Autumn is certainly upon us: the nights are drawing in, and the trees are turning. We had a fairly dry late summer, so didn’t generate much, but since then it has rained….and rained – luckily for us not as torrentially as in other places, but it certainly filled up the river, and things have been busy at the turbine as a result.
We had a very successful working party just before the weather turned – we cleared lots of overgrown vegetation, and started to try to shift a set of willows that had fallen over into the river and rooted just above the turbine intake; we felt these were causing an eddy which allowed silt and rubbish to be deposited at our intake, reducing the flow.. We only managed to move part of the set of trees – but heavy rain then half-uprooted them and left them dangling across the intake.
Just hauling failed to shift them – too heavy – but Mike Ford found an electric winch, which more or less did the job…even this could only drag the root mass partway up the bank, so we are gradually cutting pieces off as weather allows, and will eventually get it moved.
One of the features of Autumn is the beauty of the trees as the leaves change colour and fall; this is lovely, but all those leaves have to go somewhere, and many of them end up in the river, get waterlogged, and clog up our intake screen. Sometimes just stopping and starting the turbine will fix this, but often someone has to go down and clear the intake with a big rake. It keeps us fit.
Other news: Mike has organised a replacement high-pressure cylinder for our hydraulics, now installed. I’ll write some more about servicing and maintenance in a later blog….
Rory Newman, Chair of Esk Energy
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