Wow, I have really not been keeping this blog up to date.
Things are definitely afoot tho. I'm currently in Germany, flying to India in less than a month to start the approtech building trip through Asia. I'll be documenting that (as in, actually documenting it) through a separate blog, the address of which I'll post here when it's up.

Meanwhile, I'll be giving another couple of wind turbine building workshops in Berlin on April 26th and 27th (https://www.facebook.com/events/857595347591183) after the quite successful ones given in Perth and Melbourne. Also a talk at Sublab, Leipzig's hackerspace, on the 13th.

In other news, the vawt tutorial is now available on Instructables.com (http://www.instructables.com/id/Vertial-Axis-Wind-Turbine-from-30-Of-Scrap-Materia/) and of course the SolarFlower website (http://solarflower.org/tutorial.php?lang=en&tut=vawt). I'd recommend viewing via the latter, layout's a bit more useful.

Since leaving New Zealand last September I've spent three months in Western Australia with mum, working on getting the vawt plugged into the airconditioner prototype via a very simple and seemingly quite effective bellows pump made from an old biscuit tin and other bits and pieces:



This seemed like it probably would've worked out reasonably well, but unfortunately as I was preparing to haul the whole apparatus up the side of mum's house I discovered that the brickwork on the roof I was planning to attach it all to is extremely dangerously unstable, and not something you want to be ever standing under, let alone attaching a wind turbine to.
So instead I had to put the aircon back on a vacuum cleaner motor, which then proceeded, due to the new 40mm hose replacing the 18mm, to blast most of the water out of the ground tank and melt a hole in itself.
Mum's since moved house (for unrelated reasons), so when I'm back over that way round the end of the year I'll take another crack at getting all this going. Though it'll probably come up on the trip and get more nicely prototyped somewhere in Asia.

From Perth I was originally going to be heading to Alice Springs, until enough people finally convinced me that going into the outback in December is both dangerous and pointless, as everyone else has the good sense to clear out til it cools down a bit, so instead I flew into Brisbane and headed down the east coast, visiting mates along the way, then flew to Alice mid Feb.

Australia is a mess, for reasons that are too extensive to really go into here, so plans to work in with remote communities didn't really pan out. Instead I played with plugging a photovoltaic panel into the aircon instead of the vawt:



Then drove to Darwin, flew to Germany.

So really things are ticking along until I hit India, at which point it all goes pretty crazy, I should imagine.