RB900 in gale force winds

Manufacturers make claims about the survivability of their wind turbines in high winds. Over the weekend Northland was hit by a huge storm causing much damage in places. Gale force winds was were predicted ( 25 - 34 M/S or Over 90 KPH ) though no measurements of wind strengths available yet.
Picture shows an RB900 attached to a wooden pole Via a 1.5 meter long, 50 mm diameter tube. Winds was strong enough to bend the pipe. Looks like it was bent at the point where it is attached to the pole by a steel band. No damage to the propellers or wind generator. We will have to replace the pipe with a larger 82 mm diameter pipe.
The propellers of the RB900 is pitch variable and is not furled away from high winds. The 2.0 meter, 5 bladed design subject the machine to tremendous forces, which gives it good low wind speeds performance.
The RB900 is a 1000 watts peak machine list priced at $3950. Average production at 3 - 5 M/S wind is about 60 KW hrs a month.
Price does not include installation but the manufacturers do provide suggestions and help with advise. Each installation is different according to location and conditions. Some are guyed. This particular installation should be guyed as well but it is wise after the fact.

July 13 NZ Herald online " About 100 homes and businesses are still without power as the Far North recovers from a weekend of heavy rain and wind gusts reaching up to 140km an hour......"

RB900 actual output

We did a field test of the RB900 in 3 - 5 Meters per second wind speeds today. Auckland Met report had the wind speed at 10 - 14 MPH all day ( about 5 - 8 knots. ) We ran the RB900 in 12 volt mode.
I should mention that our battery bank was situated 60 meters from the wind generator. Perhaps with the bank directly under the generator we could have got better results.
The results we got were very encouraging indeed. 3 - 5 meters a second is really light winds. Most wind turbines need more than this to produce useful power.

We were averaging 5 amps at 12.6 volts. The results varies with wind gust sometimes peaking at 10 amps at 13.5 volts and dropping to nothing as well on occasion. Generally as soon as the turbine spins useful power was produced to charge the batteries. On average we were getting 60 watts. Over 24 hours this would have translated into about 1.5 kilowatt hours.

This is very good results as we often get this amount of wind all year round. We could not operate the turbine at 24 volts at this wind speeds as the turbine output voltages rarely exceeded 25 volts. To operate at 24 volts we will need a DC to Dc inverter. That will be our next project. For the time being we will operate the turbine at 12 volt and when the weather report predicts 20 KPH and above winds we can manually switch over to 24 volt operation.