we know what is their issue, but we have found a work around that is adequate. Unfortunately all the messing around with an uncontrolled turbine at this site has rather messed up other things which we puzzled away at and as we did so we made changes to other production units to test out the various theories.
Once we found the work around for eastern England we commissioned the French site which immediately worked except that it exhibited an odd rattle at some wind speeds. After thinking through the options, and having had further experience in eastern England, we put this down to a loose magnet and pencilled in a turbine head change to investigate. We had seen a loose magnet on one of the turbines and the symptoms were the same.

As an aside all the remote monitoring packages have worked fine at our own two test locations but not at any of the client sites except for briefly at the eastern England site during a period when unfortunately the sensors were inoperative. We continue to chase our tails on this which is a nuisance as we would really appreciate that data, but fortunately it is not something we included in the ‘sales’ package. At the moment it is a ‘freebie’. We continued to puzzle away at the east of England site which seemed to be seeing unique problems and experiencing terrible bad luck with a run of simultaneous faults.

We installed over on the west coast of Ireland which went smoothly except for the remote monitoring package. Apart from some absolutely awful weather that is – I was trying to teach the local installers in horizontal rain with floods lapping towards our feet.

Then we almost simultaneously commissioned the first Scottish site, a second Scottish site, and a second French site. The second French site was in a desperate hurry to have a unit because of some publicity deadlines and delivery problems from other turbine suppliers (there is a rather depressing history in France with small wind turbines over the last few years) so we let them have our own test prototype Ampair 3500 and explained that we would have to return and upgrade them to an Ampair 6000 at a later date. We were told it was working very well immediately after installation – we gave them all the other kit as per the Ampair 6000 to make the eventual change easier but we limited the power curve so as not to burn anything out.

All these were done with hand made circuit boards and if you count you will find that there are about six units in all which cleaned out our stock of hand made circuit boards. During this period we transited from one set of interconnect unit designs to another as a result of learning in the east of England site, so now we have a mixed fleet out there that we need to revisit. We also had cleaned out our first run of mechanical hardware and did not even have a test unit of our own left.

Whilst all this was going on we were bringing about thirty sets of mechanical hardware through our production system. At a certain point we realised that we were almost two months late with the castings. It took a while to get to the bottom of why this was but finally the foundry explained that the batch of castings had failed the hardness test post heat treatment. They had investigated this and traced it to a supply of ingots with a forged certificate of conformity. So they scrapped the batch of castings and started again. They also invested in an analyser for all their raw materials – they are a very quality conscious foundry with some very high profile customers so were rather relieved that it had happened to our product rather than one of their other clients, and don’t want it to happen again. This set us back about two months on the thirty or so mechanicals.

This in turn was causing knock-on problems elsewhere because we have a rather large order backlog, plus we wanted to completely reinstall at the eastern England site where we were rather suspecting the continual abuse (due to our run of bad luck) had caused a magnet to come loose and jam the entire system. This was after we went there one day to tune the system, observed 6kW output, and then it jammed up. Most unfortunate but at least a safe state to be in.

So by the Christmas period the good news was that blade production was just about getting ahead of demand, and the bad news was we were waiting on a batch of production electronics, and a batch of production mechanicals. The electronics kept on going right as the circuit layouts slowed down. We tried to assist a French client by doing a part delivery of some blades and some mechanicals, and to do this we worked through the holidays and postponed a factory move (we are trying to get into larger premises). They would have to wait for us to deliver the electronics and the remainder of the mechanicals at a later date, same as with eastern England.

Driving back from France in the snow on new year’s eve the phone rang to tell me that the Irish client had woken up in the morning to find his turbine had shed its blades. We immediately contacted all of the running turbines to shut them down. During January we analysed the failure which we traced to a change in the details of the manufacturing process that caused a fatigue failure. We decided to not only revert to our initial manufacturing process (remembering that we had been running a turbine for about nine months before the first unit went to a client) but also to massively reinforce the internal structure of the blade. We filed a HSE incident report with the BWEA for their new small wind safety (HSE) database and we briefed our colleagues/competitors about our problems at the BWEA technical committee meeting. There are enough problems in this industry without trying to sweep safety issues under the carpet and we are happy to share learning in this context. Needless to say this was a pretty devastating episode for us as we thought we had just about managed to juggle all the eggs and get through to settled production.

This set us back in two ways. Firstly all the blades in service – and the five sets that were ready to go into service – became instant scrap. Secondly there was an additional process cost and doubling of processing time to make the reinforced blades. So we slowly made more blades (with some learning and some additional scrappage as a result) and issued blades to two sites – three sets out because one set got stranded en route. These were to sites where the electronics are known to be OK. Unfortunately the Irish site must wait until new electronics are ready as the turbine head needs replacing as a precaution.

Right now we are working our way through the new production PCBs. There are four in a set so there are 120 PCBs in all. Eventually we got the PCB drawings finished, and finally sourced the components some of which had gone out of stock in the interim. We have produced one set of four to proof test them before we go into full production and three have tested fine. The fourth is not behaving and we have been through two build cycles trying to debug it. It has improved on each cycle but is still not quite there and later this week we are going to do a comparative analysis of our lab unit with the production unit, using the production contractor’s test equipment. These are fairly large surface mount boards that are manufactured in a clean room environment so one must work slowly, patiently, and carefully during the debug. As you can imagine this is not filling all of our clients with delight and they definitely do not all appreciate the “how long is a piece of string” nature of debugging.

To speed up the blade manufacturing process we also took a decision – once we were happy with the reinforced blade production and performance – that we would commission additional blade moulds. We have enough of these arriving in about a fortnight to treble the production rate versus where we were, or increase it sixfold versus where we are. That will be a relief as we have more catching up to do both with installed units and with the order backlog.

That brings us to the tricky issue of the order backlog. The good news is that we don’t ordinarily accept deposits and prepayments (we have accepted one for special reasons). The bad news is that on each occasion we have accepted an order in good faith then a few days later something else has set us back. Each time it has seemed to us that the responsible thing is to slow down and figure it out, but of course people who have placed orders don’t see it quite the same way. The still want us to keep to the predicted delivery dates we gave them. Actually not all think like that – some are more understanding, and some are less understanding. Some have now got masts installed or delivered or foundations in the ground, and some don’t. We will be able to give you all dates when we have that fourth PCB through its test. Until then it is always a few weeks away because that is how long it takes to test/produce/assemble/deliver and what we don’t know is when the test cycle will be adequately completed.

In the meantime we try to juggle everybody’s needs as much as we can and we are keeping our heads down and not seeking additional orders. I could try and explain what all this has done to the factory move or our cash flow but that is a story for another day. Likewise this has not been doing wonders for our steady-state business to have all this going on or a frozen factory move. As you will appreciate this is just the bare bones of an even more involved situation so please excuse me if I have missed out details.

Cold Shores - Skiing For Land Mine Awareness

2010-02-25T18:55:00.005Z

This is just a quick blog entry to publicise the Cold Shores expedition; the 2010, British led attempt to traverse the Arctic Island of Svalbard. I used to do a fair amount of mountaineering and this looks like good hard fun. It has a more serious side which we think is a worthy cause. Many British servicemen and those of our allies and innocent civilians in conflict zones worldwide, have become casualties as a result of landmines, and The Halo Trust is an organisation which actively works to remove these weapons. You can read more about them at http://www.coldshores.co.uk/.

We supported them by helping them through the process of specifying and sourcing a solution to power their communications and photographic equipment. They initially came to us with the intention of using our wind turbines but we identified that this was not the best option and that some solar and some specialist battery systems were more suitable for their needs. We don't ordinarily get involved in small solar projects but because of our long experience in expeditions and our sympathy to the cause we have worked to provide them with a solution. We had their leader - Dave Leaning - in for two days and customised the gear for them and taught them how to use it all and made sure it worked with their comms and photo gear.

Over to them now and good luck. You can help them by donating money either to the expedition (these things do cost a bit) or to Halo Trust at http://coldshores.co.uk/donate . You can monitor their progess on line over the coming weeks.

Ampair 600 photos from France and Norway

2009-12-21T19:42:00.003Z

I have just received some nice photos of off grid Ampair 600 units. The first is from Norway where it replaces an old Lakota unit, and the other three are from southern France which are a bit sunnier. The installer was very happy with the final picture.

Shipshop / Schulz-Hohenstein Soehne at BOOT Dusseldorf

2009-11-04T18:56:00.003Z

Our distributor Shipshop / Schulz-Hohenstein Soehne will be exhibiting at Boot Dusseldorf in HAll 11H74. This is the German boat show and is from Jan 23 - 31, 2010.

Schulz-Hohenstein Soehne
Geibelstrasse 9-11, 47057 Duisburg
Contact: Georg Seifert
Tel +49 203 352 044
Fax +49 203 355 432
info@shipshop.de
www.shipshop.de

Ampair 6000 progress update

2009-10-23T17:49:00.003Z

A quick update on where we are with the Ampair 6000. Basically we have started installing and as a result are finding a few snags that we had not flushed out in testing at our own site.

On one site in Scotland the client wiring was not ready and so that installation has not been commissioned yet. We've since had a problem at another site and have asked the Scoittish to hold fire a moment in case we want to make a change to anything - it is a very long way away in case we switch it on too soon.

At a site in eastern England we used a new alternator design that has had bench testing but not had live wind testing at our site. We pulled it forwards in the build sequence because that client wanted the new alternator which is smashing from a performance perspective as it includes a few lessons from testing of the first batch. We've had a lot of problems which are probably because of this decision. We suspect that the alternator is the cause of the problems but equally the site is showing issues with earth leakage. Or it could be a combination of both alternator-inverter and inverter-grid. To add insult to injury our nice remote monitoring system has decided to be uncooperative on this site of all sites. Need less to say we are furiously trying to get to the bottom of this as it affects all turbines that naturally fit into the production sequence after that one. And unfortunately each time we go to site the wind does not blow much. We've struggled with this for two weeks now.

Another site further south has been installed and is going live any day now with the initial batch of alternators which will help us in trying to flush out these problems. We are also building various test rigs and looking to fly a new style alternator here at the factory if the wind cooperates (which it did not when we last tried).

The assembly sequence is going fine and the mast installs are going fine so that side of things is good. The remote monitoring is still a work in progress but is making progress. We are trying to improve a few installability issues with our electrical package - to be truthful more maintainability than installability. These have become more evident as a result of trying to troubleshoot the new alternator unit.

So not quite where we'd like to be, and we are very much scratching our heads on the new alternator unit. But progress none the less.

As it happens two days ago I was at the BWEA annual conference in Liverpool and a colleague at another small wind turbine company told me they'd recently had to switch off all their machines due to a manufacturing defect they found. He said he was getting a lot of grief over this and that clients are absolutely expecting right first time. He found that rather unfair as even Boeing are late by two years on their 787, and often major auto manufacturers are late with new product development or have to do recalls. And these major companies have enormous resources which for sure small wind companies seldom do. His view is that consumers have become detached from the underlying engineering reality as a result of virtual reality and marketing. Anyway I guess we'd better plug away at learning how to solve our issues and this blog post is just to update everybody the same way I updated the visitors to our stand at the BWEA conference.

Ampair 6000 video and on BBC television

2009-07-30T08:50:00.004Z

A couple of weeks ago the BBC visited us to film for the BBC2 Working Lunch programme, including the Ampair 6000.
They broadcast the footage on the same day that the British government made a number of announcements about green jobs and their latest low carbon strategy. They edit things immensely so it doesn't matter how balanced we try to be as the odds are that the clip they use will only be a short segment. So they get the balance from the overall programme rather than from individual clips. In a way that's a pity because the interview segment they used with me was about jobs in the UK and I come across as being quite parochial but I guess that's par for the course and they do their best. They took some footage of the Ampair 6000 as well as the inside of our workshops which they used as the backdrop. They also contrasted our creation of a few jobs and being the UK's oldest turbine manufacturer with the announcements about the Vestas plant closing and the loss of about 600 jobs on the Isle of Wight. As I've said many times the UK government is a lot better at paying consultants to write strategy papers than it is at doing things in practice.

I was going to post the link to the BBC website for people to see but it cannot be viewed outside the UK and expires after two weeks. We did ask them about putting it on our website but it costs £1,150 for a 12-month licence for a 2-minute segment which is a joke. So I went out in the field this morning and took a clip of the Ampair 6000 running in winds between 4-6m/s. If you look carefully in the back left you can see smaller Ampair turbines on poles by our factory. This movie runs OK in QuickTime, not sure about other viewers.

Energy Saving Trust report - "Location, location, location"

2009-07-13T07:22:00.005Z

The Energy Savings Trust have released a very short report into their Domestic Small-scale Wind Field Trial with the snappier subtitle 'Location, location, location'.

The EST claim to be a non-profit making organisation acting as a bridge between government, consumers, and trade bodies. From where I sit they have the same existential objectives as any other organisation and in practice are funded by the major utilities and central government through a system of levies, contracts, and subsidies. They are one of the better para-state organisations and I pay attention to a lot of their work but always ponder why it is being written.

The report itself is the result of over a year of work and 57 sites. They consulted industry prior to starting the work and as a result they expanded the scope from just being a building-mounted urban microwind trial to include freestanding smallwind in rural locations. After a great deal of behind the scenes coaxing and persuasion they ultimately cooperated with the Warwick Wind Trial which front run them. They are not technology discipline experts and have subcontracted analysis of the trial results to Southamption University which is why they still have the capacity to make embarassing gaffes from time to time, sometimes so fundamentally that I was looking forwards to the opportunity to read the full report to check their methodology. Unfortunately although industry encouraged the trial to include vertical axis wind turbines (VAWT) they seem to have evaded the trial net. This trial includes some Renewable Devices Swift units which is very unusual as they are seldom in independent trials.

The published report is frighteningly thin and bereft of almost all the data one would like to see. This is the most obvious thing that has already caused a lot of comment around the world. The other thing that is very obvious to me is that there is no data from the Warwick sites and this is a shame as they are not confidential and we as an industry have already taken our lumps for them. So I suspect that the EST sites include a series that are incredibly embarassing for one or more parties. (I know it can't be us as we only injected units into the EST trial via the WWT).

In advance of publication they met with the various turbine manufacturers to discuss results. Although they discussed the Ampair-specific data with us they did not show us the report, likewise for the other manufacturers. There is a lot less in the public report than I anticipated. It is my understanding that there is a much more comprehensive private report which has been sent to the study funders but I am not sure if this includes the datasets. I personally am uncomfortable inasmuch as I do not know what is being said in that other report which upsets me as I believe it is being made available to one participant, but there are many things I have no control over and so just have to accept as the way the world is. I see from the report that one of the project partners is the Scottish Government and another is the UK government department called DEFRA. It might be that a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to either of these would gain you access to the other report although I doubt it. The EST themselves are a quasi-governmental body and so I believe are ordinarily sheltered from FOI requests.

Perhaps the reason that the EST have such a slim public report is that they are seeking to do the minimum of damage to the industry. There is a long history in the UK of mainstream journalists being only too keen to trash literally anything ("if it bleeds it leads") and certainly when I listened to the EST being interviewed on BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme (equivalent of NPR at drivetime) I felt that EST were doing their best to be low key and supportive but realistic which is probably the most appropriate stance. The same balanced message seems to have come across on the other news items and I think they have done a good job in this respect.

The EST have provisionally agreed to analyse the datasets in support of the IEC / IEA 61400-2 ed 3 revision work that is going on, but not to release the raw data to the IEC / IEA committee. Therefore they will be asking the University of Southampton to conduct the analyis and release only the analysis results into the committee. The area of interest is the suitability of the existing wind class definitions in small wind design & (strength) testing. This illustrates on the one hand that EST are being very protective of their raw data (presumably for commercial reasons), but on the other hand they are trying to be supportive of the smallwind community in its efforts to move forwards. In contrast to some other recent UK (quasi) government funded work the EST are to be praised for this level of support.

You can download the report here.Domestic_small-scale_wind_field_trial_report_July09.pdf

On a different note one commentator has already pointed out that their are photos of Proven turbines on every page so I went through and counted the photos to see how balanced a view of the industry it gives:

Proven = 8
Windsave = 3
Eoltec = 3
Renewable Devices Swift = 2
Ampair = 0
Eclectic = 0
Zephyr = 0
Iskra = 0

MREA small wind conference

2009-06-27T20:16:00.003Z

Last week I was lucky enough to go to Wisconsin to the MREA Small Wind Conference. This was two days of fun ! Luckily the weather was nice when I eventually arrived, after a night in Philadelphia because of extremely bad weather which delayed the connecting flight. Almost everybody there was a small wind professional and there were lots of side meetings going on. Well worth it for anyone in the Americas who is into small wind. The micro wind side of things is pretty much frowned upon though.

I crammed three presentations into two slots which may be of interest. The first is a pretty standard Ampair commercial.

Ampair%20for%20MREA%20conference%2C%20rev%202%20%28June%202009%29.pdf

Then I delivered two presentations on some of the UK trials. One is from the Warwick Wind Trials which were run by Encraft. The other is from the Energy Savings Trust trial and is all they wanted to release prior to the full trial report coming out sometime soon. Both were with kind permission of the relevant trial management.

Encraft%20-%20DS%20for%20MREA%2C%20June%2009.ppt.pdf

EST%20Field%20Trial%20-%20Presentation_D%20Sharman.pdf

In the WWT slideset one slide is repeated twice. I'd meant to put up a slide with turbine failures on it and photos of dead Ampairs, Swifts, and a Windsave. Maybe it was just as well it didn't make it in.

There wasn't a single boring presentation there. One evening Bergey sponsored a load of beer out at the MREA site where they were preparing for the annual MREA Fair which was very welcome and they were the most popular model. Proven seem to have a very good following in the area, ARE seem to be up and coming, and Southwest were well represented as ever. There were about a dozen other manufacturers and a couple of hundred small wind installers and such like.

Ampair 600 and Ampair 6000 certification

2009-06-05T17:39:00.002Z

This was a recent email to all our distributors that has a wider significance.

On the downloads page http://www.ampair.com/ampair/resources_downloads.asp we have now added four new documents in the "certificates" area which are sufficiently important that I write to you all.

The first and most important is the summary test report for the Ampair 600 in the 230V grid connected Mk 2.5 version. This report is issued by NaREC who are a well known and widely respected independent test laboratory. It summarises testing in accordance with BS EN 61400-2; BS EN 61400-11; BS EN 61400-12-1; and BS EN 61400-14 standards as amended by the BWEA Small Wind Safety & Performance Standard.

For those of you who do not know BS EN 61400 is exactly the same as the IEC 61400 suite of wind turbine standards. The -2 part deals with safety & durability, the -11 part deals with acoustic noise, the 12-1 part deals with power performance, and the -14 deals with acoustic tonality etc. The BWEA standard makes some amendments to incorporate recent industry experience and is aligned with the equivalent (but still draft) AWEA standard.

I believe we are the first small wind turbine company to release these particular test reports publicly. This is a very important step for us which on the one hand has the potential to assist us and on the other hand has the potential to harm us. The independent testing carried out in the preparation of this summary test report is absolutely unbiased and extremely rigorous. This means that the client can rely on the contents. It also means there is nowhere for us to hide. You will note if you read the contents that the reference power was measured as 231W which is lower than our stated rated power of 600W. Similarly the reference annual energy was measured as 481 kWh/yr which is lower than our stated rated power of 1232 kWh/yr. There is no escaping the fact that these numbers are lower than we stated and we think it is an important step forwards for the industry that we have the courage to put these independent test reports into the public domain. You will also know that we have always claimed lower numbers than are commonly claimed in the industry for machines of this size (1.7-1.8m diameter rotors) and yet in the independent trials such as the Warwick Wind Trials and the Delta/Zeeland Windtest the Ampair 600 has been shown to be one of the better performers, or in some circumstances the best performer. You will note that the Ampair 600 is designed as a Class I turbine which is the strongest turbine available, and you will also note that it achieved 100% reliability on test.

The performance of the Ampair 600 in the 230V grid connected Mk2.5 configuration is lower than we would like because of the way the turbine interacts with the inverter. We are working very hard to improve this. We have at this time no reason to doubt the performance claims we are making for the Ampair 600 in the battery charge 24V or 48V versions. In due course we will conduct independent testing of the battery charge versions but independent testing is a very expensive process which we struggle to afford and so we will delay that until we think it is economic to do so. This will probably not be until we put forwards the next revision of the 230V grid connected turbine for independent testing. We expect to receive no government subsidy for testing in the UK.

We would like to thank both NaREC and TUV-NEL for their patience and support during this testing process. They are leading the industry in terms of offering a commercially available and affordable small wind turbine testing and certification process. We look forwards to cooperating with them on the next stage which is that of certification under the Microgeneration Certification Scheme which is a requirement for grant funding of some clients in the UK.

We encourage you to use these reports to register the Ampair 600 for any local certification schemes in your countries. If you do so please can you keep us informed so that we can understand your local processes and coordinate your activities where appropriate.

The other three documents are the certificates of conformity for the Aurora PVI 6000 which is the inverter used in the Ampair 6000. These are the grid connection standards to the Spanish EMW, German VDE, and UK G83 standards. Those of you who are making preparations for installing Ampair 6000 units may find them helpful.

Ampair reveals Award Winning new 6kW wind turbine

2009-04-14T18:31:00.004Z

Ampair, the Berkshire, UK based company, has just revealed photographs of its sleek new 6000W x 5.5m turbine, the latest in a long line of reliable, rugged and quiet wind generators. This impressive turbine recently won the prestigious Rushlight Windpower Award 2008 and the company is now accepting orders via its distributors.

The new machine has a rotor diameter of 5.5 m and is ideal for supplying power to remote farms or rural houses, telecoms systems, public buildings, schools or industrial infrastructure, either offshore or onshore, for 230V grid connection or for 48V battery charging.

Photograph shows:
Ampair 6000w x 5.5m on 10m mast supplying a farmhouse in Berkshire, UK

Like all Ampair turbines, it is manufactured from high quality marine grade materials making it particularly suited to remote, coastal or cold-weather applications and in keeping with the company’s quality ethos is designed to be compliant with the IEC 61400-2 standard for a Class I turbine, which means it can be easily and safely installed worldwide. It is a fully sealed unit that does not require costly annual servicing.

A range of mast options is available. As with all turbines, more height gives greater power because of the increase in wind speed so Ampair can supply masts from 10m to 30m in a variety of styles including monopole or lattice; guyed or unguyed.

The price for the grid connected 230V system on a 10m mast is just £13,500+VAT. As Ampair’s managing director David Sharman says “We have always worked on an unsubsidised commercial basis and see no reason to charge the high prices that are the norm in the 6kW market. In my opinion, the current grant subsidies from Westminster and Scotland to favoured manufacturers are propping up this practice and are a distortion of the market and should be withdrawn immediately.”

Since 1973 Ampair has been recognised as a leader in small wind turbine technology with over twenty thousand units installed worldwide. There are Ampair turbines from the Antarctic to Alaska, and the Solent to the Sahara including some of the harshest environments known to man. The lessons learned from this continuous history are always incorporated into every generation of the company’s products, ensuring an extremely high “return for investment” level due to reliability and longevity.

The family-owned Ampair is Britain’s oldest wind turbine manufacturer and is proud to be an independent and thriving manufacturer with strong export sales through its network of global distributors. Additionally, the company prides itself on its after sales service and boasts that it can still service and maintain units going back over many years, often by the same experienced technicians who manufactured them decades ago.

The new Ampair 6000 fits neatly into a slot in the market which Ampair has been working to fill for several years to satisfy the rising demand for a turbine of this size made to Ampair’s high standards.

MORE INFORMATION:
T: 0845 3890660
F: 01344 303312
E: sales@ampair.com
W: www ampair.com

ATTACHMENTS:
Ampair product range, 2009
CD%203116%20Ampair%20product%20range%202009%20%28rev%201.0%2C%2015%20April%202009%29.pdf
Ampair 6000 specification sheet
Ampair%206000%20x%205%205%20technical%20specifications.pdf
Ampair 6000 drawings
ASMB00261.pdf
Rushlight awards logo

Ampair photo for print use

Ampair press release text as .doc
Ampair%20reveal%20new%206Kw%20wind%20turbine.doc
Ampair press release text as .pdf
Ampair%20reveal%20new%206Kw%20wind%20turbine.pdf

French hill farmers and British feed in tariffs

2009-04-13T21:13:00.006Z

On my way back from the European Wind Energy Conference in Marseille a few weeks ago I called in to see an old neighbour of mine who runs a farm in the Pyrenees. After convincing the sheepdogs that they knew me (these are the genuine sheep guard dog variety) I found him and his daughter with their flock of a few hundred sheep who were busy lambing. They thrust a litre Coke bottle full of warm goats milk in my hands and we got on with feeding the lambs. They keep a few dozen goats and use the spare milk for the rejected lambs or the runts.

After an hour of this we went out into the yard and he gesticulated at the conifers behind the barns and told me he was about to cut them down. His explanation was that he had just leased out the south facing roofs of all his barns to a solar company. He is at about a 1000m altitude and his roofs have no obstructions on them and face nicely south at 30 degrees slope which makes them almost as perfect as one can get for solar. The leasing company is going to pay him a annual rent provided he files all the paperwork and keeps the roofs clean and unshaded – hence no pine needles. The leasing company is going to sell the power back to the grid under the new French feed-in-tariff laws and then they are going to securitise the future energy sales in the financial markets. The feed-in-tariff in France is about 40 cents/kWh or so (I forget the exact number). Feed in tariffs are one of the types of microgeneration tariffs I have described in previous blog entries.

Since electricity in France usually costs 10-15 cents/kWh someone is subsidising this deal. Basically that someone is the average person in France who is subsidising the few who have the opportunity to put solar on their roofs. These are normally affluent middle class people along with quite a few farmers with handy roofs, most of whom are pretty poor in the area I know (these are not the grain baron variety). The same thing has happened in Germany and Spain. So most (poor) folk are subsidising a few (rich) folk make more money.

And it gets even more eye watering – because of the way any guaranteed income stream can be securitised the finance community get mega rich setting up all these deals. Don’t get any silly ideas that there will be serious job creation going on in France because all the factories churning out these solar panels already exist. They’re all in Germany, Spain, California, and Japan who were the first to put in feed-in tariffs and who have spare capacity, oh and China. So there has been a real first-mover advantage for those countries who got their industry moving and from here on in poor local taxpayers subsidise middle class property owners and rich financiers.

Actually in France they have ways of making sure that some solar factories will get built to provide some local employment. The same feed-in-tariff legislation will be introduced in the UK next year (2010). The difference in the UK is that the UK is so far behind in the solar manufacturing game, and has governments who couldn’t organise building a factory if their salaries depended on it (which they do, but don’t realise) and so there will be precious few solar jobs created apart from the first flush of installation work.

However in the UK we do have a small wind turbine industry. If we were German we would introduce a feed-in-tariff for wind turbines but not for solar. In fact that’s why the Germans introduced a feed-in-tariff for solar (which they make) but not for small wind turbines (which they don't make). After all they had no intention of playing fair – nor did the Spanish, or the Japanese. Common sense would dictate that we would set a modest feed-in-tariff. Just enough to encourage sensible growth in the domestic small wind industry without fostering the sort of solar roof-leasing by imported solar I’ve described above, and certainly not enough to set off a boom and bust boondoggle. And if we do decide to be generous and give some tariff to solar then surely we would be sensible and set it at a lower level than for small wind.
It would be nice to think this wouldn’t it ? So obviously sensible to build up British manufacturing industry ? Let’s see.

A couple of weeks ago we got a call from a company called Datamonitor (http://www.datamonitor.com/) who were reading our blog entries about microgeneration tariffs and wondering if they could quote it. They rang back later to say that they’ve decided to redo the work from scratch which I think is a backhanded way of saying that they intend to sell the report they are going to write. When folk like Datamonitor start covering the tariff space that indicates they think there’s money to be made.

It's going to be fun the next few years isn't it.

Delta / Zeeland trial - results update April 2009

2009-04-10T14:21:00.003Z

The April update from the Delta / Zeeland trial has arrived, with the March data.

Zeeland%20small%20wind%20turbine%20testfield%20%28end%20Mar%202009%29.pdf

The energy consumption figures have been updated and some quite drastic downwards revisions have occurred. This is odd and I do not know why it has happened but it does not affect the trends.

The mystery of the zero power output from the Windwalker has been somewhat clarified with the note "the Windwalker was installed in January 2008 but has not operated".

The trend remains that the Ampair, Skystream, and Fortis are the good performing economic turbines with the Zephyr AirDolphin working well but being expensive.

The Ropatec 3kW seems to have gained a dramatic improvement and is now outperforming the Ropatec 6kW which is most odd. As an aside the planning permission request for a 6kW Ropatec at our local Tesco supermarket has just been withdrawn.

The Turby has now been repaired.

Sander Mertens of Ingenious has done some analysis of the site layout in the figure above (supplied by Fortis, courtesy Sander Mertens) in which the red line is the row of turbines which runs from NW to SE. It has been confirmed that in the spreadsheet the turbines are listed from NW to SE, so the 6kW Ropatec is at the North and the Windwalker is at the South. Since the wind direction is generally from the SW it might be thought that this slightly favours the most southerly turbines. However because of the housing estates to the SW and a belt of trees to the NE it turns out that the most northerly three turbines are the best located. Sanders has indicated the areas of wind obstruction in orange dots on the image.

Sander Mertens is speaking at the forthcoming International Small Wind Conference organised by the BWEA and BRE which is on 22, 23 April 2009 in Watford, London. It will be interesting to hear more about this trial.

Delta / Zeeland trial - results update March 2009

2009-03-07T10:38:00.006Z

The latest results have come in from the Delta / Zeeland trial of small wind turbines in the Netherlands. They do not normally release public results at one month intervals so I expect it is because they want to announce some news.

Their email gives the following information:

1. The Renewable Device Swift turbine was removed on 31 January 2009 and will be replaced by a Raum 1.3.

2. The Raum 1.3 turbine has been installed but the inverter has not been installed yet. Installation is expected to be completed in mid April 2009.

3. The Turby has had a fault during all of February 2009.

Looking at the data it seems to support all the trends that were in place, i.e.:

- The vertical axis turbines are the worse performers.

- The Ampair, Fortis, and SWW Skystream are the best performers.

- The Zephyr AirDolphin is technically a good performer but commercially so expensive it is not commercially attractive. In fairness to Ampair I should point out that our installer has put an price on the Ampair that is unusually high so we too are labouring under an heavy economic burden.

The strongest wind month was January with an annual average of 4.4m/s. Some people are commenting that winds on this site are unusually low but I disagree as they are in fact typical of the 12m height wind speeds at most rural locations where substantial communities live. It is extremely unusual to find large groups of people living in winds of higher than this and recent work in the UK tends to support our observations (see the Warwick Wind Trials and the EST microwind trials).

Other comments I have heard are that there is wind shadowing occurring between turbines. There may be some truth in this as the turbines are on a line SSE-NNW and the average wind has come from almost dead S. So anyone is immediately downstream of the Skystream (the most efficient wind harvester and with a large diameter) coulfd reasonably raise this as an issue. There is obviously scope here for a quick undergraduate project to explore this issue further. I don't actually know the sequence of turbines in the line.

The results can be downloaded here:

.Zeeland%20small%20wind%20turbine%20testfield%20%2812m+%29.pdf

As always those manufacturers who have had the courage to participate are to be commended. Doing stuff like this in public is difficult for small companies. Also the Delta / Zeeland trial organisers are doing a good job and showing that pretty basic but independent trials can yield very informative results for consumers.

UK microgeneration tariff update - March 2009

2009-03-07T10:28:00.003Z

There has been feedback from three utilities and I have updated the rate information and the calculation tool which can be down loaded below. I have not agreed with all their comments (suprise) but as before note that most of the people working in the microgeneration teams in the utilities are trying to do a good job with very little visible support from their organisations.

PDF version - information only:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.pdf

Excel version - includes working calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.xls

There has also been feedback from readers of this blog who have found it helpful and which was our aim. Here at Ampair we concentrate on design & manufacture of small wind turbines and small hydro turbines. The rest is over to our distributors / installers and the wider public who hopefully include a few of our clients.

More information and explanation is in our blog entry below:

http://www.boost-energy.com/boost/2009/02/uk-microgeneration-tariffs.html

UK microgeneration tariffs - February 2009

2009-02-08T11:20:00.013Z

[Note that the spreadsheet calculator have been updated in the March blog entry above. However all the explanation and information below will still be useful.]

UK microgeneration tariffs
For 35-years Ampair has concentrated on manufacturing battery charging systems – our wind turbines, micro hydro turbines, and solar PV systems. Over the last couple of years the grid-connected version of the Ampair 600 wind turbine has been available but even so we have had relatively few grid-connected clients. We expect this to change over the coming years. A client who is running one of our prototypes recently asked for our advice on the best deal available from the UK electrical utilities for a microgeneration tariff. This caused me to delve into the current tariff deals and this blog entry discusses the results. Even better you can download our handy little spreadsheet calculator that will help you identify the best deal for you. The spreadsheet can be used in other countries.

The UK has one of the most complex grid systems in the world from a regulatory and commercial perspective. In this blog entry I will ignore most of the complexity and just talk about “the utilities”.

There are a bewildering array of tariffs available to clients even before we get into the specialist discussion of microgeneration tariffs. Again I am going to just concentrate on the microgeneration tariffs, and specifically only on the electrical tariffs (because yes, thermal tariffs are coming one day).

The structure of microgeneration tariffs
It used to be that customers on the electrical grid paid the utility for three basic elements:

- a meter charge

- a connection charge

- a tariff per unit of electricity (per kWh) that they import from the grid, i.e. £/kWh import. This is what you pay for normally when you buy electricity, i.e. electricity that you imported into your house from the grid.

In addition to this customers with grid-connected microgeneration have two more elements to consider:

- a tariff per unit of electricity (per kWh) that they export to the grid, i.e. £/kWh export, sometimes known as a feed-in-tariff

- a tariff per unit of renewable electricity that they generate, called a ROC which stands for Renewable Obligation Certificate

Now let”s look at these in more detail because you will need to understand the system to figure out what is the best deal for you.

What is a ROC
In the UK the utilities are forced to buy a certain amount of electricity generated from renewable sources. The quota they must buy is supposed to increase over time. Every generator of renewable electricity is given a Renewable Obligation Certificate (a ROC) as they generate electricity. Then they sell the electricity to the utilities and separately they sell the ROC certificates. The sales take place in an auction process but we don”t need to worry about that – all we need to know is that the renewable electricity we generate has two values, firstly for the electricity itself, and secondly for the ROC. The extra value of the ROC is supposed to help pay for the extra cost of building expensive wind farms and hydro stations rather than cheap coal fired power stations. In your case it helps pay you to install your microgeneration system.

If you have lots of ROCs you can go to the auction and sell them yourself. But if you only have a few you might prefer to sell them to your utility company so as to avoid the administration. You can also sell them to intermediaries who may offer you a higher price than the utilities, and who will then bundle them with other people”s ROCs to make a more attractive auction package. You can only sell ROCs to the intermediaries if your utility has not locked you into a contract which forces you to sell them to the utility. This is what I mean when I talk about “locked ROCs” and “unlocked ROCs”.

One ROC certificate is supposed to be for quite a large chunk of electricity and is worth about £40 - £50 at auction. So in practice it is ordinarily simpler for the microgeneration owner to sell their ROCs to the utility who is prepared to accept partial ROCs and pay a £/kWh fee for them. The utility will then bundle them with lots of other peoples” partial ROCs to make a useful quantity for administrative purposes.

In the future ROCs will get banded and microgenerators will get even more ROCs but let”s not discuss that except to bear in mind that over the next few years there will be more money for the householder from selling their ROCs, which is generally a good thing.

An important thing about ROCs is that they are given for the generation of renewable electricity and it doesn”t matter whether you use that electricity yourself or whether you export it to the grid. But it does mean that you must have an electricity meter in the correct location to count the renewable electricity that you generate. This ROC meter is in a different position than the import meter (see picture). So you can get paid even if you keep all the electricity to yourself !

Electricity metering for an export tariff (feed-in-tariff)
When the microgenerator produces electricity the electricity can either be consumed in the premises or any left over must flow out into the grid (please don”t try storing it in batteries if you live in the UK – it”s not a good idea but it”s too big a discussion for this blog entry). This is often called feeding-in to the grid which is why these tariffs can be called a feed-in tariff. The less electricity you consume the more is left over and the more that will flow out into the grid. The technology makes sure that electricity you make is consumed in preference to electricity you import. In the old days electricity that flowed out into the grid would have turned the meter backwards but these days the utilities install meters that will turn in only one direction (in the old days people could steal electricity by rewiring their meters in reverse until anti-theft meters were invented). So unless you change your meter the electricity will still flow out into the grid but it won”t be counted. (By the way be very careful if reading American websites as they often talk about “net metering” as if it was literally turning the meter backwards which it isn”t).

Because of the invention of anti-theft meters a special meter has to be fitted that keeps two totals – the electricity imported and the electricity exported. This is often called a smart meter and some of these bidirectional meters are smart meters, but not all of them. The people you will talk to in the utilities will call all of them smart meters or export meters and it is best just to use the same name as they do so as not to confuse things.

You will still pay your normal amount for the electricity imported. But now we come to the good bit - by law in the UK the electricity companies must offer you a price for the renewable electricity you export. Unfortunately the bad bit is that some of the electricity companies bend the law by offering a price of zero for electricity produced from most renewable microgeneration technologies. So this means they can tell the politicians that they fully support customers who wish to make a cleaner environment, and then they go out and offer a price of zero. The politicians and Ofgem (the energy regulator) aren”t very good at fining the companies for this downright evasive behaviour which is because of something called regulatory capture, i.e. the politicians and regulators tend to do what the utilities want rather than what voters want. If anybody doesn”t believe me I suggest you ring up EON.powergen and ask for an export tariff for hydro microgeneration. Actually things are now better than they used to be and EON.powergen and Scottish Power are pretty much the laggards in this respect. You won”t be able to find anyone on the Scottish Power switchboard who will understand what a microgeneration tariff or a feed-in tariff is (of course I hope they read this blog and are shamed into cleaning up their act – or that Ofgem fine them).

Over the last few years things have improved in this respect but let us discuss another way some companies evade their responsibilities. In order to get paid for exporting electricity to the grid you will need an export meter. Actually getting an export meter fitted can be a very daunting prospect for a customer who is struggling to cope with the terminology and the technology. Helpfully EON.powergen will not install an export meter for you and will not tell you how to get one fitted. So although EON.powergen will pay you £0.10 per kWh of solar electricity you export, most clients will never get paid because they”ll never be able to get an export meter fitted. Remember that EON.powergen discriminate against electricity from wind, hydro, and fuel cells and will pay zero for that. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking that some utilities were really going out of their way to be difficult. I should point out that EON are a German company and have cooperated enthusiastically with the German government to support a feed-in-tariff in Germany so it is obviously possible for EON to do it if they want to, it”s just that they obviously don”t want to enough in the UK. Maybe German politicians are a more determined lot than British politicians, who knows. Lest anyone think I am beating up on EON you should try telephoning Scottish Power because I still haven”t managed to figure out the secret words to find anyone who can talk to me (and I”ve tried please, and I”ve tried talking to managers on three different phone lines). Another company who are somewhat difficult about export meters are British Gas / Centrica who will also not tell you how to get an export meter fitted and will not fit one for you. By the way BG Centrica will pay you a huge 5p per kWh you export which is getting pretty close to that magic zero I was talking about earlier.

Whilst I am on the subject of export meters if any company tries telling you that they are not permitted to arrange an export meter I am afraid it is absolute nonsense. Yes I fully understand that there are huge regulatory issues around the subject of export meters but some companies manage to be helpful and still comply with the spirit of the regulations so it can be done if they try. Congratulations to Scottish and Southern Energy for showing the way in this respect because not only will they fit an export meter but they will also do it for free. It took them about two weeks to turn up and fit mine when I asked them as an experiment (I figured I”d better try it out on myself before I sent them to a client). It took the technician about half an hour to fit the export meter.

How much will you be paid
Some companies have decided to make the customer”s life easier by paying a lot for the ROCs but paying nothing for the actual exported electricity. This means that you don”t need an export meter, they don”t worry about the hassle of fitting an export meter, nobody has the cost of an export meter, and everybody is happy provided they pay you enough. This is what Good Energy and Ecotricity do and they will both pay you around £0.10/kWh for the ROC value which as we will see later are probably the best microgeneration deals available in the UK.

Although RWE.npower will not advise you on fitting an export meter and will not fit one for you they have a different way of making the customer”s life easier. If you want they will assume that you export 50-60% of the electricity you produce and pay you an export tariff for that amount, plus a small amount for the ROC. So they pay £0.035/kWh for the ROC and £0.10 - £0.12/kWh for half of the power as your export tariff. This works out slightly stingier than the Good Energy and Ecotricity deals. Perhaps their import tariffs are slightly cheaper in which case they may still be a better utility to choose as your supplier.

With Scottish and Southern it is a similar deal to RWE.npower except that they fit a meter for free. The actual rates they give you are higher for the ROC and lower for the export tariff compared with RWE.npower but the total benefit tends to work out about the same for most people. On balance I tend to prefer the Scottish and Southern package versus the RWE.npower package for two reasons. Firstly if people have real meters then they are incentivised to minimise electricity consumption which is the best way to save money and look after the environment – the assumptions made in “profiling” discriminate against people learning better behaviour. Secondly Scottish and Southern Energy don”t discriminate between different types of renewable electricity (except for one of their tariffs, discussed below).

Let me discuss the discrimination issue further. Here at Ampair we manufacture wind turbines in the UK and we sell them to British customers (and we export them all over the world). Then a utility will pay a feed-in tariff of say 10p per kWh for electricity from one of our wind turbines but it will pay 12p per kWh for electricity from a solar panel. Almost all solar panels sold in the UK are imported from Germany, Spain or China and I do not see why we should be encouraging British consumers to buy imported solar panels rather than domestic wind turbines. What we should really do is to force the utilities to offer the same tariff for all technologies and then let the client decide which is the correct technology for the client”s site. In this I am at least principled unlike the German government which has launched their solar industry using a tariff that discriminates in favour of their domestic solar manufacturers and against British small wind turbine manufacturers. I am also annoyed in this respect by Scottish and Southern Energy who should know better, and are offering 20p per kWh but only for solar.

To put all these numbers in perspective the feed-in tariff for solar microgeneration in Germany is about 40p per kWh. A shame the Germans discriminate against small wind turbines or we would have a nice business over there, or in Spain, or in France. Oh and compare the export tariffs with the import tariffs – if the utilities could organise their billing systems they would be making a profit out of you producing electricity which they buy from you at a lower cost than they sell it to your neighbour, i.e. your capital investment would be subsidising them. Something”s not right here and it won”t be right until the export tariff (excluding the ROC element) is at least equal to the import tariff as a minimum.

Understanding your utility partner
I prefer to think of the utilities as partners rather than suppliers as it gets me in the right frame of mind. Even though I may sometimes be disappointed by their behaviour they do have an important job to do. For example they have to give you continuity of supply when your microgeneration system isn”t producing, and they have to handle all the administration, and they have to pay you some money. If you are lucky they may even have to pay you more than you pay them.

Choosing between them can be difficult. Even the first step of getting the relevant information out of all of them is practically impossible – as I”ve said before I challenge you to get past the Scottish Power switchboard. As a general rule their websites are unhelpful. Some have tucked microgeneration away in a corner of their energy efficiency section, but even then they don”t give important information such as tariff rates and telephone numbers. Some of them make assumptions that are wrong or unhelpful. And some don”t exist at all. Trying to phone the telephone numbers which can be found is depressing as they are almost all routed to answering machines or are disconnected. So I also tried ringing all the switchboards just like a standard client would. After a great deal of perseverance I was able to get through to the right specialist department most of the time. Typically it took about four – six telephone calls per company and about 45-60 minutes on hold plus a lot of coaxing on my part. I have admitted failure with Scottish Power as my life is too short. With EDF they get the runner-up prize for the worst switchboard as their people refused to talk to me unless I was in an EDF region. In the end I gave up with the EDF switchboard and used a number I found elsewhere on the web.

Once I had got through to the specialist department I got the data I needed and explained that I would be putting it on the Ampair blog. It turned out I already knew some of the people from various industry committees and most of them are a good bunch. In general the specialist microgeneration teams are small and include pretty committed people who are not very well supported by the organisations they are in. Don”t get mad with them as they are mostly trying to change things for the better. They are also supposed to be their organisations experts and I am afraid that a substantial fraction of them do not yet know sufficient to advise their organisations authoritatively which is worrying – they tend to be staffed by the less experienced personnel. The four organisations who stood out for their better level of knowledge were Ecotricity, Good Energy, Scottish and Southern Energy, and RWE.npower.

I have made a note of all of the microgeneration tariff information, including the tariff names and the telephone numbers of the specialist departments on the attached spreadsheet. This alone should be a huge step forwards if you want to compare your options and make any further enquiries. I”ve sent this to those utilities which I had the email addresses of and updated it where I got given corrections. I have not bothered to record website details as most were so appalling, with one or two exceptions.

Excel version of Ampair tariff information + calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.xls

PDF version of Ampair tariff information + calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.pdf

I fully understand the issues that the utilities are grappling with, including the ones they don”t want to talk about in public. This is already a long enough blog entry so I”ll discuss that another time. In the meantime let”s get on to the next topic, that of actually choosing your utility partner

Choosing your utility partner
Assuming you are at least partly motivated by financial considerations you will want to try and understand which utility is giving you the best deal. The second page of the spreadsheet is a calculation tool which I have put together to cope with most circumstances and will explain next. I have locked the spreadsheets to prevent you deleting calculation cells by accident, but you can change data in some yellow cells which I have deliberately left unlocked.

Firstly if you have no connection to the electrical grid then you should choose the Good Energy “homegen offgrid” tariff. This means you rely on batteries.

Secondly assuming you are like most UK customers you are a grid-connected client. So look in the top right corner of the second page of the spreadsheet where there are some bright yellow cells. Enter values into these:

- Enter your average annual total consumption in kWh (which may be called “units” on your electricity bill). A typical UK house might use about 3,000 – 6,000 kWh/yr but it can be a lot less and I use about 1,200 kWh/yr in a 2-bed maisonette.

- Enter a default import rate. This just helps put all the utilities into perspective. It will probably be in the range £0.12/kWh - £0.15/kWh at the moment.

- Select your microgeneration technology. You will need to put your cursor on this cell and select from wind, solar (PV), hydro, or fuel cell. Some of the tariffs are only available for some of the technologies and so depending on what you select the calculation tool will “grey out” the tariffs that cannot be used for your technology. If you want to have multiple technologies I am afraid the utilities aren”t so good at coping with you unless you choose one of the tariffs that is available for “all technologies”.

- Enter your average annual total generation in kWh. If you have a 1kW microwind turbine and are in a city this might be as low as 100kWh but if you have a 6kW small wind turbine and live on a windy hill this might be as high as 8,000 kWh/yr. So this depends on your technology of choice and on your location. If you are not sure then your microgeneration installer should be able to advise you. Alternatively you could look at the Encraft website for some handy prediction calculators for the various technologies. Please do not telephone Ampair – although we make wind turbines we are not an advice line and instead you should telephone our distributors who organise installation if you want to buy one of our turbines.

- Enter your likely export fraction in %. If you are installing a lot of microgeneration compared to your consumption then this might be as high as 75%. If your microgeneration is relatively small compared to consumption then it may be nearer to 25%. If in doubt try 50%.

Now scan down the spreadsheet and you will see that the white cells are the likely size of your annual electricity bill after taking into account the electricity you don”t need to buy as well as the money you are paid for ROCs and electricity you export. In almost all circumstances I find that Good Energy and Ecotricity tie for joint first place, and that RWE.npower and Scottish and Southern Energy tie for joint second place which is why I have put these four at the top of the spreadsheet.

To improve the accuracy of your prediction and to allow you to update the spreadsheet as new tariffs become available you can also enter data into the light yellow cells. It is probably worth contacting the utilities of interest to find out the applicable standard (i.e. import) tariffs as this may swing the selection between the different utilities (especially if you also buy gas from the same utility).

These calculations do not take into account the cost of fitting an export meter but the better four utilities have structured their tariffs so that this is essentially zero as discussed above. If a company insists on you buying an export meter and is unhelpful then it is probably a pretty good indication that they don”t deserve your business.

With RWE.npower you can sign up to “juice” which ensures that the electricity you import comes from renewable sources. They will not charge you extra for this and any RWE.npower customer can sign up (spread the word). Using renewable sources is a given if you buy from Good Energy or Ecotricity but often their import tariffs are a bit more expensive. I am not sure of the situation with Scottish and Southern Energy in this respect but they are definitely very committed to their large scale renewable energy projects so they deserve support as well. A lot of people criticise the small print in the commitments of these four companies but at least they are trying.

Summary
This is complicated but the little spreadsheet calculator makes it a lot easier. A car is complicated as well but society teaches us about cars from the day we are born – one day society will teach us all about using and conserving energy from the day we are born. In the meantime I hope this helps explain your options.
The four utilities I put at the top of the spreadsheet are also the four who I find most supportive in all the industry meetings and discussions which is a welcome surprise. That doesn”t mean we always agree with each other.

If you think these feed-in-tariffs and ROC prices are too low contact your MP and ask when we will have a microgeneration feed-in tariff of 40p/kWh common to all technologies including wind and hydro. Don”t take no for an answer and don”t allow your MP to be evasive on the need for the tariff to be a common rate for all the microgeneration technologies. Don”t be fobbed off with delays. There”s an election coming quite soon and you can remind your MP that they work for you and not the other way around.

Also ask when Ofgem are going to fine the evasive utilities so as to drive the message home that this is getting serious.

I hope that soon this spreadsheet is out of date and the worse performing utilities have improved dramatically.

Excel version of Ampair tariff information + calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.xls

PDF version of Ampair tariff information + calculator:
UK_microgeneration_export_tariffs.pdf

Delta / Zeeland trial - results update February 2009

2009-02-05T15:58:00.004Z

The Delta / Zeeland small wind turbine wind trial has released another set of results so that the data now covers a ten month period through until the end of January 2009. This is a trial of eleven turbines in a row in a relatively coastal area of the Netherlands.

The previous results covered the first six months and were discussed here, here, and here.

Since then I believe that RD Swift and Ropatec have made some changes to their turbines. The smaller Ropatec (the 3kW) is now performing better but the larger (the 6kW) seems unchanged. The RD Swift does not appear to have a different performance.

The better performers continue to be Southwest, Fortis, and Ampair. The Zephyr AirDolphin also does well but is very expensive.

The results can be downloaded here.Zeeland%20small%20wind%20turbine%20testfield%20%2812m%29.pdf

Warwick Wind Trial seminar 13 Jan 2009 - presentations

2009-01-14T08:06:00.009Z

Yesterday the Warwick Wind Trial final results seminar took place.

From an Ampair perspective the trial has tended to confirm what we suspected about urban grid-connected microwind, i.e. technologically difficult, unconvincing wind resource albeit actually marginally better than we anticipated, and challenging economics for everyone. Nevertheless it was pleasing to see that Ampair had the highest annual power output, the highest capacity factor, and the most honest power curve. For the time being Ampair will sell into the grid connected urban microwind segment but only to customers who insist on purchasing, and who understand the limitations.

Here is a list of the speakers and the files of their presentations:

Results of the Warwick Wind Trials
- David Hailes, Encraft
David%20Hailes%20-%20Encraft%20-%20Overview%20of%20the%20Warwick%20Wind%20Trial.pdf
- Helen Brown, Encraft
Helen%20Brown%20-%20Encraft%20-%20Results%20of%20the%20Warwick%20Wind%20Trial.pdf

Current Academic Work on Microwind
- Prof Simon Watson, Loughborough University
Simon%20Watson%20-%20Loughborough%20University.pdf

An Industry Perspective
- David Sharman, Ampair
WWT%20final%20results%20%28for%20Encraft%20in%20Jan%202009%29.pdf

New Tools and Techniques for Wind Predicion
- Henrietta Stock, Carbon Trust
Henrietta%20Stock%20-%20Carbon%20Trust.pdf

Economic Opportunities for Small Wind in the UK
- Alex Murley, BWEA
Alex%20Murley%20-%20BWEA.pdf

Noise Issues and Installations Standards for Small Wind Turbines
- Dr Panagiota Pantazopoulo, BRE
Giota%20Pantazopoulou%20-%20BRE.pdf

Premininary Results of the EST Wind Trials
- Jaryn Bradford, Energy Saving Trust
Jaryn%20Bradford%20-%20Energy%20Saving%20Trust.pdf

The small and microwind industry owe thanks to the funding sponsors of the Warwick Wind Trial including Pilkington Energy Trust, the Warwick District Council, Warcick County Council, BRE, and the Energy Savings Trust. Special thanks are due to Encraft who conceived and managed the trial.

The final report is here (warning this is a big file):
- Warwick Wind Trial final report, Encraft
.Warwick+Wind+Trials+Final+Report%3Dfinal%20release.pdf

And all the previous reports and much more information on the trial can be found on the Warwick Wind Trial website

International Small Wind Conference 2009

2008-12-20T16:48:00.005Z

Two-day international small wind conference
Organised by BRE and BWEA
22-23 April 2009
Be part of the first truly international event for small wind systems!

In 2009 the UK will play host to BRE and BWEA's inaugural international conference, for a technology which is seeing unprecedented market growth the world over.

Small wind systems are taking off in a big way. Driven by government policy, planning, building regulations, climate change and increasing fossil fuel prices, microgeneration technologies are increasingly becoming an integral part of national, householder or business approaches to energy use and onsite generation.

Two days of seminars, workshops, demonstrations, educational sessions and networking opportunities will bring all constituents of the global sector together with focus given to renewable energy policy, international markets, technology awareness, technical research, and educational issues.

The conference will attract attendance from the international microgeneration industry, national Government, policy makers, the financial sector, the construction sector, academia, the media, as well as consumers and businesses interested in generating their own clean green renewable energy!

To register your interest for ISWC2009 and receive further information, contact Caroline McGill at events@bre.co.uk

-----------------------------------------------
This conference continues the sequence of one-day small wind seminars that BRE have been running for several years. It will be a two-day event which we as a small wind community can use to meet each other: suppliers, manufacturers, installers, clients, policy makers, and related parties such as planners and consultants. It is intended to be the European equivalent of the MREA Small Wind Conference that takes place in Wisconsin in mid-June each year.

Delta trial per Fortis

2008-11-30T14:40:00.003Z

Last week at the BWEA Small Wind Systems Technical Sub-Group meeting (what a mouthful, we normally just call it the BWEA tech cte) the folks at Fortis attended and gave a presentation which I have attached below, along with a press release from Fortis regarding the trial. These are both in english and give quite a lot of background to the trials which may be useful as the Zeeland Windtest literature is only available in Dutch.

The BWEA tech cte is open to companies from all countries. Anybody can join the BWEA. At the moment there are representatives from Ropatec of Italy, SouthWest of the USA, and Fortis of the Netherlands. There are some installers who represent some other manufacturers but they do not seem to actively represent 'their' manufacturers. Just contact the BWEA if you want to know more.

pres%20BWEA.pdf

Home%20wind%20turbines%20tested.pdf

Warwick Wind Trial seminar 13 Jan 2009

2008-11-24T17:32:00.008Z

The Warwick Wind Trial final results are due out early next year. This is the first public trial of urban microwind. I have yet to see the final results but each time they get more data and do more analysis the more I find interesting things inside them. The consultancy that has managed the trials is Encraft and they are holding a seminar:

13 January 2009
0900 - 1700

Hill Close Garden Trust
Warwick

The seminar includes a bus ride around to some local installations amongst which is the Wolseley Sustainable Building Centre. To book a place contact booking@encraft.co.uk .

The price is £200 per person inc lunch and coach tour, £125 per person for early birds and students.

Manufacturers involved in the trial are Ampair, Eclectic, Windsave, and Zephyr. There were also Renewable Device Swift units in the trial briefly but they were withdrawn.

The flyer for the seminar can be downloaded by clicking on the link below.
Jan%2013%20-%20Microwind%20Complete%20Picture.pdf

Torfaen eco-building

2008-11-15T17:04:00.005Z

Working through a backlog that I'm trying to get off my desk Torfaen County Borough Council were asking about the noise levels of the Ampair 100. I pointed them in the direction of Paul Gipe's trials (see here and here) and asked why.

Turns out that they have built an eco-building on one of the industrial estates they manage and they were going through a BREEAM assessment. This is an interesting project because as they point out industrial buildings (warehouses & factories) aren't usually very environmentally sound.

The Ampair 100 on the building probably is not hugely relevant in the overall scheme of things. But a lot of the other stuff certainly is. I've put the pdf download about their project below. For some reason I do not seem to able to control where blogger puts file links.

Eco-building%20Overview2.pdf

Northanger visiting Antarctic peninsular

2008-11-09T18:18:00.006Z

These two photos were just sent by Roger Robinson who was on Northanger about 5-years ago and visited the Antarctic peninsular. He apologises for the quality as these are scans from slides. They look fine to me.

I should point out that Northanger run or support various 'commercial' expeditions - just look at the Northanger website for more info. Having organised and been on both commercial and non-commercial expeditions I'm not always sure of the difference. Style surely is the real issue and we like the Northanger style going right back to the Smith Island ascent of Greg Landreth back in 1995. The chap who told me the tale of this was on the second Joint Services expedition to the island and he was impressed.

Ampair sponsor Northanger

2008-11-09T13:07:00.005Z

Greg Landreth & Keri Pashuk saling Northanger away from Hourglass Bay on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut – Canada; with the blades of the Ampair 100 they use at the top of the picture

Northanger is a yacht, two people, and a way of living. For the last 18-years co-skippers Greg Landreth and Keri Pashuk have taken the steel ketch 'Northanger' to the extreme ends of the oceans on a permanent expedition.

Ampair first joined them when they over-wintered 1999 / 2000 by freezing Northanger into the ice of Hourglass Bay on Ellesmere Island. Since then their Ampair 100 has been in constant use. Recently they contacted us for some spare blades and we recognised the yacht from our own mountaineering experiences and were very happy to discover that they had been using Ampair all these years. After that we were happy to become an official Northanger sponsor.

As with many people their electrical needs have increased of late due to adoption of more modern conveniences. They are now putting a second Ampair on Northanger and we wish them many more years of serious adventure.

Delta / Zeeland trial update - November 2008

2008-11-03T18:32:00.006Z

I have added in the price/kWh analysis on the last two slides of the presentation for the first six months of data. I didn't have time to do this before. I assume 20-year lifetimes for all units, no maintenance, and no change in wind regime. This is simplistic of course but occasionally I have to do the day job.

Delta Zeeland wind turbine trial presentation update (look at the bottom of this blog post)

Some folk have done a bit more digging into the trial:

- Olino
- Newenergyfocus

One of these includes a full NPV analysis.

The Zeeland folk have commented that they expected a 6m/s average and indeed it will be interesting to see what the average is after we have had the winter episodes in.

The Swift folk have commented about inverter tuning in one of the reports on the trial and it looks as if they will do a spot of tuning. The holy grail is auto-adaptive control algorithms which I know were discussed at least three years ago (because I answered a question at the BRE microwind seminar regarding them, ironically when standing next to one of the XCO2 / Quiet Revolution chaps: I think they now use an auto-adaptive algorithm in their QR6 unit but that's just a guess on my part) but surely have been openly discussed for longer, I've known about them for over twenty years when I was at college.

As I say in my blog I sincerely congratulate everybody brave enough to do public performance trials. In our experience it gets easier the more you do. Also as one consultant commented to me today "it's not what your problems are, it's more how you respond to them".

I've had a comment in that I am being a mite aggressive in my discussion re Tesco. I've had a look at what I wrote. To make it clear:
- I think Ropatec are a very robust VAWT with good engineers at the helm,
- I think that Ropatec made exactly the same sort of mistake that could happen to all of us (and which I have pointed out that something similar did happen to Ampair) and best wishes over the next six months,
- I think that the data shows that all the VAWTs are not (yet) good producers (and I'd love to see data on better performance in the future),
- I think that the consultant who conducted the initial pre-purchase analysis for Tesco owes Tesco a refund,
- I think that Tesco are to be congratulated for trying.

So well done Ropatec; well done to Tesco; (not mentioned but well done to Llumarlite who are the Ropatec representative in the UK); and what a shoddy job by the Tesco's expert consultant who I know did not understand the advice he was given and tried to bluff which is always a sign of an unprofessional professional.

Like I said and will continue to say, congratulations to all who have the courage to participate.

Ampair%20for%20BWEA%20conference%20%28rev2%2C%20October%202008%29.pdf

Delta wind trial in Netherlands; BWEA conference

2008-10-24T15:17:00.009Z

During the week we exhibited at the BWEA conference and exhibition and in one of the little seminar sessions I gave the usual update on Ampair etc plus I summarised the results that have just come in from the first 6 months of the Delta wind trial in Zeeland in the Netherlands, managed by Zeeuwind.

Ampair - BWEA seminar presentation c/w Delta / Zeeland windtest results: dowload pdf file from this link:

Ampair%20for%20BWEA%20conference%20%28October%202008%29.pdf

Refer to the pdf file which can be downloaded. The first five slides are just an Ampair commercial from the seminar presentation I gave.

-----------------------

Ampair has been participating in the Delta wind trial in the Netherlands of small grid connected wind turbines. The first report has just been released with 6-months of data and the results are very interesting because they show clearly the state of the art in commercial small wind turbines (with Ampair as one of the leaders), and because they show the performance of several vertical axis designs.

The trial is running slightly late – this is a common feature of all such trials because in practice many products are not as available as press releases would have us believe. The trial is a collective effort of some consumer testing organisations (the equivalent of Which in the UK) and some utilities, and some provincial governments. It is taking place in the Zeeland area of southwest Holland.

Originally twelve turbines were pencilled in for the trial. Not all arrived as scheduled and so one of our Dutch distributors Eco-Energie Rietpol put forwards the Ampair 600 to fill a vacancy. The 11 turbines which did participate are summarised in slide 6. Sincere congratulations to everybody who participated for having the courage to do so – it is easy to snipe at the results but I can assure you that the participants all deserve our support. As always the people who avoid participation in these sorts of serious trials are the ones who may merit negative comment, and not those who genuinely participate and then have some public disappointment.

Eco-Energie Rietpol installed the Ampair 600 early in the year, and not long afterwards it was shut down because we needed to upgrade the blades, tail, and electronic safety circuits. The trial started whilst the Ampair was shut down and so you will notice that the first seven weeks of production data for the Ampair are essentially zero.

Each week the organisers release information to the installers about performance of their turbines but not of all the others. Last week the organisers released the summary data for the first six months of the eleven turbines that did arrive. They have given monthly production data and total consumption data. In my version which is slide 7 I have added in a row showing the net power output, i.e. production minus consumption. I have translated from the Dutch and any mistakes are my fault, sorry.

On slide 8 I have graphed the results to display installed versus net power output.

This trial includes four vertical wind turbines, two from Ropatec and one each from Turby and Windwalker. This seems to be the first time that so many VAWTs have been represented in a trial side by side with several different HAWTs and so the results would be fascinating for that reason alone.

The only two turbines in the trial which are directly comparable are the Ampair 600 and the Zephyr AirDolphin. The Zephyr is 1.8m diameter and the Ampair is 1.7m diameter but basically they are both 3-bladed upwind HAWTs. Again this is fascinating because it gives us all an opportunity to compare results from two serious manufacturers of good standing. As an industry there is a lot of consideration being given to conducting so-called round-robin tests where one turbine moves from test site to test site to compare the abilities of test organisations to reproduce each others figures. It seems quite likely that the Ampair 600 and the Zephyr Airdolphin will be used for this as they are small enough and cheap enough, yet also stable enough to survive and produce statistically meaningful results. So looking at them side-by-side is interesting.

Slide 8 is the most interesting slide. The most obvious thing is the shaded zone running crudely Ampair 600 – Fortis Passaat - Southwest Skystream – Fortis Montana. These four turbines are closest to the ideal of more power for less money and so they appear to represent the efficient frontier of the current state of the art in modern small wind turbine manufacture. All are HAWTS from manufacturers with credible histories, even if only one of them has had huge (relatively) amounts of cash to put in to product R&D.

Looking at the rest the most obvious conclusion is that there is no correlation between money invested in R&D and product performance. With one exception all of the rest are simply poor performers in terms of closeness to the efficient frontier. This does not mean that they are necessarily not worth further consideration but it does mean that from an investment perspective (whether society, shareholder, client) one should think very carefully before heading in that direction as for whatever reason they are simply expensive. I know that Ampair and Fortis are cash-poor (i.e. without VC investment to date) and we are demonstrating that we can perform and that in my opinion is the standard we should all be assessed against.

All the VAWTs are bad performers. One is so bad that it does not even make it onto the graph. In fact I am not sure it was at the test site as the Windwalker appears to have consumed 39 kWh and produced nothing. It may be that it has not been installed and the meter is reading incorrectly. I note that no price is given and so I have chosen not to graph it. The other three VAWTs do at least appear to produce but their cost/benefit is noticeably poorer than any of the HAWTs. This is in supposedly relatively clean airflow and they will argue that as the airflow becomes more turbulent they will become relatively better performers. In fact many VAWT manufacturers are claiming that they are best suited to low velocity turbulent urban airflows, but so far no good comparative data set has existed to support this claim. From the Zeeland data the best one can do is to point out that maybe the VAWTs will be better but they’ve got a large handicap to overcome.

I know the Ropatec people had some confusions in the first two months as they visited me at the BWEA conference in London. If I understood their explanation their installer put the 3kW inverter on the 6kW machine and vice versa. Towards they end of the first two months they corrected this mistake. There is some confusion as to whether the inverters have been correctly reprogrammed now. Good luck to them in the next six months. It is fascinating to observe that the Tesco supermarket chain has installed thirty plus of the 6kW Ropatec units at over £35k each in the UK as, on the basis of this data a couple of Ampair 600 or one small Fortis Passaat would have been better, and in the case of Ampair would have had the benefit of buying British.

This Turby is producing. In previous tests of the Turby this has not always been the case – note that the Turby is a serious power consumer. The Turby is spun up to speed by using the generator as a motor. It appears that whatever Turby are doing to improve their spin up algorithm is working, or that the winds are sufficiently steady on this site. But a 10:6 ratio of production : consumption does not leave much margin for error. In this respect the Ropatec layout is a clear winner in the VAWT stakes.

The Renewable Devices Swift is another non-performer. It simply is not producing. It has a 2.1m diameter and so has twice the swept area of the Zephyr Airdolphin and the Ampair 600 and so should produce approximately twice the energy. Instead it is producing less than half. Clearly their electronics design is not ideal as it is a serious power consumer, but even if we just look at power output in any given month it is producing half of the Ampair and the Zephyr. This is before one looks at the additional handicap of the huge cost of the product. Their latest claim is that they have orders for 3,000 machines and that they are silent. Well they may be silent but they also do not appear to produce power. They have not participated in any public trials before so it is not possible to comment as to whether this is an unusual result. One benefit of being a repeat participant in trials as that one can be given a bit of slack if something goes wrong in any one trial.

The Energy Ball deserves an especial good mention. The Energy Ball is one of two similar products on the market with the other being the 2kW Loopwing from Japan. Apparently Scottish & Southern Energy have just bought two Loopwings to install in the UK in Weymouth at a cost of £30-£40k or so we were told at a BWEA meeting which set us all (it was a manufacturers meeting) back on our heels with much collective gnashing of teeth. This makes the EUR 4k Energy Ball an extremely cost-effective proposition as it is the only product that is below the efficient frontier. Because of this I am not considering (for now) that the price is a true reflection of the actual commercial installed cost. I may be wrong and I will be happy to correct myself as it is a truly good result and I look forward to learning more about a design I had hitherto disregarded.

Now we get to the four machines that seem to form the efficient frontier. The Fortis units are doing exactly what I expect them to do – dependable performers that are good in low winds and not quite harvesting to the maximum in high winds. To understand this point compare April and May production for the Fortis units with that of the Zephy AirDolphin, and also look at the monthly windspeed table on the lower left of slide 7. See how the Apr/May winds obviously came through as high wind pulses contain a greater fraction of energy and how the Zephyr could more than double its performance whereas the Fortis units were held to 1-1/2 or so. This suggests that the Zephyr has over-invested in high-wind performance to the detriment of its low-wind cost-effectiveness. The Fortis designer is very focussed on cost-effectiveness and he would appear to have made a commercially sound compromise here. The Fortis installed prices are perfectly believable.

The Southwest Windpower (SWW) Skystream unit is the third good performer. For many years now Ampair has competed commercially with the SWW designs and we have been under no illusions about their competency in making cost-effective turbines (and the slickest marketing in the industry). We have been warning our bigger brethren to brace themselves and we appear to have been right to do so as the Skystream is very good – even more so if you replot this graph as a swept area graph. There are varying stories about exactly how much US government support the Skystream and SWW have received over and above the venture capital but it is paying off (I hope the UK government realise that this is a hint, but the UK government representative for microgeneration cancelled his talk at the last moment which gives you a feel for things here). I will point out that the Skystream is underpriced in this report and the true installed price is more like EUR 14k. The Belgian distributor has installed this unit and this is because the Dutch one was more expensive – someone has swallowed a chunk of cost here. Once the Skystream is upped to EUR 14k it is exactly on trend with the Fortis products.

It is time to critique the Ampair 600. Firstly our installer has overcosted this one as our boxed set only costs £2850, so an installed price of EUR 89250 is rather eyebrow raising. Reducing this to a more realistic EUR 6000 brings us on-trend, but don’t go beating Eco-Rietpol up for that price as he is well aware that fixed costs are high for small installs and he won't underprice. Secondly the energy output is low versus the Zephyr because we have effectively missed the first two months which are energy rich, because we were shutdown until week 8 whilst we waited on our safety upgrade (but that is our fault so we will take it on the chin). Comparing the next four months one sees that the Zephyr and the Ampair are trading kWh for kWh with each other which is exactly what I would expect as we are both manufacturers with an aero/mech/electrical competence and a power electronics competence and we both basically know what we are doing. In the last month the Zephyr gets slightly ahead again which is again to be expected as this was another energy rich month. I know that the inverter on this Ampair is the SMA 700W whereas the Zephyr tend to use the larger SMA units and so can better harvest the high wind pulses. Conversely however one can see that the Zephyr is a substantial energy consumer whereas the Ampair is a real miser. So I expect Ampair and Zephyr to continue to go head to head with these models for some years to come except that Ampair have a cost (or price) advantage at the momet. Once the Ampair data is corrected it is possible to draw an almost perfect line along the four efficient frontier units.

UPDATE 25 OCT 08

One thing I forgot to mention last night is that this Zeeland trial is supporting the general validity of the AWEA and BWEA small wind standards. In the Ampair 2008 catalogue we have tried to set out the information required in accordance with the BWEA standard - see page 5. One very important piece of information is the Annual Energy Production graph and for the the grid connected Ampair 600-230 this is the lower left hand graph.

At the test site the average windspeed was about 3.5m/s for the first six months. Drawing a vertical line on the AEP graph at 3.5 one can read off an annual production of 440 kWh which means that the Ampair 600 should have produced 220 kWh in the six month period. To compensate for the missing 7 weeks if we add approximately 60 kWh (per the Zephyr) to the measured 82 kWh we get 140 kWh.

This is actually a pretty good prediction (220kWh predicted versus 140 kWh actual) and a lot of the error is probably in the shape factor used to calculate the wind speed distribution. I am guessing from the limited data released so far but the Summer months have probably had a shape factor of 1.2 to 1.6 whereas the AWEA/BWEA standard requires the calculation to be performed with a shape factor of 2.0. I say this from observing the monthly differences, not because I have been crunching the data that the test sends out each week. During the winter months I expect that the shape factor will rise somewhat and hopefully in the next report it will be included. The shape factor is the small wind industry's equivalent of the solar PV industry's mythical 1000W/m2.

Of course the AEP is utterly dependent on the dependability of the power curve data. By now anyone reading should have figured out that this must be a power curve for net useful power to the consumer, and will now see why some folk prefer to give power curves that are somewhat ambiguous in this regard. It makes a lot of difference whether you measure power out of turbine or power into grid. It also makes a lot of difference whether you measure power out, or net power out. Ask your manufacturer !

Whether you trust your manufacturer is a separate issue. I have written previously (see blog for 29 December 2007) about Ampair practice in this regard. Our AEP figures in the 2008 catalogue come from the low tech approach. Now we have several further sets of data for the Ampair 600 which show it as anything from a 'rated' 350W machine to a 700W machine. Some of those numbers are high tech data logged outputs and some are low tech data logged outputs. Until we understand why the differences arise we will not be in a great hurry to commit further commercial suicide by publishing the lowest of these. Please excuse us but we already lose enough sales as it is. Again testing per the AWEA / BWEA standard helps but I see a nasty commercial dilemma coming where some machines test and publish independently certified results, but then go out of business whilst others merrily claim super-hero status and laugh all the way to the bank.

END UPDATE 25 OCT 08

I expect that we will all scurry around frantically improving our designs and carry on into the next round. These wind speeds are absolutely typical of the sort of Summer windspeeds I expect at most urban fringes in reasonable wind locations. After 12-months we will know what the annual average will be.

Now could someone please send me the name of the Tesco highly paid expert consultant and of the people within Tesco who believed him. At least I hope they get their consultancy fee back.

Good luck to all manufacturers who participated. I fully expect that we will all (Ampair included) have lots of very public failures over the next six months, and I look forward to revising my opinions as new facts come to light.

For further info on the trial see:
Zeeuwind
www.zeeuwind.nl

Tales of Alaskan woe, sort of ...

2008-10-16T18:47:00.004Z

One of our distributors in the USA told us about a client in Alaska yesterday. They have just heard back from a client they sold a couple of sets of replacement turbine blades to for the Ampair 100. Apparently they were ordered because a communications relay tower stopped functioning mid way through a storm. Since it is a helicopter ride to go and fix the aerials, and since the turbines are half way up the tower, the client figured it was sensible to take spare blades along when they went out to fix the aerials which they reckoned must have blown off the tower, because they reckoned that the Ampair probably hadn't survived either.

The client has now given the second half of the story to us. Apparently they arrived on site to find that the storm had blown the entire tower over. But the Ampairs were still intact and in full operating order. The anemometer broke at about 140 mph during the storm, probably when the tower blew over.

Like I say to all our clients, "we don't aim to make an indestructible turbine because it would be too expensive for everyone, and anyway you can always find a way to break them, but we do try to make our turbines strong".

Solvind exhibition in Oslo

2008-10-16T18:35:00.004Z

One of our distributors (Solvind) exhibited recently at a renewable energy fair in the centre of Oslo. They have quite a nice video of the middle of Oslo with the royal castle behind and an Ampair 600 in front.

The video is on youtube.

Aquair 100 in Australia on SY PINDIMARA

2008-08-19T07:59:00.007Z

One of our Aquair 100 clients down in Australia had a clevis pin etc damaged in transit (grievous abuse by shipping folk I am afraid) and we sent a few spares down. They're about to cross the Pacific to the USA and have just sent us this update on how they are getting on with it using it as a wind turbine with the hoist in rigging kit:

Hi David

I just thought that I would update you with our progress. I knocked the bearing seal back into place with a soft hammer, replaced the bent clevis pin, and reassembled the air turbine with the new boss. The propeller slipped into place with ease and I hoisted it onto the foredeck. The only complaint that I have is that it is very hard to get one of the tail fin bolts into place, because it butts right up against the cable and you need very small fingers while balanced on a swaying deck.

We then waited through a week of perfect calm with no wind at all.

Finally, a storm blew up and the generator started spinning. Over the next week or so we had quite a few thunderstorms, and we were gratified to see a reasonably steady 1 to 6 amps flowing into our system. In fact, for the first time ever, during a particularly big storm, I noticed that the Ampair regulator (which also takes power from our solar panels) was actually shutting down with an indicated battery voltage of just over 13 volts. We'd never had a full charge before, and this made us very happy.

The turbine hangs directly above our forepeak cabin, perhaps four metres above our bed. We had been worried about the noise (in fact, everybody in the marina started grumbling when they saw us mounting a wind generator) but found that even in the middle of the night we couldn't hear the Ampair over the slight rumble of our tiny Nicro extractor fan. In fact, we occasionally shut the extractor down to see if we could hear the Ampair turning, but the most we got was a slight "thwuck thwuck" at low speed and just a gentle "whoosh" when up to generating speed. Then in one particularly fierce storm, the wind changed to a southerly (those are the evil cold Antarctic winds here) and started to moan in the shrouds, and we suddenly heard the turbine start to howl. I rushed up on deck to have a look, and then realised to my amusement that the Ampair (now an all-but invisible blur in the starlight) was still completely silent; all the noise was coming from a pole-mounted generator on another yacht 40 metres away.

So you can colour us very impressed. Now we just need to sort out the tow mounting, but for that we need to get out of the estuary and into the sea (it's too crowded and shallow to tow a line inshore here) and we haven't yet had the chance. Maybe this coming weekend.

Thanks for a great, solidly built piece of kit.

Reinhard

These clients are using the Ampair regulator with the dual wind + solar input. The particular model that they are using is the DM1B-12 where the D indicates dual input. These Ampair charge control regulators are four stage PWM regulators which were well in advance of most other regulators when they were introduced about 15-years ago. Now they are simply as good as others and I guess they are due for a refresh at some point.

You must be careful which regulator you use with a wind turbine and ordinarily you should not try to use a solar regulator with a wind turbine to save money. This is because a common solar regulator is intended for quite low voltages (say max 20V for a 12V regulator, or max 40V for a 24V regulator) and wind or water turbines can give much higher voltages when being controlled. The higher voltages will damage the low cost components used in most solar regulators. This is why turbine manufacturers design and manufacture their own regulators which are that bit more expensive because they have higher grade components.

Aquair 100 installation video

2008-08-19T07:46:00.006Z

One of our clients down in Gibraltar had acquired some Aquair pieces and contacted us to get the balance and install it on the yacht. He has made this little video clip which shows how he did it.

The wind version has obviously been tied off with a piece of rope during installation. In the towed (water) mode have a slight preference that the Aquair is lashed on with rope because it gives a certain degree of flexibility in use to absorb shocks, but if you are going to hard-mount them then this is a good layout. Also we have a preference that the cable gland is on the bottom of the unit as that way any water will tend to drain away from the weak point of the gland. The wind turbine version is the Aquair 100 mounted on a pole mounting kit. Most Aquair users select the hoist in rigging kit but we make the different styles so that folk can select the one that best fits their boat.

Sail World recommend Aquair 100

2008-08-19T07:30:00.005Z

Sail World put out a completely unsolicited article praising the "Aquair" towed generators from Ampair which was spotted by one of our suppliers back in July (I've only just made time to comment in the blog because of some other Aquair things I am posting):

Sail World article on the Aquair 100 from Ampair

I've contacted Nanck Knudsen at Sail World and they are happy that we tell everybody about this. The photos are courtesy B&W media from Sail World. We didn't even know they were doing this which is quite a nice suprise really.

"After 35,000 miles of cruising, with a spare in the hold (just in case), we have never had even a nibble, let alone a bite from a fish on our trailing genny. The brand we use is an AMPAIR, and it puts in 6 amps at 6 knots reliably over a 24 hour period ....... You'll find the product on Ampair's website, and they have world wide distributors.. (http://www.sail-world.com/indexs.cfm?nid=45233)"

Ampair 100 Mk1b reliability

2008-02-16T15:41:00.005Z

From time to time we get feedback from happy clients and never seem to do anything with it except to pass around the workshop and lose before we publish our next catalogue (complaints also get dealt with - we make our mistakes as well). Anyway I reckon I'll post them up from now on like this that came in yesterday and which is regarding an Ampair 100 Mk1b (serial # 1340):

========================================

15 February 2008 02:09

David,
Many thanks for your 12th.Feb.2008 mail re the subject Generator. The shaft diameter is indeed 17 mm.

I have disassembled the unit and cleaned the works and reassembled it,however, brushes need replacement.Even if it is assumed that the unit is approximately 22/17 years old,it has worked continuously thru those years some on a 60' Cat named "Tropical Dreamer" and then on shore at home here charging 2 batteries which power exterior lighting and a 12 volt pressure water[rain) pump which drip irrigates our front flower garden,or approx,250' of line,that is one hell of a good performance.

If you wish a testimonial to this effect you can draft one how you wish it worded and I will have it properly executed and returned to you. I hold a Certificate of Competency as Master issued by UK Dep. of Transport in 1956,a first Degree in Mechanical Engineering,was CEO Bridgetown Harbour from 1956 to 1992,have sailed with P & O and British India as a Deck Officer and have sailed from 8 years age and continue sailing to this day by the grace of God.
Also own a Hunter 29.5"Performance Cruiser and sail/fish her at least twice weekly.Have an 1972 CB Honda 400/4 Motor Bike which I completely restored in 2007 and ride almost daily.
I need 2 sets of brushes so please let me know what I owe and i will forward same.
Best regards/Peter

---------------------------

Peter,
It is almost certainly an Ampair 100 Mk 1b. If you measure the diameter of the shaft I think you will find it is 17.0 mm diameter. This version was made from 1985-1990 which is at variance with your comment that it is 30 years old. It was during the A100-Mk1a that the lower pivot housing casting received the reinforcement that shows up as a step in the silhoutte on the photo. If ordering parts please let us know this model information.
The manual remains a good guide to construction and use - see http://www.boost-energy.com/UserFiles/Downloads/Ampair_100_manual.pdf
Like I said our motto is if it ain't broke don't fix it. You mention wanting brushes - if the old ones are working there should be no need to change brushes. But you can check those easily enough. Also we notice that there are some nicks out of the end of the blades. You can order new blades if you want, or you can just dress the nicks in the old ones with emery paper.
If you want to order let us know what you need.
Regards,
David

==============================================

Warwick Wind Trial Results (to date 11 Dec 2007)

2007-12-30T13:57:00.000Z

These comments summarise some of the responses I have written over the last month to people in the microwind and smallwind industry who have been asking about the results of the Warwick Wind Trial, which spill over into a lot of related areas. Fundamentally Ampair supported this trial because we felt it was right to get hard facts into the public about the difficulties with urban grid connected microwind.

The WWT trial has had a difficult two years to get to where it is, namely the world’s first public domain trial of multiple models of grid connected small wind turbines on different sites especially urban sites. Just getting to this point has obviously been a mammoth task for the WWT team given the very limited resources they have had. All credit to them, especially to Mathew Rhodes and David Hailes. But they are now only one third of the way through (turbines up, data coming in) and they have the other two thirds still to come (capture one year of data, analyse data, write up and clean up). At this point they have only got one month of data (for Nov 2007) from all 24 sites (they have longer data runs from some sites) including the following manufacturers and products:

Ampair (Ampair 600)
Eclectic (Stealthgen D400)
Renewable Devices Swift (Swift Mk2)
Windsave (WS1000 c/w Plug’n’Save)
Zephyr (AirDolphin)

There were going to be FuturEnergy turbines installed but they have failed to deliver as far as I gather. In fact an important learning point from the trial is that originally it was going to be of just Windsaves and Swifts but they both pulled out (as manufacturers). To date the only manufacturer that was prepared to commit to public datalogging was Ampair. All the other turbines have been ‘volunteered’ for the trial by clients. A list of the turbines that ought to be in the trial but are not yet (i.e. ones that are being marketed for building mounted including steel frame buildings) would include:

Quiet Revolution (QR6 or QR5)
FuturEnergy (1kW)
SouthWestWindpower (various)
Ropatec (various)
Samrey (Wren)
Aerovironment (Architectural Wind)

The results as presented at the 11 December 07 seminar are on the WWT site here except for the picture of the RD Swift that shed blades at BRE.

Quick advert: Yes we are very pleased with the relative performance of the Ampair 600. But we are not perfect and we have a lot to learn.

The context of the WWT trial is that several manufacturers have recently (last 5 years) entered the small wind turbine market with the initial marketing vision of low cost wind power for everyone (which by definition has to mean 0.5-1.5kW turbines; urban locations; grid connected; often building mounted). This is exemplified by Windsave and all credit to them for their laudable marketing ambitions. The industry incumbents then spent a few years trying to ignore the newcomers and then started to get serious about a response. From now on I’ll use Windsave as the exemplar of the newcomers since they’re the first to try breaking into the mass market with B+Q.

Quick advert: The media are trying to set us Ampair as being the 'rivals' of Windsave in a sort of mirror image way that media like to do. This is absolutely not what we are.

The main industry issue is the potential reputational threat to the industry arising from the over ambitious marketing claims of the newcomers. So as an industry we have become very serious about standards and testing, and in both the BWEA and the AWEA there are responsible manufacturers doing serious work in this respect (the AWEA effort seems to be mostly SouthWest and Bergy as manufacturers; the BWEA effort includes the following manufacturers: Ampair, Proven, Iskra, Gaia, Marlec, Quiet Revolution, and Windsave – I’m listing the ones I have seen taking standards committees seriously and yes that includes Windsave who are being very supportive in that respect). So the new entrants have done us all a favour in forcing us to take testing etc seriously and this is where Ampair have been putting its emphasis.

Soon people will be able to start publishing results in accordance with the new standards and that will be a dramatic step forwards. In the meantime there are already changes arising as a result of this - for example several manufacturers now have test sites in a way they did not have until recently. Also the new Ampair catalogue contains information we did not previously give.

Similarly the whole resource issue is being studied much more rationally than before. I think that within a year we will be able to predict actual windspeeds in post code grids (i.e. 10 house packets) to a fair degree of accuracy (much much better than NOABL). This work is being triggered by the new entrants but in truth it will be most use for people in the 5-15kW range. Early results are coming out in the form of adjustment factors in MIS 3003, the BRE assessment FB17, and the Loughborough CREST work and within a year these and the Warwick trial and EST trial and some other stuff in the pipeline will all be integrated.

Now coming to the particular commercial business case implicit in Windsave 'a wind turbine for every home' yes I would agree that these results objectively illustrate that this is not a good idea on electricity production grounds. The reason why we as Ampair agreed to participate in the Warwick trials when Windsave pulled out was because we felt intuitively that it was a bad thing for the industry to rush headlong into this in the way Windsave were (at the time they had just started their B+Q marketing campaign). Also at the time both Paul Gipe and Hugh Piggott were quite correctly raising serious concerns on both product performance and resource availability grounds with both of them doing useful work in informing the debate. At Ampair we decided to put our effort into the whole standards business and hoped that others would run the trials and expose their turbines to the reputational risk involved. But when Windsave pulled out of the WWT (by not supplying turbines) we felt that it was vital that somebody filled the gap and we stepped forwards. We'd only just got our grid-tie system working on the Ampair 600 so this was a huge risk to us. Also we were not exactly keen on house mounting (and still aren't) and definitely did not have the resources to actually go and do installs (and still don't – installation is what our distributors are supposed to do). So we were risking our reputation to disprove something we didn't in any case agree in and doing so on behalf of the wider industry.

Because of this we pushed to get the tower block sites included in the Warwick trial. As we expected the wind on these is very different than the suburban roofscape wind. In fact we are probably seeing more wind up there than at 5m height on Lands End. So far we cannot usefully convert all that wind into energy (because we are limited by our inverter, and because we are limited by noise production) and so we cannot yet reach any firm conclusions about the power production utility on these sites. But it is obviously a dramatically different prospect than suburban roofs.

So far the Warwick results only represent one month of data so it is simply too early to start doing much statistical crunching. And even when there is a year of data we can only crunch it so far as it is deliberately quite poor resolution data (to keep instrumentation costs down) and so the WWT team themselves are very sensibly trying not to over-analyse the data. In due course a higher resolution data set will become available from the EST trial which will include about 100 turbines but that is running about a year behind the WWT (there is some overlap) and then more analysis can be done.

Quick advert: The results to date for Ampair are that:

The Ampair 600 appears to be at least as powerful as the Windsave WS 1000 and the Zephyr AirDolphin, i.e. Ampair's 0.6kW turbine is at least as powerful as the so-called 1.0kW turbines of the competitors.
The Ampair 600 is yielding a much better import:export ratio than the competitors.
The Ampair 600 has a much wider range of mounting systems than the competitors.
The Ampair 600 is proving noisy in very high winds (on top of three exposed tower blocks - we are fixing this pretty quickly and already have workarounds in place).

In an Ampair context almost all our building mounted turbines have been included in the WWT, i.e. we're not hiding anything. In fact we've encouraged WWT to deliberately put turbines at very poor locations and it has been Ampairs that have ended up in the bad locations so we are certainly not cherry picking sites. Anyway we regard building mounted or urban microwind as being very much for R+D or for early adopters at present.

Overall the results so far are that at current energy prices there is not an economic case to be made for grid connecting at typical suburban roofline. There may be a rational economic case for grid connecting at tower block roofs. And of course there is always an irrational case (the green statement thing) or the rational case on non-power production grounds (e.g. for education). Already this crucifies many of the new entrants’ original business case but they are adapting and are now trying to persuade their backers that they will be mega rich at 2% of the UK housing stock. There is a prospect of some sites being suitable and I can see some sites yielding 1000kWh over the course of a year (i.e. 25% of a typical on-gas semi's electricity use; or 20 year payback from a £2k turbine not that the current £2k turbines models will last 20 years). Bear in mind that the UK has about 20 million dwellings.

Quickly we should put to bed the CO2 content issue. The BRE assessment FB17 analyses this in conjunction with the Bath Life Cycle Assessment work (we assisted both projects, see my earlier commentary) and the results are that for a wind turbine that has the design choices of an Ampair (think 'right' weight - too much or too little weight are both bad, as bad as weight in the wrong place) and is in a moderately windy location will have CO2 paybacks of less than 5 years. In a poor wind location CO2 payback for an Ampair is more than 10 years. In good wind CO2 payback on the Ampair 600 is less than 1 year. These paybacks are very sensitive to design choices and so the RD Swift and the Windsave are both much worse than the Ampair (which now gives you the three anonymous turbines in the BRE assessment FB17) which is a function of their poor weight ratios. This would be even worse for Windsave if the actual location of the manufacture of the Windsave were taken into account. It would also be bad for Windsave and for RD Swift if the actual performance of their units were taken into account (BRE have assumed the manufacturers' power curves are believable and only adjusted for wind resource: a fair assumption for Ampair but as is becoming evident this is not a good assumption fr everyone). So on CO2 payback turbines can vary from good to bad depending on wind resource and on model chosen.

Then returning again to the 'futility of using wind turbines in urban locations' question I would say that right now for most premises it is futile. But I think it is premature to write off the whole area in the way we were doing 2-3 years ago. As with other small wind turbine markets we will find that there are niches that are viable and slowly we will build successively better performing generations of turbines that compete in those niches. If I was a guessing man I would guess at seaside locations (so they must be marine grade) and high rise buildings (so they must be safe) and right weight designs and 20 year lifetimes for microwind which sounds like a fair description of an Ampair turbine. For small wind (5-15kW) it will mean a different set of clients (those with large plots of land). And the jury is still out on the Darrieus rotor crew (i.e. VAWT designs).

So if we can get 0.01% of the UK habitable stock to take a sub 1kW turbine each year that represents a market of 2000 units/yr which would be a useful contribution to greater volume manufacturing. Can we do that - I don't know. Are we taking it seriously ? Yes we are now which is not what we would have said two years ago. Are we betting the business on it ? No as we see it as just one of the many niches we have to compete in. Will we change our mind ? Probably, we must be rational technical/economic decision makers and we must be guided by the science in all this and as more facts emerge we will rethink things. If we can make a small wind turbine that can be affordabe and be building mounted and meet the criteria then we can progress towards the economies of scale. But we would be doing that in any case so it's not too great a distraction from our other markets which obviously look very different from a user perspective.

The initial results from WWT have triggered a substantial series of articles in Powerhouse News under the headline "Micro-wind manufacturers cry foul at trial humiliation” which I can't post for obvious copyright reasons. Well at Ampair we are not crying foul and nor do we feel humiliated. We have plenty of problems but we will fix the issues we are seeing because they are learning experience. I would encourage any other manufacturer or importer to step forwards, volunteer more sites for datalogging, and get on with learning. Ideally that could include small wind manufacturers in the 5-15kW bracket out in open terrain because now that WWT have a decent instrumentation package and data analysis process they can start to cost effectively deliver results to the public.

So to summarise the Warwick Wind Trial is a huge step forwards and the team behind it are to be congratulated. They are simply putting the data out and are letting it speak for itself. As ever more data is welcome and inevitably there will be comparisons made, some valid and some not but that’s life.

Small wind turbine power curves - Ampair historic practice

2007-12-29T16:06:00.000Z

I thought it worth writing down how Ampair has been doing its power curve testing over the years. This is not intended to show ourselves as some sort of gold standard for technique but simply to say what we are doing in the spirit of full disclosure. Anyway historically Ampair has measured and reported its power curves:

Using real turbines, regulators, batteries, etc.
In open air.
Either on short poles or on vehicles.
With manual data logging of cup type anemometers at approximately hub height, and with manual data logging of voltmeters and ammeters.
Noting power into battery at typical battery voltages, and more recently of power into grid for grid connected (G83) inverters.
Publishing the results in our manuals and marketing literature.

Our underlying intent has always been to try and report a power curve that a client could reasonably expect to reproduce if they had commonly available instrumentation and patience. Taking the points in turn shows how things can be done differently.

Real systems have not been tuned for abnormally high performance, and include all the components that should be in a client's system.
An important part of the way Ampair tests turbines is that it is in the open air. The open air has a lot of variation in it and this causes turbines a lot of problems trying to respond. If you test in unreal conditions such as the smooth and stable flow of a wind tunnel it is easy to get much more power out of a wind turbine system than of the same system in real wind. This is because the mechanical and electrical system responses don't have any tracking error in steady flows and doubling of system power can be achieved in wind tunnels like this (assuming the wind tunnel is large enough, if it is smaller then the power out is even higher in a wind tunnel). By the way there is a role for wind tunnels and small wind turbines - but only for R&D work, not for published power curves.
Historically we've tested on short poles, or on vehicles. Both ways give similar results if you avoid too ideal a set up, or distortions induced by putting instrumentation in the wrong place. We typically do our vehicle testing in cluttered environments so we get very unclean wind on to the turbine, similarly our poles are ordinarily very low down and again we get foul wind. This is exactly how our clients tend to use our turbines.
We have used manual recording of the data from standard instrumentation. We do not use high precision instrumentation (we keep an eye out for calibration errors, but do no more than this) and we manually record what is best thought of as the visual average of the data we see. This visual filtering is important as it means we watch the three meters (volts, amps, knots) and look for the periods when they are steady enough that we can write down all three quickly. We could try and be very optimistic and write down only the peaks but that wouldn't be helpful, and if we were pessimistic and wrote down only the troughs we would be out of business as nobody would ever buy our turbines (this is what Hugh Piggott refers to as "marketing suicide"). We use cup type anemometers so that we are always recording the maximum wind available irrespective of direction and we set the anemometer at a height that gives it representative wind on to the turbine. A feature of using pretty basic instrumentation is that our results can be reproduced by clients (so in the olden days we used Avometers, these days we use Flukes) who aren't able to buy fancy kit. Until recently dataloggers were barely affordable for the smallwind manufacturers (such as Bergey and Proven) and not affordable for microwind manufacturers (such as Ampair).
We are interested in 'useful power for the client' so we are logging power into the battery or power into the grid. This is important as some people measure power out of the turbine which is often much higher than power into battery or grid because regulator and inverter inefficiencies can be much higher than people think.
It may seem obvious but we publish our results in our manuals and our marketing literature. Not all manufacturers are quite this transparent.

What I have just described above is a low tech equivalent of what is done in large wind turbines. The real issue is the genuineness of the good intent of the people writing the power curve. No amount of fancy instrumentation makes up for a person who is trying to push the data to mis-represent reality. In fact high tech instrumentation can make it easier to artificially over report a power curve. So when we read a test report (such as the yachting magazines produce every few years, or we have a conscientious client write in, or folk like Piggott and Gipe do tests) we pay attention if our turbines are behaving differently than we think they should be. And when people like Piggott say nice things like "It has never (except with Ampair) been my experience that the outputs I measure match manufacturer's predictions" then we think we are getting it about right.

In the future it is likely that we will start using higher tech instrumentation but we will do so in the context of a very tightly defined standard that will lay out exactly how to report power curves, which we are almost at with the BWEA small wind standard (and the related parallel AWEA one). We've been upgrading our long term test site at Misty View Farm in Cornwall with that in mind and we continue to install more and more kit as we search for a better way to do it. Until we are happy with that methodology we'll carry on doing it the way we always have. Amazingly very few people have ever done any serious work on comparative testing of small wind turbines and manufacturers' power curve claims and to this day the best work has been done by Paul Gipe (see Windworks ) who comes up with some alarming reports about almost all manufacturers' power curves. Fortunately Ampair come out well with the quote from Gipe of ".. the Ampair 100 were the only machines to exceed their power curves at any time". The other independent person who has looked seriously at this topic is Hugh Piggot of Scoraig Wind who has been turned down by the UK government when he has proposed to do independent testing on small wind turbines in the past which is a shame and which has limited his ability to do work in this area.

Why does all this matter ? Simple: clients make purchasing decisions on the basis of power curves and governments give grants on the basis of power curves. So if one manufacturer gives a power curve that is over-optimistic they attract a lot more (taxpayer funded) government grant and a lot more eager customers than another manufacturer that is more cautious. I would like to say that honesty is always rewarded in the long term, but unfortunately in the short term history reports that manufacturers can quickly be out of business.

Over the last two years Ampair have put a lot of effort in to move the standards agenda forwards and we've left it for others to do comparative testing of modern grid-connected microwind turbines. Now results are starting to come from public testing in but that's a topic for another post.

BRE report FB17: Ampair comments part 2

2007-12-20T09:18:00.000Z

(continued from previous post on the BRE urban micro wind turbine assessment)

In calculating electricity generation BRE make the careful statement “the conditions under which the the [manufacturers’] power curves were obtained is, in most cases, uncertain, it is expected that they were obtained in wind tunnels or using free standing mast-mounted turbines”. Herein lies my biggest quibble with the FB17 methodology as BRE should have put this in much bigger letters and written an additional caution, namely:

WIND TUNNEL POWER CURVES ARE NOT COMPARABLE WITH OPEN FIELD POWER CURVES.

At the moment to use all wind turbine manufacturers’ power curves to predict electricity generation as if they were equal in quality is to introduce a large error especially as (to the best of my knowledge) of the three systems analysed only the Ampair 600 is an open field power curve. The reason for the difference is that in a wind tunnel one can hold the wind speed absolutely constant for the measurement period, and the wind direction is necessarily constant, and the turulence can be reduced to a minimum. This means that the turbine system performance is not degraded by a variety of tracking errors irrespective of whether they are mechanical in nature or electrical in nature. (This unfortunate situation will change as very rigorous standards for generating power curves are being introduced, but it is so important a quibble that we are disappointed with BRE for not emphasising their predicament).

Once this quibble is out of the way the actual values for electricity production in an urban environment are of approximately the right order of magnitude (at least for the Ampair). But the net electricity generation is different than the gross electricity production. This is because BRE have assumed (or not even stated the assumption) that the turbines are not importing electricity. Again for some systems this is an unwise assumption as the annual standby power consumption can be of the same order of magnitude as the annual production leading to a net generation of approximately zero, or even negative. For an Ampair system the extra money we put in to a high quality inverter pays off in very low standby powers so for Ampair the BRE assumption is valid.

The energy production figures are not corrected for any wind quality issues. As BRE themselves state this is a known issue and it is too early to try and make such adjustments.

The CO2 payback results appear sound. From an Ampair perspective it is pleasing that the Ampair pays back CO2 more quickly than the other turbines. We believe that this would be even more noticeable if the power curves were put on a level playing field and if the electricity import issue was accurately modelled.

The lifecycle costings contain an important error regarding the actual cost of System 3 (RD Swift). Obtaining pricing for this system has been notoriously difficult for the last two years and so it is unsuprising that BRE have used the only public domain data they could locate, that of £3.5k as provided by bettergeneration.co.uk who are not an RD Swift distributor and who are themselves misled. Unfortunately it is very misleading and a more accurate cost would have been about £7k. Whilst RD Swift are working hard to reduce both price and cost and certainly aspire to much lower than £7k the other two systems are being evaluated on their costs in the market today and once again a level playing field should have been applied.

The other issue with lifecycle costings is the maintenance and longevity one discussed earlier. We think that a quality turbine should aim to last on average 15 years with perhaps a five yearly on demand maintenance visit (i.e. four visits: once to install; two for maintenance; and one to remove), and a lower quality turbine should aim to last on average 10 years with four visits in total (at reduced intervals). We don’t mean lower quality in a pejorative sense: it may be more cost effective to make a cheaper turbine with a shorter life.

These two costing problems contaminate the finncial payback calculations sufficiently that one cannot make any further comments.

Further research is of course required and the proposed list is a sensible one. Overall I think this FB17 report from BRE is a pretty good assessment of the aspects of urban microwind and look forward to more pieces of the puzzle being slotted into the jigsaw in due course. Whether one thinks urban microwind is a good idea is a different thing and one we'll comment on separately.

(concluded)

BRE report FB17: Ampair comments part 1

2007-12-19T12:02:00.000Z

These notes on the BRE microwind assessment are not intended to be a comprehensive scientific critique, just an informal and necessarily limited set of comments. We are a manufacturer not an academic institution.

This area is short of good quality work so anything as sound as this is to be welcomed. To ask for perfection at this stage would be mind numbingly boring and so any niggles must be put in that context.

Our most important criticisms are:

The cost of the System 3 is completely inaccurate. Our sources tell us that the true cost of this system is typically £5k-10k installed not the £3.5k assumed in the report which came from a very dated website which was quoting a 'target' price.
The manufacturer’s power curves have been used. The three systems have very different ‘quality’ power curves only one of which is measured in real wind conditions.

System 1 is an Ampair 600-230 EU2. We assisted Bath University in their Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) in the data gathering phase of their work, and put them in touch with BRE when we were approached by BRE to conduct another LCA. We thought another LCA would be repetitious and instead we asked BRE to invest their resources in a complementary piece of work which has become the resource piece of this BRE assessment. So in a sense we were the matchmaker but beyond that both Bath and BRE are autonomous and independent organisations and Ampair has not had any influence over either beyond commenting on an early BRE draft with respect to references to the Ampair product. In due course we look forwards to seing the full analysis that Bath have been conducting.

System 3 is the Renewable Devices Swift. This can be seen at a glance since it is the only 1.5kW turbine in production. More academically rigorous is the fact that ref 5 (Rankine, Chick, Harrison) has been quoted by RD Swift in the Swift marketing literature of 2006/2007.

System 2 must be the Windsave WS 1000 system complete with the Plug’n’Save inverter. This can be deduced because there are only two systems that meet the basic specification on p10 (albeit with some errors) and the price of £1798 on p40 narrows it down to the Windsave.

I’m writing the above paragraphs because it will assist researchers who need an independent reference for identifying the three systems which are being examined as exemplars of the microwind industry. They are also the only three systems currently on the market which pass the basic adequacy tests for grid connected urban microwind products so they are truly typical.

The inventory analysis is pretty sound. The WS 1000 is largely imported from Asian sources and so I think the impact would be higher than is predicted. The RD Swift data is for the Mk1 Swift and they have changed inverter for the Mk2 so it may no longer be representative, also I’m not sure that the impact data for the carbon fibre blades truly represents end of lifecycle costs (but that’s just a suspicion of mine re the HSE costs). The Ampair data is for the EU2 version and so is up to date. The most important issue I have with the inventory section is the assumption regarding maintenance. The authors seem to disregard visual observation as a good way of initiating condition-based maintenance which is a pity. Our experience is that the combination of visual observation and a passable ear is appropriate. Maintenance issues don’t come on neatly in annual cycles – they arise much faster – so an annual inspection is very costly (economically and environmentally) and ultimately futile. Instead it is better to either assume condition-based maintenance or a range of lifetimes. In this respect I would be extremely suprised to see all these turbines lasting very long in a coastal environment as the only one that appears to be marine grade is the Ampair although again I am happy to be corrected. Constructing a marine grade turbine is an expensive business and is directly reflected in the purchase price of the units.

The urban wind resource estimation is as good as it gets at the moment in the public domain from a theoretical perspective. To a certain extent theoretical work can only go so far and practical work can only go so far and the final picture will only become clear when all the pieces of the jigsaw are fitted together (several times). The experimental wind tunnel data re flows over building roofs look fairly similar to results from CFD modelling work carried out by the Loughborough University Centre for Renewable Energy Technologies (CREST) team led by Simon Watson and are not unsuprising, i.e. higher = better, and ends = better, and ridges = better, and best of all is of course to be as far away from buildings and trees and other obstructions as possible.

The BRE comparison of Met Office windspeeds, NOABL windspeeds and predicted actual windspeeds is very interesting. In Appendix B they show the relative location of the Met Office instrumentation and the five sites for which they have predicted wind speeds. The first thing is that the shape of the wind speed distribution is very important in assessing the energy yield and that can be observed in the Fig 5 on p15 and Fig 7 on p16 where the more ‘marine’ a wind is the more energy it contains. This change in a wind’s character is of course not described by the NOABL database. Then the correction factor that BRE calculate using their BREVe tool (based on BS 6399-2) to produce a prediction is as yet not tested against reality (from the perspective of small scale wind) and so for now is a harmless exercise. Soon they will no doubt be cranking the same BREVe tool for comparison with actual winds measured from various trials and then we will get closer to the holy grail of accurate site specific prediction. Ideally such a tool will be predicting mean wind speed, distribution, and turbulence but that is of course an ideal which will have a rather large error bar on it.

(to be continued)

BRE report FB17 available "Microwind turbines in urban environments"

2007-12-18T19:43:00.000Z

The Building Research Establishment (BRE) have issued a new report titled "Microwind turbines in urban environments - an assessment" which goes by a unique publication number FB17. Since one of the turbines considered as being representative is the Ampair 600 I'll comment on it in another post but for now here is the contents:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
It can be purchased from the BRE online shop
http://www.brebookshop.com/details.jsp?id=287572
------------------------------------------------------------------
Title: Micro-wind turbines in urban environments - an assessment

Author: R Phillips, P Blackmore, J Anderson, M Clift, A Aguilo-Rullan and S Pester

Date: Nov 30, 2007

Price: £42.30

Stock Code: 287572

ISBN: 978-1-84806-021-0

Abstract:
There is little experience of the operation of small wind turbines mounted on domestic buildings in urban environments and little data on their performance in terms of power generation, service life and maintenance.This BRE Trust-finded study shows that, in addition to the initial embodied carbon and efficiency of the turbine, the payback period is highly sensitive to local wind conditions, transport costs, maintenance requirements and the life of the turbine. It reveals large variations in output of micro-wind turbines in a city such as Manchester and a windy location such as Wick in Scotland, and between the outskirts and town centres in windy locations.In windy locations, micro-wind turbines can generate enough energy to pay back their carbon emissions within a few months or years but in large urban areas, micro-wind turbines may never pay back their carbon emissions. Life cycle costing suggests that, even in favourable urban locations, financial payback is unlikely for all but the most durable, efficient and low maintenance turbines.This work confirms the need for a more rigorous method for estimating the electricity generated from building-mounted micro-wind turbines and for research and innovation in technology, planning and urban design to maximise the effectiveness of the turbine installations. 47 pages.

Benefits:

Provides a rigorous analysis of all the factors that influence the power that small wind turbines can generate in urban areas
Studies the whole life costs and carbon emission costs of micro-wind turbines
Case studies for three locations - Manchester, Wick and Portsmouth

Contents:
Executive summary
1 Introduction
2 Inventory analysis of micro-wind turbine systems
Introduction
University of Bath LCA data
System boundaries
Recycling
Results
Comparison with LCA data for other turbines
Installation, maintenance and operation of the micro-wind systems
3 Estimation of typical urban wind resource
Introduction
Wind resource - adjustment factors for urban environments
4 Electricity generation by building-mounted wind turbines in typical urban scenarios
Introduction
Methodology for the electricity calculation
Results
Conclusions
5 CO2 payback for domestic micro-wind turbines in urban environments
6 Life cycle costs and financial payback for micro-wind turbines
Introduction to life cycle costing
What costs are taken into account when undertaking LCC for a wind turbine?
7 Discussion and conclusions
8 Further work
9 References

Subject/Keywords:
FB17, wind power, renewable energy, microturbines, costs, life cycle analysis, LCA.

White Alice Farm B&B

2007-03-05T23:11:00.001Z

Just had a very rainy weekend in Cornwall again visiting our microwind test site. We drove down on Friday evening in terrible weather and stopped at the Golden Lion Inn for supper. Simply nice food, and a good pint of St Austell best.

The White Alice Farm B+B is definitely the best place for us to stay. It's a little difficult to find by road in the dark which I don't think my wife will let me forget for a long time, but worth it. We stayed in the self catering barn which was useful because there was a bit of extra space to strew wet gear around. It's run by Sue Faryluk (White Alice Farm, Carnmenellis, Cornwall, TR16 6PH; tel 01209 860634) and her husband. She does a nice breakfast.

On Saturday I put up another wind turbine and various bits of instrumentation in pretty fair weather, and on Sunday we had terrible weather whilst we did some stuff with a wind tunnel we have. Our Ampair 600-24 is going really well on performance trials down there.

Agh the $%^** Blogger ampersand curse has struck again. No way is this out of beta !

Hugh Mereweather and early Kestrel / Harrier testing

2007-03-01T21:59:00.000Z

Ampair was started by Hugh Mereweather back in 1973. He was a test pilot who enjoyed sailing and he designed the early Ampair 50 wind turbine that evolved into the Ampair 75 and then the Ampair 100. The Aquair was jointly his design and that of Don Street of IOLAIRE fame. Later the UW was co-designed with George Durrant who brought Ampair into some stability after the rather meagre early years. Anyway it is not often that one can find information about Hugh Mereweather's test pilot work and I have just seen some at the Harrier history website.

Hugh died last year and Ampair was represented at his funeral by George Durrant. I will post his obituary as written by Don Street another day.

Supplier part numbers in MYOB

2007-02-16T17:43:00.000Z

I like to include supplier part numbers in purchase orders, and MYOB thoughtfully allows for this. I couldn't understand why they weren't coming through on the printed forms (of course they never show on the screen because of the MYOB lay out issues I've described before) and finally I've realised that its because of the supplier selection. For each item one can set up a normal supplier. If one then issues a PO to another supplier MYOB thoughfully conceals the supplier part number. This prevents us all inadvertently upsetting our secondary suppliers by revealing alien part numbers to them. Unfortunately MYOB doesn't have a secondary supplier pick and secondary supplier part number.

We also make use of the supplier part number to link our drawing registry and our accounting system. We use the supplier part number as our drawing number (for parts which are being manufactured to our drawings) and our own part number is our (MYOB) accounting part number. It is a work around but the accounts people are determined not to use drawing numbers as part numbers, and the drawing people simply can't use the acounting part number convention (because of the way the drawing package file structures are arranged).

I guess we're guilty of turning MYOB into a cheapskate ERP but there really aren't many good alternatives out there. Recently a competitor changed from Sage FC 500 to Exchequer and they tell me it is good. They were driven by pretty much the same issues that drive any SME manufacturer. I hadn't heard of this before but it appears they shelled out £20-£40k for the move whereas we've done a pretty good job with MYOB for £4k inc consulting. Equally interestingly our consultant has dropped out of the MYOB consulting scheme because she doesn't want to support MYOB until they take the networking issues seriously. She was a silver and really knew her stuff - much better than the gold tier people we checked out. But equally she says Sage is a poor network user as well.

El Reg carried an interesting article on ERP packages the other day. I'm not sure they ever consider stuff as small and insignificant as us, but given the way Sage are hoovering up mid to low end package vendors I guess we'll be rereading that article in a few years time. Hopefully making more microwind and water turbines by then but it might be something else given the way our R+D team are throwing out ideas.

Oh and this new blogger text editor is a disaster - it doesn't allow ampersands. What a nightmare. Turns out the offending amersand is in the label field !!

Boost as Ampair supports Mike Perham's Transatlantic Record

2007-01-03T22:45:00.000Z

We're happy that 14-year old Mike Perham has today safely sailed single handed across the Atlantic and is now the youngest person to do so. We at Boost supported him via our Ampair renewable energy business by suplying specialist solar panels and regulators.

He and his father Mike Perham originally wanted to use our Ampair wind turbines or our Aquair water turbines, but because of the light displacement of their Tide 28 yachts we advised the use of solar panels. We reviewed their power needs and the deckspace available and selected the correct panels for the job. They took the Aquairs along but in the event they didn't need to use them.

You can read about the story on the BBC at and see a video of the arrival in Antigua. The Perham website is at www.sailmike.com.

MYOB email preferences

2006-09-15T11:36:00.000Z

Just been working on a PC where MYOB couldn't email out the POs, invoices, etc. Turned out that the Outlook Express email account settings had been disabled but Outlook had not been selected as the preferred email program. Solution was to select Outlook (and disable Express) in the Outlook>Tools>Options>Other preferences.

There appears to be no way to direct MYOB to use a specific email programme - not that it would necessarily be a feature one would ever need.

Using Mozilla Thunderbird - changing password

2006-09-15T10:32:00.000Z

In Mozilla Thunderbird the passwords account setting is dreadfully difficult to find.

To change a password you saved for an account, under Tools, then Options, click Advanced. Click Manage Stored Passwords. Highlight the account you want to change and click Remove.

Outgoing SMTP server management is also difficult - expecially if you host two websites on the same server as we do. The reason is that there is no way to assign an account name so as to be able to distinguish between smtp.xxx.com and smpt.xxx.com which can lead to some guesswork in picking !

new Ampair website

2006-08-29T09:33:00.000Z

Our partner business Ampair has its new website up and running. They are at www.ampair.com and specialise in manufacturing renewable energy systems, especially micro wind turbines, microhydro turbines, and distribute specialist solar systems.

MYOB server + memory + BoM

2006-08-29T09:12:00.000Z

BLOG comments:
Two blog comments have come in re MYOB crashes:

1. A suggestion from Mick Devine of TwoKeys of Australia that we run the Premier Enterprise version, and that we run it on a server system.
- We run MYOB Accounting Plus for Windows Great Britain release version 15, release 10.0.2k. This is the best (most capable) available in the UK. I'm not sure of any (if any) difference between this and the Premier Enterprise version. Grateful if anybody could elucidate.
- We run on a PC rather than a server. That PC does only two other jobs (running Outlook and Office) and is only used by the administrator who is the main MYOB user (partly us rejigging our busines processes to accomodate MYOB crashes).
- We aim to shift MYOB to a dedicated server but this will not happen for a while. In the meantime this is as lightly a used PC as we could possible dream of.

2. A suggestion that we maximise RAM.
- We have 512Mb on all the machines. We upgraded one from 256Mb a while back and since that time we've reduced to about 3-4 crashes per day (previously we were in crashes per hour territory). However at the same time we also shifted the (master) host machine, and got very serious about use discipline in an attempt to keep a maximum of only 2-3 users logged on concurrently. So it is a little difficult to be sure which change was most important - and in any case we would rather be in crashes per month territory with 5 concurrent users (and quick response times).

Exploded BoM:
Also exploded BoM issues are beginning to drive us potty. Think of nested assemblies where we in practice build up the sub assemblies near immediately with the final product (but it is still worth breaking out the sub assembly as it gets reused as a module in many products). So the MYOB user needs to autobuild the whole sequence one at a time rather than auto cascading the build instruction through the logical hierarchy. A pain in the $%^%^ for the user, especially if they are not product 'aware'.

PO tick list:
Also on purchase orders we would like to be able to call up the item list and run down it ticking off a whol eseries of things that we know come from the same supplier, and then issuing a PO. Instead we have to open a PO and then remember all the part numbers.

Amending recurring orders:
Also on recurring orders it appears that we cannot edit (or delete) them. So trying to improve repeated purchases can be tricky and we now have a list of repeats that are almost but not quite 'right' (and what is right is in any case a moving target). Minimum functionality in this repect would be the ability to delete repeated POs.

Progressing with MYOB

2006-05-21T11:50:00.000Z

We're at the point where we want to start using MYOB as a production management tool. Previously we only used it as an accounting tool, and simply updated stocks from time to time. Needless to say this makes it difficult to allocate costs to products as one is basically expensing components in a given period. Over the last six months we've been getting all the components correctly coded and cross-referenced to all our production drawings, and getting bills of materials set up for all of our products. Now we're about to go live using it to 'create' electronic stock as a mirror of the actual workshop floor. This functionality is what makes MYOB so much more powerful than the competitor products in its class. Basically the equivalent SAGE product costs £20k minimum.

Over the last three days we've stock-checked about two thousand unique items (SKUs) and on Monday we go live.

But the bad news of course is that MYOB still does not like being networked. In practice we manage to keep about three users on line for about two hours between system crashes. More news to come in the next few weeks ! If I owned MYOB the networking issue is the one and only thing I'd have the development team working on.

Skype 2; Olympia USB Cordless DualPhone

2006-03-02T11:51:00.000Z

Somebody reads this blog !! A chap with problems with a DualPhone contacted me because his calls are being dropped almost every time.

Yesterday I upgraded my work pc to Skype 2.0.0.81 and it carried on working OK (phew) with the Olympia USB Cordless DualPhone I have connected.

Skype 2 is the one that allows video conferencing as well. I use it at home and the beta version has been pretty good.

The UK telephone number for DualPhone support is 0800 092 3745. I am currently running the v1.107 software which works OK.

A reason Skype calls can be patchy (and other VOIP offerings e.g. Vonage etc) is that the ISP/telcos are starting to actively degrade the service by using 'traffic assistance' . See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/23/isps_set_skype_limits/ for more details especially of the phenomenal statement:

"After (say) 100 sessions are started, "we can disconnect, or block new ones, or even slow down the rate they are transmitted," said Sandvine. "With customers who use this technology, we've got the traffic from 70 per cent to 20 per cent," he boasted.
One reason ISPs like doing this, is to encourage their customers to use the company's own VoIP system, rather than a rival's. If the packet is void, and is detected as from the cable company's own product, it is optimised - sent through faster than normal. Other packets are allowed to take their place in what's left of the queue.
He said: "A year ago, 90 per cent of VoIP was Skype; today is more like 50 per cent as the service provider favours their own service. So they prioritise their own branded VoIP services when the network is congested. "They don't manage Skype or Vonage down. They just do 'best efforts' for them, but generate superior quality for their own." "

BBC article on wind turbines

2006-02-11T16:39:00.000Z

Someone sent me a link to the BBC article on micro wind turbines:

(With energy prices on the up, will city skylines bristle with wind turbines and will back gardens become mini wind farms?
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/magazine/4694070.stm )

and scanning down it I saw some readers' comments. I quickly jotted down a reply to answer some of the entirely valid points raised. As of today (24-hours later) my reply has not been printed. I wonder if that is because the BBC doesn't work at weekends, or whether they now consider the story closed, or whether they consider my response unprintable ? In any case a weakness in the BBC system is that it does not email one a copy - in the future I will draft any comment on my own computer and that paste it across to their browser window so that I retain a copy.

Using MYOB for serious manufacturing control

2006-02-11T16:31:00.000Z

Any serious manufacturing control system relies on various Bill Of Material (BOM).

In MYOB to print out a BOM one has to go REPORTS/STOCK/AUTOBUILD/CUSTOMISE/DISPLAY/PRINT which is rather long winded. More generally they need to get print buttons on all their screens - there are many other screens which are useful but which can only be printed by going through a tortuous report generation process.

Similarly any serious BOM will include all sorts of sub assemblies which typically form a nested hierarchy. When one prints off the BOM to give a technician or storekeeper it would be better if all the nested items were available via a collapse / expand trigger (i.e. a +/- toggle). At the moment MYOB prints only one layer at a time, so the user has to manually create the report for each layer of sub assembly.

More MYOB comments

2006-01-29T21:25:00.000Z

As much as anything I keep this diary to remind myself of the issues when we come to redo something. I won't be suprised if we need to upgrade our accounting pckage as we will inevitably outgow MYOB in due course so I need to keep track of what causes us headaches now, before our workarounds become the norms.

If I go to a supplier account history I would like to be able to click on a given month, then be shown all the invoices, then be able to zero in on a particular invoice. I can't do that. Instead I have to scroll through ALL supplier invoices trying to guess the one that had the thing in it that interests me.

When suppliers ship to us we need to be able to use their delivery note to increase stocks as, typically, it will be a week or so until the invoice arrives. MYOB is genuinely an accounting package and so the workaround is to do a manual stock adjustment, but this means that we can double count when the invoice arrives, plus - even if we don't doublecount - we have to reverse out the stock adjustment and then enter the invoice. Of course any JIT production system will create this issue.

The field display size on MYOB needs to be user adjustable. I have plenty of screen real estate but MYOB displays in fixed coulum widths which are less than the field width. So my product codes (e.g. ..AM METL00001 all look the same as the column truncates them all to ..AM METL 0). I'd like to be able to quickly open out the columns.

I'd like to be able to give standard POs a title as a memory jogger so that I can reuse them (the reuse feature exists, but one needs to remember which was the relevant PO for a given supplier) as otherwise I am forced to use the BoM to create batch orders. I don't always want to use a BoM to batch order as e.g. the EOQ of castings may equate to three batches whereas the EOQ of bearings may equate to one batch.

I can't easily use a BoM printout as a job card for the workshop. In fact the underlying issue is that I can't create a job card for a production line. Oh and when I 'autobuild' in MYOB it is a zero time process so raw material gets immediatey shifted into the relevant finished goods whereas in real life the workshop takes time to make it - and ideally there should be a way of closing the loop. This one is going to be difficult to live with for a while.

I still haven't figured out what causes my computer to get so many more lock files than the others in MYOB.

We have figured out what caused the non-printing product codes. We had some quick idfentifiers in the product codes (e.g. AA=product we sell; /AA=facilitating servce such as transport; //AA=components in items) and the / and // were being interpreted as no printing codes. This wasn't in the MYOB manual, or widely known by the MYOB help desk staff as it had supposedly been removed in the latest release of MYOB (there is now a selectable field) but apparently is still in the code as a legacy feature (i.e. bug) which we inadvertently triggered. Our workaround was to use ..AA etc.

Accounting software in use, phones

2005-12-04T18:30:00.000Z

Our accounting software is now in day to day use and we can start to comment meaningfully on it. We chose MYOB over the market leader (Sage) or Quicken.

As one might expect having an accounting package definitely enforces process discipline. Since our processes were very flexible and not at all entrenched this is a relatively easy transition for us and one which most of us are ready for. Some of the things we were not doing well have begun to improve as a result (mainly order fulfillment) and we may get better on the other things (mainly supply chain management) in time.

Not everything is well in the land of MYOB. We are getting a worrying number of workstation lockups. MYOB is a late convert to networked environments and this may be related to the history of how it has evolved from a single workstation product. Each session is issued a session ticket (a lock file) so that we cannot exceed the number of simultaneous user sessions we have paid for (5 in our case) and sometimes a computer is detected as having already had a session ticket issued for it at which point it gets disconnected. The only way to reset this is to shut down all MYOB sessions and delete the lock file on the master workstation. This is irritating and we have yet to identify the reason for it. We are a wired network (or at least the relevant computers are) and so wireless issues are not the cause of this - MYOB is notoriously tricky on wireless networks.

Another area which is causing us problems is getting the forms set up. MYOB can use plain paper forms (i.e. it prints a form onto plain paper which saves a lot of problems) provided the forms are created in a basic editor package which is included in MYOB. It is a very basic editor and very user unfriendly. It is probably the worst thing about MYOB. If I owned MYOB I would concentrate at least half of my product development resources on fixing this. At the moment we are having to rework our purchase order (PO) layouts for the dumb reason that we didn't realise we should go for landscape print formats. This is because us engineers like long product codes whilst the accountants like short product codes - and there are two product codes on each PO: one for the buyer and one for the seller. Oh, and MYOB won't allow wordwrapping of product (item) codes (and it doesn't print a partial code either which is a pain). So we start again with the very stressful process of creating forms, deleting them off the various computers, and reinstalling them. Right now we have landscape POs but still don't have product codes in them - it worked in the sandpit tests but is not in the real world which is causing a bit of head scrathing, and manual code writing.

We finally solved the Skype issue after a bit. It turns out that there is a UK-specific software bug that prevents interoperability between the latest Skype release (1.3.0.66) and the latest Olympia Dualphone release (we use their cordless handsets) and once we downgraded the handset then it worked OK. No fix as yet. But bonus points to both Skype and Olympia for having a product support helpline with real people who are a) knowledgeable, b) helpful, c) speak english and d) only two menus away.

The main landlines are irritatingly inaudible. This is something I will try to figure out over the next few weeks. They are sometimes acceptable and sometimes terrible and the pattern doesn't seem to correlate with anything.

Our premises are starting to resemble a real factory again with production lines working and the supply chain in almost full swing. Our suppliers have been really good in helping us out over the last couple of months. All except two that is. It makes a difference to us and we appreciate it.

BT finally install our lines, Skype software upgrade fails

2005-11-09T18:05:00.000Z

Finally BT have installed all our lines. They arrived today - and in the process collected about £1500 worth of line testing equipment that they forgot last week. I think we now know all the local line installation and maintenance technicians (two separare groups), both in BT and in their contract workforce. It has taken almost three months.

Separately we upgraded our Skype software (as per the message from Skype) and promptly lost the use of our VOIP phone. Our VOIP phone is an Olympia Cordless DualPhone. We've contacted the folks at Olympia (who laudably have a help desk) and unfortunatel ythe Skype upgrade has broken the set up. They've escalated it to second line support (who sound as if they are colocated with Skype from the conversations I have had) and they tell us we will hear back from them in six or seven days. Reinstalls etc have all failed to fix the problem.

Don't you just love telecoms problems !

Boost for Ampair !

2005-11-09T16:26:00.000Z

Boost Energy Systems, the Berkshire based manufacturers of single to three phase converters announce that they have acquired Ampair the world renowned, wind, water and solar energy specialists. This move is part of a growth plan to create a business servicing all sectors of the worldwide small scale renewable energy market.

Boost are excited that this acquisition comes just as the new generation of Ampair machines are being introduced. They are currently developing their plans to expand the marketing of these and other ranges over the coming months.

Ampair has relocated from its existing factory in Ringwood to the Boost premises in Warfield, Berkshire. They will continue to show at all their regular exhibitions and events and as ever will be easily accessible in “virtual” form via their web site www.ampair.com.

David Sharman, MD of Boost comments. “This new relationship strengthens and enhances the long term “energy systems” objectives of the Boost Group and is a natural progression towards growing the business in this particular market sector over the next few years”.

New contact details for Ampair are as follows:
Telephone: 01344 303313
Fax: 01344 303312
Email: sales@ampair.com
Website: www.ampair.com

Boost Energy Systems:
David Sharman
Park Farm, West End Lane, Warfield, Berkshire, RG42 5RH, UK
Tel +44 (0)1344 303 311 www.boost-energy.com
Fax +44 (0)1344 303 312 david.sharman@boost-energy.com

Press Information:
Ian W Marriott
Inter World Marketing – 02380 474243

Moving and expanding

2005-10-17T20:09:00.000Z

This weekend and two weekends ago we moved another factory in to join ours. Just some notes for next time we need to do this:
- 7-1/2 tonner OK for up to 100 miles, thereafter go for 20+ tonners
- forks both ends
- journeys per day: 1, 2, 2, 3
- pallets per journey = 10
- pallet equivalents = 80
We've been preparing for this for a few months now but at the moment our factory still looks like a tip. Unfortunately our technicians are still new, and one is off sick, so getting organised is a real back breaker. But at least we are controlling the pace of this ourselves and so have been able to keep an almost uninterupted flow of goods to customers (unlike the phones which are still causing us real commercial problems).

If in the Bracknell area I recommend BTC for vehicle rentals. Very straightforward people, and cheap and reliable. We've used them for almost two years now. Our neigbours at Infinicar were also doing a workshop move this weekend and used them too.

We got the lighting up in our warehouse today, and ordered pallet racking - JW Whittle have found us some second hand stuff that suits our needs. We couldn't get the pallet racking in first which would have been the preferred solution.

Still no phone lines from BT !!

2005-10-14T21:05:00.000Z

Our escalation manager at Central Telecom (our service provider) told me today that BT have committed to have cable installed by 18th October. That is not quite the same as 'lines connected and working' but is at least a date to work with. Apparently BT are in dispute with their contractors hence the delay of some eight weeks. I wonder if they treat their contractors the same way they treat their customers.

Our commercial neighbour has been waiting quite a few more weeks than we have so I won't believe it until it works. In the meantime I know we lost at least one sale today of £1k due to disfunctional phones. And BT still haven't rerouted some other lines which we requested an exchange diversion on about 10 days ago - a job which takes 30 seconds on a keyboard.

On a happier note we were able to help out our neigbours in Infinicar with cheap transportation to Ireland and local lorry rentals. There are several businesses on site and we all try to help each other: four are automotive; we are electromechanical manufacturing; one runs a herd of goats and a dairy; one double glazing outfit; one security shredding outfit; one exhibition setup outfit; plus our landlord of course who is also extremely helpful.

TNT discriminate against UK manufacturers

2005-10-10T20:25:00.000Z

We've been waiting a month for a TNT security inspector to come and visit a consignment that was damaged in transit. In fact TNT managed to damage it twice - once on the way out and once on the way back. Fortunately we have photographic evidence of the before and after as the client took a shot of the packaging when he sent it back (which means TNT can't blame it on the client's shoddy packaging). The damage occurred because TNT have tipped the unit on its side (both sides, once each way) even though it is mounted on a pallet at TNT's request (I asked them to participate in the packaging design just over a year ago - assistance I was grateful for and in which Paul Roberts of TNT was extremely helpful). After a month of waiting for the inspector we gave up and repaired it today - we sent the client a new unit out by return of course.

I don't mind TNT damaging units - at least I don't mind provided they don't do it too often and I have to admit they are the best option we have at the moment (although this may change as our freight blend migrates as our business grows). What I do mind though is the attitude they have towards refunding damages. They discriminate against manufacturers. They do this by only refunding for damages for which the repaired part is bought in. This means that any assembly (and disassembly) labour is ignored. Now I quite agree that profit ought to be excluded, but excluding internally manufactured components or internal labour is absolutely not on. Somebody has to do it and it ought not to make any difference whether it is in-house or outsourced. Doing it this way discriminates against UK manufacturers in favour of those who source their products outside the UK.

As a side effect TNT management think that their service is good because they have low claims costs, whereas in fact they have artificially depressed the claimable amount. Oh and the depot managers (in this case Jamie Mitchell) simply bully small manufacturers with the "if you don't like our conditions of carriage you can go elsewhere" response. Of course they know only too well that they don't say this to the larger customers, and that they have a near monopoly on certain freight classes. In this particular instance the result is that our claim is only for £50 whereas the true cost to us is about £250 excluding customer satisfaction and management time. Which is a lot of money to us. I could get around this by getting a supplier to create a fake invoice but that would be dishonest.

There's not much I can do right now except to run trial batches out via the other carriers, and to talk to the reps of the other carriers who I have been declining to meet for the last year. And to post this cautionary tale. And to discuss my experiences with my peers in other small UK manufacturing businesses who distressingly report exactly the same problem with TNT which really annoys all of them as well. It's a pity really because a slightly different attitude from TNT would cause us all to really support them rather than griping like this.

Oh and I'm doing a redesign of the unit that was damaged to eliminate two of the weak areas and which will also allow me to use different packaging. And maybe even make it more attractive to other carriers ...

BT still haven't got our new lines in - it has now been escalated again within both CT and BT. However today BT did replace a faulty line card on the exchange side DSL equipment which has cured one problem though.

Telephone lines and workshops

2005-10-08T18:58:00.000Z

Over the past six or seven weeks we've been working hard rebuilding our factory and preparing for expansion. The rebuilding part has been fairly easy - we do it ourselves so all it takes is hard work and ingenuity. That's taken quite a lot of weekends (and the ten day long Southampton Boat Show has taken all the others) and most spare minutes.

The far from easy part has been the telephone system. The first choice was whether to get a VOIP enabled switcboard but when we discovered the cost (£10k for a simple system) we canned that and went with a £500 analogue system which has fractionally more functionality than four quadpacks of DECT handsets (and by the way there is a business opportunity out there for someone). The second choice was which service provider and we have decided to remain with Central Telecom who have started to give almost acceptable service. And then for six weeks we have waited for the new lines, and waited, and waited. And still BT can't get them in. Threatening to escalate the issue to OFTEL has finally got line crews stringing cable (and lots of 'engineers' arriving with a stunning lack of ability to read a cable register) but apparently it will take another week to see the new lines. In the meantime they've practically crippled our aDSL internet connection with their shenanigans.

Hopefully all will be resolved.

Boost intern steals limelight at regional STEP award

2005-09-25T20:35:00.000Z

Last week Ahmed Mulla and I went along to the regional heats of the STEP scheme which were hosted by Shell in London. It was a super view from high up in their offices - almost level with the top of the London Eye. Ahmed gave an absolutely super explanation of what he had been up to with us and whilst the judges retired to consider all the projects all the other students congratulated him on his work in the expectation that he would win.

Unfortunately the organisers then announced that he was disqualified as he had been a STEP student before. This was something that he had always pointed out and nobody except the STEP programme director was aware that it was an issue, so it came as rather a shock.

Ahmed was very good about it, but the bottom line has to be tread very warily if considering participating in STEP.

Boost intern wins local STEP award !

2005-09-09T17:06:00.000Z

This morning I went along to the event where all the local area STEP students (Shell Technology Enterprise Programme) present their Summer internship projects. We were extremely proud that our student (Ahmed Mulla) won the local area competition and will now be a finalist in the regional competition.

Ahmed has been doing several pieces of research for us over the past two months, and prior to that provided holiday cover for us whilst one of our regular technicians went off on honeymoon for a month. Ahmed is an electrical engineering student studying at Cambridge University and he has been doing a series of structured projects for us in the field of renewable and distributed energy. Please excuse me if I don't give further details !

We were especially pleased because we had not even given him much assistance with the presentation of his project. At Boost we encourage, but give everybody room to learn - in his case he has done us proud. Well done Ahmed.

You can read more about Ahmed's experiences as an intern on our careers page - look down at the bottom for details of the job description, our evaluation of all the candidates who applied before the deadline, and Ahmed's comments on his time with us.

Boost is recruiting

2005-09-05T19:17:00.000Z

At Boost we are expanding our UK manufacturing operations and have vacancies for two technicians. The detailed job adverts are on our website here. It takes a lot of hard work to run an expanding manufacturing business in the UK, especially one within 50 miles of London, and so anybody who applies must be ready to contribute their utmost. The principal roles are assembling phase converters, wind and water turbines (renewable energy devices) and managing component stock levels etc.

Organising 2005 SDM Conference at MIT

2005-08-28T09:40:00.000Z

During the last year I've been one of the team organising the 2005 SDM Conference at MIT. This is now open for booking and whilst attendance is strictly speaking only available for alumni, students, and faculty associated with the SDM and LFM programmes at MIT / Sloan we are pretty flexible in taking bookings from other people with a serious interest in complex system design and/or management.

The conference is on Thursday 27th October and Friday 28th October at MIT. We have an exciting list of speakers including Carliss Baldwin and Stefan Tomke (both of Harvard Business School) as well as Michael Hammer (of MIT), and for the first time an SDM alumni will give a full length lecture - he is Bill Taylor of SDM'01 and he and I sweated over our theses together.

The sponsors are BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, Raytheon, and Boost Energy Systems.

Hope to see you there !

Visiting suppliers, climbing in the West Country

2005-08-25T16:24:00.000Z

I've just spent a week visiting a lot of suppliers along the south coast of the UK, from Southampton down to Falmouth. The weather was absolutely gorgeous and I took advantage of the trip to get a weekend of climbing in at Lands End and on the Culm Coast (Great Zawn; Bosigran; Rosemergy Towers; Carn Kenidjack; Hartlands Point). We stayed at Roselands Caravan Park (www.roselands.co.uk; 01736 788571) which was fine but full. Excellent pasties from Warrens of Penzance who now have a near monopoly in the West Country, with bakery outlets in many of the small villages.

Another distributor in Scotland

2005-08-12T20:33:00.000Z

I've just taken a moment to put up details of our latest distributor, Power and Generation Services in Oban. They aren't a store - but they are prety good consulting engineers who also do HV electrical safety training and run offshore oil & gas platforms in their spare time. They've been handling our phase converters for a while and selected our units after quite a thorough evaluation. They also deal in remote generation packages such as diesel / wind / solar / microhydro systems for both the onshore and offshore market.

Accounting packages, telephone systems, phase converter overloads

2005-08-10T20:37:00.000Z

For now we have decided to go with MYOB Accountant Plus. We'll try and get it up and running over the next few weeks so I'll let you know how it goes.

We've also started the process of looking at our telephone systems. Trying to get our telephone provider to take ownership has been something of a trial but eventually (after weeks) one of them has asked to visit us to try and understand our needs.

We're doing these things now because this is the quietest time of year for phase converter sales. Yesterday an interesting converter problem surfaced in a unit we sold about 3 months ago to run a dry cleaner. I drove over in the afternoon - although it was quite a few hours drive they can't afford to be out of action for more than a day or so, and in those circumstances we move quickly.

The first problem was simple: the supply was via a 63 Amp 'B' type breaker and the breaker was failing. All I had with me was a 'C' type which resolved the increasingly frequent supply side trips. Ideally I would have fitted a 'D' type. The second problem was that our phase converter was a Booster A 12kW unit and the client's load was pulling a pretty steady 13kW during one part of the dry cleaning cycle. This was causing our unit to go into boost quite frequently (almost 50% of the time for several minutes) and this was overstressing the controller which was on the point of failing. I replaced it with a 16kW controller and we'll see how it performs now. The next weakest thing in the system is either the motor or the supply, and I'd rather not upgrade either if the client can avoid the expense. I guess this shows one of the advantages of using our controllers as even with this amount of boosting it still wasn't causing a great deal of difficulty to the load as a contactor-based solution would have.

Accounting packages

2005-08-07T20:17:00.000Z

We need to get an accounting package now in order to cater for growth. Unfortunately we seem to fall midway between the small business packages (Intuit Quickbooks; MYOB; basic Sage) and the medium sized business packages (Sage Line 50; Opera II; SAP sbe; Dream/CODA; Sunsystems).

The former can be picked up for £300 or less whereas the latter fall into the £2500-£15000 range and require quite complex (i.e. costly) implementation. This issue is made worse by the fact that we are a manufacturer and this makes everything tricky as in the future we need to consider integrating with our manufacturing systems (production scheduling, purchasing, resource allocation, etc). Oh and then there is the issue of marketing as this whole thing can be considered as a full ERP+accounts+CRM.

We've been taking advice and reviewing our options. A good site for advice is http://www.accountingweb.co.uk but they don't tend to discuss the merits of the small packages. Quickbooks definitely looks expensive versus MYOB. And SAP is equally expensive versus Sage Line 50 and Opera II. And Sage has a dreadful reputation in fast-changing manufacturing environments. Dream/CODA and Sunsystems are more of an unknown quantity but first I think we need to choose between the small and medium sized packages. Right now MYOB Accounting Plus is looking pretty attractive.

Boost, phase converters, and accounting packages

2005-08-02T20:26:00.000Z

Hello, I am David Sharman. This is where I will try and keep a diary of interesting things that happen to us here at Boost. Well, the sort of things that interest us and will provide a record we can look back on to get a sense of perspective. Some of them may also interest you - especially if you are interested in phase converters; renewable and distributed energy; and the problems that face a small manufacturer.

Our core product is a phase converter. We've been making these for 48 years. A phase converter transforms single phase electrical power (the sort that one gets in a standard 3 pin plug) into 3 phase electrical power (the sort that requires either a 4 or 5 pin electrical plug). They are quite useful but also a niche product. Boost Energy Systems started life in 1957 as Boost Electrical Engineering. We changed the name when I took over because we could see that we would expand our products to move beyond phase converters. This is happening slowly. I took over about 18 months ago and most of our progress has been in phase converters - enough progress that we have had to move premises twice. We joke that our core competence is building workshops !

There are three of us directly working for the business right now: myself who is a general engineer; Dalibor Golubvic who is our assembly technician; and Ahmed Mulla who is an engineering student doing a piece of research for us. We also have quite a close working relationship with Peter and Selina Burton at Isomatic UK; and George and Hristo Nachev at Isomatic Lab. From time to time Mr Ali works with us when we have abnormal demand levels.

Right now is the quietest time of year for us. This means we can get some of our systems sorted out ready for the rest of the year. This week I am trying to figure out if we ought to move onto an accounting system - and if so if it is one that should also be extendable to a manufacturing resource system. If any of you have suggestions then let me know. Top contenders appear to be Opera and Sage. SAP are trying to convince me that they can scale down to our business but they are not very convincing. Sage don't seem very customer responsive which rather puts me off them (I am looking at Sage Line 50 FC by the way). Opera seem to get it but I am wary of being locked in too quickly. Another one might be Mamut. Right now we run off spreadsheets and ring binders which has the advantage of being flexible and compatible with doing the books on my kitchen table in the evenings. I'll let you know more as we work through the problem.