Length does matter.....

 7:17 am - Friday - November 15th - TWW - 46° F, humidity 31%, wind 16 mph out of the south by southwest....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 51° F.  On this date in 2019 TLE and I were working at Ramona Oaks RV Resort, and I rode my new to me Haibike SDURO electric assist mountain bike for the first time....I was in love.....

.....before buying the Haibike I had to push my Intense 5.5 part of the way up to the microwave tower.  With the Haibike electric assist I was able to ride the bike the entire way.

We began Thursday with one simple goal, but as can happen in the Hockwald clan, our attention was diverted several times to other projects.  Our main goal for Thursday was to extend the 'mast' on the new wind turbine above the Newell, and the surrounding trees in order to take better advantage of the wind.  I moved the saw horses from the garage over to the trailer, and brought the 'mast' extension pole over as well.  

I would need TLE's help with this project, and she was in the middle of burning cardboard in our 'burn barrel', so I turned my attention to trying to fix the latch on the driver side water bay door on Phyllis' Newell.  What began as a 30 minute project, turned into a 2 hour project, and at the end I had improved the travel of the latch about 85%, but it would still not lock in place like the others do.  TLE moved from the burn barrel to other things while I struggled with the water bay door.  I finally decided I had gone as far as I could on the latch, deciding to leave the last 15% until another day.  Right now it does keep the water bay door closed, and the elements out, so I had that going for me.

Next TLE and I finally turned our attention to extending the 'mast' for the wind turbine.  In order to extend the 'mast' 8' I needed to add about 8' of 10 gauge stranded wire to the existing wiring.  That went pretty smoothly.  We also had to take down the wind turbine to work on that wiring, as well as prepare it to be extended.  I won't go into all the details, but the project seemed to take twice as long as it should, however, in the end we were successful in raising the full 'mast', which is now about 18' long, and putting it back into the mounting brackets on the trailer.  Trying to lift that much metal was a little daunting, but between TLE and I we figured out the best way to do it, and in the end we were successful with no small children, or animals of any size, being harmed.....

The extended 'mast' installed

The 8' extension

.....within minutes of installing the longer 'mast' the propeller began to spin as fast as I have seen it spin since we installed it.  The wind was very light, but the turbine was now tall enough to get the turbine above the trees and Newell to catch the wind!

For the rest of the afternoon busied myself with several small projects, one of which was to replace the ground wire for the new SeaFlo water pump, which went very smoothly.  It was also time to refill our onboard fresh water tank, and after that the IBC water tote.  With TLE's help both were accomplished in short order.  By the time we finished putting away the large hose we use to transfer water from the water tower to the IBC water tote the sun was setting, and another day at TWW was in the books.  Other than a short snack break, we worked continuously for about 6 hours....one of our longer work days since we arrived.

Thanks for stopping by!