Just had flyer from a turbine installation company listing annual servicing costs for a range of turbines, all in the 10 to 20 kWh spectrum. costs range from £220 up to £500 and the higher costs are not necessarily higher for the bigger turbines plus travelling and any parts except grease. if you have a turbine with an annual bill at the top end over the expected 20 year lifetime that's ten thousand quid off the income before they fix any thing, and you can bet something is going to go wrong over the lifetime of almost any machine. As we have a 10 kWh turbine and a 10 kWh solar PV installation it will be interesting to see how the running costs of the two compare over life time of the two. By the way just noticed that in fact one turbine is only 5 kWh and still costs nearly £400. Seems high?

I seen you up on top of those ones beside the A30 ST - is that why they always seem to be static?

I like climbing, but think your 3rd party public liability would be affected if I went up there with a screwdriver and a pair of molegrips.

It may be worth comparing the service costs against energy produced, the annual kWh rather than the size of turbine. or the cost of the turbine.

How is the new PV working?

Have you gone any further with trying to establish exactly how much home grown you are using compared to exporting?
And how are the new lids working on the water tanks? Make much difference.

Since insulating the wax tanks to a much better level, boiler on time vastly reduced around 20% and a corresponding drop in fuel consumption. The problem is still as you have spotted a lot of the power we are generating is still not used by us, instead of just heating the tanks with water heated by a 20 year old kerosene boiler we need to get some immersion heaters into the system the trouble is as you know ours is home built low pressure system and we keep putting off hacking it about, but I guess we need to get on with it.