Turbine Construction

The Hanover Guys

Just before Christmas in 2004, we had a couple come to our place from Hanover in the middle of a snowy, blustery day, to talk to us about our wind turbine. Hanover is about a three hour drive north from where we live, but they were determined to come down even though the weather was not very good.

We spent the afternoon talking with them about our system and about energy conservation and various other stuff. Lorne was very interested in building one of Hugh Piggott’s axial flux turbines. They left with lot’s of information and a strong desire to start building the turbine!

Since then, there have been a few telephone conversations back and forth between us and on Saturday, July 9th, we took a drive up to their place to take some of the magnet disks to them.

Lorne and his wife live on 75 acres on a small lake a little north of Hanover. It’s a beautiful place! They have a great southern exposure on the front of their house which has been built into the side of a hill to take advantage of the insulating ground around them. The interior of the house has thick poured concrete walls, and even though it was fairly warm outside the day that we were there, the inside of the house was very comfortable, even without air conditioning! They heat the house in the winter with just a wood stove and they said that it will roast them right out of there sometimes! It’s a really interesting house!

While we were there, we met Tony, one of the guys that is interested in building a turbine as well. Lorne said that there are a lot of people in the area who are very interested in building the turbines and that they will come to his house to build them, much like the group of people that come to our house to build their turbines! That’s great! Hopefully, soon there will be little groups of people all over Ontario doing exactly the same thing!

We will be keeping in close contact with Lorne while he is building his turbine and we will be posting pictures of the progress here. Hopefully, we will be going back sometime this summer for another visit and to take more pictures.