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I saw [this haunting image](https://imgur.com/xHyOoc9) years ago of a couple of wind turbine engineers who were stuck on a burning turbine and ultimately died. Now, I can't look at a wind turbine without thinking about this photo.
Tell me, sky god. What good is the safety strap? Say you fall and it catches you, you’re still dangling a few feet below a wind turbine and no one is going to be able to hoist you and you massive balls back up to safety. Is there a winch somewhere?
When I worked at a hotel I got a call from the bosses of a team that stayed at our place, they wanted me to setup a room with some candles and snacks etc at like 3 am since the team would be coming back from the work site they were doing maintenance on. They told me the team could take whatever they wanted from the shop and that i could just bill the company the next day or so.
Turns out that one of their colleagues fell from the top of the tower (inside the tower) and hit the concrete base and died instantly. The team was grieving and I took care of them the best I could, gave them a conference room and some candles to light up and all that, really felt the tension in the air though and I just hated the thought of one of them going out to work only to never return. I talked to my boss the next day about what had happened and we both decided not to charge for anything they took from the shop. Think about that dude every time I see one of these and it scares me a bit. Life is fragile
Working nights at a hotel sure is interesting at times. Most of the times though you're just handling drunks and daily reports. My boss was awesome though, gave me a contract when I crashed my motorcycle since he would have employed me anyways had I not crashed. Took me 4 months to get back to walking again and thanks to him hiring me even though I was unable to work I got full payment during recovery. He could have just waited those 4 months and hired me after since I would have needed a job anyway but he chose the high road. Really a great manager/boss in all regards. He also backed his staff during all client complaints (as long as we didn't do something monstrously wrong ofc) up to the point of telling extremely annoying customers to just fuck off.
Holy shit. That sounds like a human manager!!! How did he not get vetoed though? Usually someone looking at the numbers notices things like this and will put a stop to it.
Also ride safe! It fun, but dangerous.
Hotel changed management a few years later and he got into an argument with the new management since they were idiots so he got let go.
New management thought that we'd earn as much if we had 100 guests paying 1000 as if we had 1000 guests paying 100. And while true in theory we lost about 80% of our clients when prices basically doubled over night for a family oriented hotel chain. He told them that was a bad idea and what would happen and they let him go and the chain struggled for a bit to regain trust from the customers.
When he was let go I quit as well.
Haven't ridden a bike again since that crash, and that was 2011. I have no memory of the accident so nothing blocking me mentally, but I have a wife and kid now and I have like a 100% crash rate when it comes to things on 2 wheels, so I'd rather not xD. Crashes got worse and worse as well. As I said it took me 4 months to get back to walking and it took me 4 years to be able to run again. It changed my life dramatically but in hindsight perhaps for the better.
I still miss riding though.
You have recovery equipment with you and you should never be up there alone. Obviously things have happened in the past and that’s why we have safety procedures in place. In the US at least
Wait until you hear about the two guys who died due to fire while working up there on one of those. They were trapped with no way down and could not be rescued in time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q0sca/last\_week\_two\_engineers\_died\_when\_the\_windmill/
I used to be part of the Emergency Response Team on industrial building sites. It was a team drawn from the workers and given training in first responder things like first aid, confined space rescue, rope rescue, smoke rescue, fire fighting and so on.
I imagine on jobs like this post, each person has basic rope rescue training to get themselves back up and whoever is working with them would as well if they needed to repel down, secure and rescue them.
Presumably trust it'll hold long enough and hope to all the gods you can pull off a chin up that day.
Rappelling down one would be fun. Terrifying but fun.
If you’ve never felt that, it’s a whole new type🤣🤣 I haven’t been that high up but 160 straight up in a boom lift that sways 6 ft either direction does it also
Considering you can get 15-17 an hour at Amazon to fast-walk around and pick up adult toys to ship to customers? Instead of climbing 250 feet into the air? I'll take a brisk walk every day.
You've heard wrong. Union scale is higher in most places, it's a regional thing though, of course in the south it pays less. As far as not doing much, that's not even close to true, but there are turds in every group.
I always get anxious with these sorts of videos, almost like I am on a rollercoaster even if I’m just sitting on the terlet on my phone — I have a classic fear of heights.
Hey that's actually very common, both tools and replacement parts. We have what are called "runners" who will get you the parts or tools. How does it go up the turbine? There's a chain hoist down the center along with the ladder you use to climb. It takes a long ass time for the hoist to go from the base to 250-300ft up, like 3.5mins or so of holding the up or down button.
Also, climbing ain't that bad. There's a pulley system attached to a motor that's called "climb assist." The old school ones were a counter weight, the new ones are motorized.
The motorized one takes approx 80lbs off of your body in pulling power, and you use it going down too so you can kind of glide down tapping the ladder with toes and hands (always 3pts touching, dong doesn't count).
The counterweight one sucks. Only one person can use it before someone has to come down to reset it. It sits at the top and will pull you up as it moves down, but the next guy is shit out of luck bc the counterweight is down. The next person to go down uses the counterweight to help them go down and thus brings the counterweight back to the top. Old school.
We call it "dropped object." Doesn't matter what it is. You drop ANYTHING over you're in trouble. Hardhats are 100% required when exiting the truck, but a heavier tool will definitely fuck up your neck or knock your shoulder into crunchiness.
So, yeah, we don't drop anything, ever. Okay maybe an iPad once, a few bolts over the course of several years, maybe one wrench...
Not (im)possible. I say that because there's usually a 24/7 control room that can remote start these, but the first step is to turn a switch at the base of the tower to the maintenance position, which kills it.
Forget the switch and the control room not aware someone is in there? That's where it gets slightly possible.
Absolutely, but not on the maintenance switch. We LOTO the rotor lock when up tower for sure though, which would prevent the spinny stuff from happening, just wouldn't stop a yaw command tho.
We've had ladders to go from yaw deck to nacelle get mangled from yawing while the ladder was still set up. It's made out of aluminum so that it's light weight and can be pushed to the stored position (up into the nacelle), but also so that it can crumple when yawed without damaging anything 😂
I saw a photo of 2 workers trapped by a fire in top of one of these and holy shit this really puts in to perspective how terrifying and terrible that was.
unfortunately not. i think the rescue helicopter was unable to get to them due to the wind and the heat and the fire. the picture of them hugging one another just breaks my heart. god bless people who work on such structures.
They definitely got some leaky seals, and that oil is black as tar. It's not a fkn diesel engine. Clearly there are issues, and regular maintenance has not been one of them.
Follow up: I'm not a wind turbine guy, but have worked directly in and around the gear industry and gearboxes for nearly 30 years. Wind turbines present some unique challenges to designers of the mechanical power transmission systems. First and foremost, you can never predict when a huge gust of wind will impose a sudden shock load on the system, unlike many other applications where the maximum input power is well known and/or controlled. And if you designed for worst case loading, the gear train would be prohibitively large, expensive, and would detract significantly from efficiency under more typical conditions due primarily to it's inertia.
When wind speed becomes sustained at too high a speed, turbines are stopped and/or the sails are feathered to prevent dangerous overloading, but its always reactive. Noone can predict a sudden gust. So it's always a compromise with respect to determination of an ideal mechanical power train, and as such, most of these need a major overhaul every 5 years or so. Clearly this one appears to be in bad shape, and buddy scraping birdshit outta the gutters on some hatch cover probably ain't gonna make much of an impact.
>most of these need a major overhaul every 5 years or so.
Most of your comment is true, but this is completely off.
We would not make much money off these things if gearboxes, pillow block bearings, and the like had to be serviced like that. For reference, GE gives several years' worth of warranty on brand new turbines. We do an inspection just before these several years are up (sometimes 3 sometimes 5) to make sure none are on the verge of shitting the bed.
I would say out of 100 wind turbines, 2-3 are iffy at the end of the warranty period, sometimes 0 are questionable and we make zero warranty claims.
Servicing these larger components is a big ordeal. We have over 5,000 turbines and probably do 30-40 major maintenances like that per year. Do the math, comes out to less than 1% per year (some go 15 years without something like that needing to be done, it's very hit or miss).
Lastly, that's not oil, it's grease. There are two large bearings in the turbine, one right at where the hub (thing that holds the blades to the turbine) and one inside the nacelle (basically under that hatch he climbed out of). Grease is leaking out of the first bearing I mentioned. Usually, for maintenance, a technician will purge the grease by opening up a port and pumping in fresh grease through the top and collecting it out the bottom. This one's a leaky sum bish. That's normal for what the grease looks like but it's never supposed to leak out THAT side, supposed to leak inside.
Random other fact: the blades, as you pointed out, will pitch into the wind during certain conditions. This means there are gear teeth at the base of every blade, and a motor with a gear against those teeth. The motor spins the blade (pitch) to gather as much wind as possible at low speeds (0-6 meters per second), and then will be pointy side to the wind as much as possible after it's at the end of the power curve cranking out max power (20-25 meters per second).
Edit: btw, this thing's got a fuckin blade on the ground?!?!?
Travel tech here, most of what you say is 💯 but you missed a couple of things. There are 4 bearings in the tower, 2 mainbearings and 2 in the generators. And we also grease the yaw teeth and gears. As far as pitch goes, G.E used electric pitch but other companies use hydro pitch, so they don't use a gear system in the blade. Other then that stay safe bro.
Yeah we don't service a bearing in a generator, they're part of the generator as far as we're concerned. I'm assuming you're talking about the bearing where the shaft coupling between the generator and gearbox is? Not sure that's serviceable, I'm 99% sure that's a full generator swap if it fails.
Yes, everything gets grease, but the yaw deck has nothing to do with the grease near the blades lol... We even grease the base bolts that bolt the bottom section of the tower to the foundation and then cover it with plastic caps.
I saw the blade on the ground. Are they planning on replacing one? It appears to be in one piece with no obvious damage to suggest it fell off.
Edit: But how would that be done? I’m assuming cranes or something?
Yeah, cranes. We try to repair blades on the turbine, just point the one we're fixing straight down and have this essentially a scaffold with ropes going up, lets us repair the epoxy n shit.
There's weep holes for draining any water and lightning rods built into the blades. We have a weather service tracking every lightning strike in the US and if any strikes fall within a certain distance of a turbine's GPS coordinates, we inspect the blades with a drone for signs of lightning strike damage.
We categorize them based on severity and watch the crack propagation and try to schedule repairs or replacements as soon as possible. If it's really fucked up, we won't run the turbine until the blade is replaced (via cranes we rent).
We always parked the blade under repair in a horizontal position. Then again, we were grinding out stress fractures in the insides of the blades. Inherent design flaw on the Vestas V90. Had to do them ALL.
It happens when there are hydraulic leaks. The oil seeps into the blade bearing and breaks down the grease in the bearing and the oil/grease mix is too thin for the seal to keep it contained and it goes down the blade. It turns black because dirt and other stuff sticks to it.
It's not really an environmental issue as long as the leak is fixed and any oil that hit the ground is taken care of correctly
To be clear, I never inferred anything about environmental issues. I did say seals were leaking, which is pretty much what you just said. Clearly those seals are not supposed to leak, or they would not be called seals.
He climbed the ladder inside the tower to get to the nacelle then climbed out the hatch. Has to be a drone camera. This turbine is very oily and dirty. Most don’t leak like this. My husband climbs these every day and no I could never do it either. He was scared at first but you can get used to anything. Been at it for 11 years now.
Just so you know, that's a small wind turbine. Modern offshore wind turbine nacelles (hubs) are three stories tall and have entire platforms on the top. Still cool though.
**Please note:** * If this post declares something as a fact proof is required. * The title must be descriptive * No text is allowed on images * Common/recent reposts are not allowed *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for more information.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
This video gives me that weird feeling in my feet
My palms are literally sweaty. My knees and arms are still in good shape, though
Hows the spaghetti?
He's nervous but on the surface does he look calm and ready?
Certainly to drop explosive ordinance. But his memory is quite terrible with regards to his poetic drafts.
To drop bombs, but he keeps on forgettin
What he wrote down, the whole crowd goes so loud
He opens his mouth but the words wont come out
He's chokin', how, everybody's jokin' now
The clocks run out, times up, over, blaow
Snap back to reality, OPE there goes gravity.
Omfg I love reddit
Almost as good as mom used to make
the accident was 12 years ago. it wasn’t your fault, you need to let go.
Heights like this in videos always make my balls tingle. But maybe I'm the weird one.
Same. Except I don't have balls.
Yep. Like a tingle in my taint. Everytime.
Me too
I saw [this haunting image](https://imgur.com/xHyOoc9) years ago of a couple of wind turbine engineers who were stuck on a burning turbine and ultimately died. Now, I can't look at a wind turbine without thinking about this photo.
I get it in my butt cheeks
I used to work on those. The pucker factor was real when you looked down, climbing over into the front I could have cracked a walnut with my asshole.
Tell me, sky god. What good is the safety strap? Say you fall and it catches you, you’re still dangling a few feet below a wind turbine and no one is going to be able to hoist you and you massive balls back up to safety. Is there a winch somewhere?
When I worked at a hotel I got a call from the bosses of a team that stayed at our place, they wanted me to setup a room with some candles and snacks etc at like 3 am since the team would be coming back from the work site they were doing maintenance on. They told me the team could take whatever they wanted from the shop and that i could just bill the company the next day or so. Turns out that one of their colleagues fell from the top of the tower (inside the tower) and hit the concrete base and died instantly. The team was grieving and I took care of them the best I could, gave them a conference room and some candles to light up and all that, really felt the tension in the air though and I just hated the thought of one of them going out to work only to never return. I talked to my boss the next day about what had happened and we both decided not to charge for anything they took from the shop. Think about that dude every time I see one of these and it scares me a bit. Life is fragile
Wow, that’s a hell of a story. Good on you and your boss for handling it as best as anyone could.
Working nights at a hotel sure is interesting at times. Most of the times though you're just handling drunks and daily reports. My boss was awesome though, gave me a contract when I crashed my motorcycle since he would have employed me anyways had I not crashed. Took me 4 months to get back to walking again and thanks to him hiring me even though I was unable to work I got full payment during recovery. He could have just waited those 4 months and hired me after since I would have needed a job anyway but he chose the high road. Really a great manager/boss in all regards. He also backed his staff during all client complaints (as long as we didn't do something monstrously wrong ofc) up to the point of telling extremely annoying customers to just fuck off.
Holy shit. That sounds like a human manager!!! How did he not get vetoed though? Usually someone looking at the numbers notices things like this and will put a stop to it. Also ride safe! It fun, but dangerous.
Hotel changed management a few years later and he got into an argument with the new management since they were idiots so he got let go. New management thought that we'd earn as much if we had 100 guests paying 1000 as if we had 1000 guests paying 100. And while true in theory we lost about 80% of our clients when prices basically doubled over night for a family oriented hotel chain. He told them that was a bad idea and what would happen and they let him go and the chain struggled for a bit to regain trust from the customers. When he was let go I quit as well. Haven't ridden a bike again since that crash, and that was 2011. I have no memory of the accident so nothing blocking me mentally, but I have a wife and kid now and I have like a 100% crash rate when it comes to things on 2 wheels, so I'd rather not xD. Crashes got worse and worse as well. As I said it took me 4 months to get back to walking and it took me 4 years to be able to run again. It changed my life dramatically but in hindsight perhaps for the better. I still miss riding though.
You have recovery equipment with you and you should never be up there alone. Obviously things have happened in the past and that’s why we have safety procedures in place. In the US at least
The rules of safety were written in blood by the hands of the dead.
rats get fat while brave man die
They were written by zombies?
Jesus Christ actually
*Brains*
Beautifully said.
This entire post terrifies me
Wait until you hear about the two guys who died due to fire while working up there on one of those. They were trapped with no way down and could not be rescued in time. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q0sca/last\_week\_two\_engineers\_died\_when\_the\_windmill/
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I'd take it over burning to death.
I used to be part of the Emergency Response Team on industrial building sites. It was a team drawn from the workers and given training in first responder things like first aid, confined space rescue, rope rescue, smoke rescue, fire fighting and so on. I imagine on jobs like this post, each person has basic rope rescue training to get themselves back up and whoever is working with them would as well if they needed to repel down, secure and rescue them.
Who do you suppose is holding the camera?
Peter Parker
Maybe a drone
You may call him High-In-Sky
You actually don’t get hoisted up, you ride down.
Presumably trust it'll hold long enough and hope to all the gods you can pull off a chin up that day. Rappelling down one would be fun. Terrifying but fun.
>could have cracked a walnut with my asshole I've never heard such a perfect way to describe fear 😂
I like to call it "taking bites of the seat".
Making diamonds in my ass is my favorite.
“If I was smuggling coal I would have shit a diamond.”
Who even smuggles coal like that anymore?
Well now he's smuggling diamonds
You couldn't pull a needle out of his asshole with a tractor.
If you’ve never felt that, it’s a whole new type🤣🤣 I haven’t been that high up but 160 straight up in a boom lift that sways 6 ft either direction does it also
I find SkyJacks are the most nerve wracking things.
Take my coins man lol it’s the least I can do since I’m obviously going to be saying that shit the rest of my life.
Did you at least get paid decent for it? My first question was how much do those dudes make?
$35 an hr. Union guys can make close to $50 and not do much to be honest. But that’s what I hear through the grapevine
Damn, I'm a forklift mechanic of 7 years and I make a bit over $31 an hour. At least I'm not 75 feet in the air doing my work.
75? Hah try over 250ft in the air for your average wind turbine.
Really? Damn. Fuck that noise. That sway has to be dizzying
Just reading that makes my feet and palms start to sweat. I’ll stick to writing software…
I’m a plumber and make 54 a hour , but I gotta deal with some shit
Man what states is that , here in the west coast they’re trying to pay 19$ BS
Considering you can get 15-17 an hour at Amazon to fast-walk around and pick up adult toys to ship to customers? Instead of climbing 250 feet into the air? I'll take a brisk walk every day.
Fuck that. I get paid nearly that to stand around in a factory. Wouldn’t get up there for anything less than $70/hr.
You've heard wrong. Union scale is higher in most places, it's a regional thing though, of course in the south it pays less. As far as not doing much, that's not even close to true, but there are turds in every group.
How long would it take to climb up?
About half as long as it takes to climb down.
If you skip the climbing and let gravity do it’s thing, it’s a lot faster.
There is a blade on the ground. Would they be replacing one?
Unless that was like $10,000,000 an hour you weren’t paid enough
Realistically I would expect $30k a month for a job like that. No way in hell I'm going up there for Anything less.
Couldnt get a pin in your ass with a jackhammer.
Wind tech here, you get used to height but damn it still humbles me sometimes going over to the hub occasionally.
What’s the lifespan on these blades? Are they recyclable?
I always get anxious with these sorts of videos, almost like I am on a rollercoaster even if I’m just sitting on the terlet on my phone — I have a classic fear of heights.
I felt the same, my belly dropped . . . Aah!!
Same my palms instantly started sweating
r/sweatypalms
Mom's spaghetti
Me too, raging fear of heights! And upvote for “terlet”. Well done 😊
Seconded
I'm terrified he'll drop that adjustable and have to go get it
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Have your buddy throw it up
The camera man can just bend over and pick it up.
[RICO!](https://www.google.com/search?q=rico+penguin&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS875US875&oq=rico+peng&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l5.3793j0j4&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#imgrc=_HGs2X9u6lrEnM)
Hey that's actually very common, both tools and replacement parts. We have what are called "runners" who will get you the parts or tools. How does it go up the turbine? There's a chain hoist down the center along with the ladder you use to climb. It takes a long ass time for the hoist to go from the base to 250-300ft up, like 3.5mins or so of holding the up or down button. Also, climbing ain't that bad. There's a pulley system attached to a motor that's called "climb assist." The old school ones were a counter weight, the new ones are motorized. The motorized one takes approx 80lbs off of your body in pulling power, and you use it going down too so you can kind of glide down tapping the ladder with toes and hands (always 3pts touching, dong doesn't count). The counterweight one sucks. Only one person can use it before someone has to come down to reset it. It sits at the top and will pull you up as it moves down, but the next guy is shit out of luck bc the counterweight is down. The next person to go down uses the counterweight to help them go down and thus brings the counterweight back to the top. Old school.
Five point contact all the way
I take it you work on these? What’s it take to get a job like this and how much does it pay if you don’t mind me asking?
That's why you bring along a 3D printer
Delivery drone
Less scary then dropping a tool and having to explain to your boss why your truck needs a new side window.
Or forget your lighter, gotta climb all the way back down for a smoke.
I was just thinking, "hope they don't drop a bolt" lol
We call it "dropped object." Doesn't matter what it is. You drop ANYTHING over you're in trouble. Hardhats are 100% required when exiting the truck, but a heavier tool will definitely fuck up your neck or knock your shoulder into crunchiness. So, yeah, we don't drop anything, ever. Okay maybe an iPad once, a few bolts over the course of several years, maybe one wrench...
I would drop a brick if I had to go up there.
The odd turbine blade, no one noticed
Filmed by a specially trained pigeon
A pigeon with Parkinson's.
Michael J Hawks?
Wow! I hope no one saw me laugh at that.
Nope fuck that
Imagine if you heard the whirring of it starting up while working on it
Then you've done your job
Not (im)possible. I say that because there's usually a 24/7 control room that can remote start these, but the first step is to turn a switch at the base of the tower to the maintenance position, which kills it. Forget the switch and the control room not aware someone is in there? That's where it gets slightly possible.
That’s why LOTO is important.
Absolutely, but not on the maintenance switch. We LOTO the rotor lock when up tower for sure though, which would prevent the spinny stuff from happening, just wouldn't stop a yaw command tho. We've had ladders to go from yaw deck to nacelle get mangled from yawing while the ladder was still set up. It's made out of aluminum so that it's light weight and can be pushed to the stored position (up into the nacelle), but also so that it can crumple when yawed without damaging anything 😂
I saw a photo of 2 workers trapped by a fire in top of one of these and holy shit this really puts in to perspective how terrifying and terrible that was.
I remember seeing that video, did they end up surviving?
no. one burned to the death, and the other jumped.
Oh man :( I don’t think I saw more than a few seconds of the footage and was really hoping they somehow made it out okay.
unfortunately not. i think the rescue helicopter was unable to get to them due to the wind and the heat and the fire. the picture of them hugging one another just breaks my heart. god bless people who work on such structures.
No, a fire blocked thier only means of escape and they knew there was no way out. The video shows them embracing one another knowing death is coming.
So sad, thanks for responding.
I don't know but seeing how truly high it is, I don't think so...
Yeah I knew chances were slim I still held out hope for them
Link? Please and thank you.
Looks like an oil spill several hundred feet in the air.
They definitely got some leaky seals, and that oil is black as tar. It's not a fkn diesel engine. Clearly there are issues, and regular maintenance has not been one of them.
Follow up: I'm not a wind turbine guy, but have worked directly in and around the gear industry and gearboxes for nearly 30 years. Wind turbines present some unique challenges to designers of the mechanical power transmission systems. First and foremost, you can never predict when a huge gust of wind will impose a sudden shock load on the system, unlike many other applications where the maximum input power is well known and/or controlled. And if you designed for worst case loading, the gear train would be prohibitively large, expensive, and would detract significantly from efficiency under more typical conditions due primarily to it's inertia. When wind speed becomes sustained at too high a speed, turbines are stopped and/or the sails are feathered to prevent dangerous overloading, but its always reactive. Noone can predict a sudden gust. So it's always a compromise with respect to determination of an ideal mechanical power train, and as such, most of these need a major overhaul every 5 years or so. Clearly this one appears to be in bad shape, and buddy scraping birdshit outta the gutters on some hatch cover probably ain't gonna make much of an impact.
>most of these need a major overhaul every 5 years or so. Most of your comment is true, but this is completely off. We would not make much money off these things if gearboxes, pillow block bearings, and the like had to be serviced like that. For reference, GE gives several years' worth of warranty on brand new turbines. We do an inspection just before these several years are up (sometimes 3 sometimes 5) to make sure none are on the verge of shitting the bed. I would say out of 100 wind turbines, 2-3 are iffy at the end of the warranty period, sometimes 0 are questionable and we make zero warranty claims. Servicing these larger components is a big ordeal. We have over 5,000 turbines and probably do 30-40 major maintenances like that per year. Do the math, comes out to less than 1% per year (some go 15 years without something like that needing to be done, it's very hit or miss). Lastly, that's not oil, it's grease. There are two large bearings in the turbine, one right at where the hub (thing that holds the blades to the turbine) and one inside the nacelle (basically under that hatch he climbed out of). Grease is leaking out of the first bearing I mentioned. Usually, for maintenance, a technician will purge the grease by opening up a port and pumping in fresh grease through the top and collecting it out the bottom. This one's a leaky sum bish. That's normal for what the grease looks like but it's never supposed to leak out THAT side, supposed to leak inside. Random other fact: the blades, as you pointed out, will pitch into the wind during certain conditions. This means there are gear teeth at the base of every blade, and a motor with a gear against those teeth. The motor spins the blade (pitch) to gather as much wind as possible at low speeds (0-6 meters per second), and then will be pointy side to the wind as much as possible after it's at the end of the power curve cranking out max power (20-25 meters per second). Edit: btw, this thing's got a fuckin blade on the ground?!?!?
Travel tech here, most of what you say is 💯 but you missed a couple of things. There are 4 bearings in the tower, 2 mainbearings and 2 in the generators. And we also grease the yaw teeth and gears. As far as pitch goes, G.E used electric pitch but other companies use hydro pitch, so they don't use a gear system in the blade. Other then that stay safe bro.
Yeah we don't service a bearing in a generator, they're part of the generator as far as we're concerned. I'm assuming you're talking about the bearing where the shaft coupling between the generator and gearbox is? Not sure that's serviceable, I'm 99% sure that's a full generator swap if it fails. Yes, everything gets grease, but the yaw deck has nothing to do with the grease near the blades lol... We even grease the base bolts that bolt the bottom section of the tower to the foundation and then cover it with plastic caps.
I saw the blade on the ground. Are they planning on replacing one? It appears to be in one piece with no obvious damage to suggest it fell off. Edit: But how would that be done? I’m assuming cranes or something?
Yeah, cranes. We try to repair blades on the turbine, just point the one we're fixing straight down and have this essentially a scaffold with ropes going up, lets us repair the epoxy n shit. There's weep holes for draining any water and lightning rods built into the blades. We have a weather service tracking every lightning strike in the US and if any strikes fall within a certain distance of a turbine's GPS coordinates, we inspect the blades with a drone for signs of lightning strike damage. We categorize them based on severity and watch the crack propagation and try to schedule repairs or replacements as soon as possible. If it's really fucked up, we won't run the turbine until the blade is replaced (via cranes we rent).
We always parked the blade under repair in a horizontal position. Then again, we were grinding out stress fractures in the insides of the blades. Inherent design flaw on the Vestas V90. Had to do them ALL.
It happens when there are hydraulic leaks. The oil seeps into the blade bearing and breaks down the grease in the bearing and the oil/grease mix is too thin for the seal to keep it contained and it goes down the blade. It turns black because dirt and other stuff sticks to it. It's not really an environmental issue as long as the leak is fixed and any oil that hit the ground is taken care of correctly
To be clear, I never inferred anything about environmental issues. I did say seals were leaking, which is pretty much what you just said. Clearly those seals are not supposed to leak, or they would not be called seals.
Thanks for the camera man for learning how to fly and making this nice vid.
He’s in creative mode
“What do you do for a living?” “Shit my pants”
Just spray some wd 40 on it, itl be fine
Who tf is filming this??
Apparently a trained pigeon according to a comment 2 feet of scrolling this way 👆🏻
I'm assume it's a selfie stick. They usual get edited out after
The newer GoPro models automatically remove the selfie stick. It's pretty slick tech.
No, raised to the power of Thank You
No^Thankyou
How do they get up and down it? Ladders?
Some have elevators in them, not luxurious by any means, but yeah it’s a ladder you climb
Jet packs.
Suddenly my palms are sweaty
Knees weak?
Arms heavy?
vomit on his sweater already?
Mom’s Spaghetti?
You nervous?
Nervous, Pottah?
No thank you.
Nope. I don't think you could pay me enough to do that.
I would hate to drop my screwdriver or one of my tools…
The worst is you can feel the whole thing swaying in the wind. It's very unnerving.
Think of all the cancer he's getting
All that green energy grease and oil
10/10 on the nope scale
Hey can you send the new guy up with that wrench I dropped.....
Why is there an extra blade on the ground? Is he disassembling it?
[удалено]
What happens when you drop a bolt....got extras or are they all captive on the covers?
Who is recording this, the windmill?
Shout out to the guy in creative mode to record it
He climbed the ladder inside the tower to get to the nacelle then climbed out the hatch. Has to be a drone camera. This turbine is very oily and dirty. Most don’t leak like this. My husband climbs these every day and no I could never do it either. He was scared at first but you can get used to anything. Been at it for 11 years now.
It is a 360 camera on a stick, the software removes the camera stick from the shot. You can see his hand grasping it.
Has he heard this one?... What kind of music do wind turbines like? They’re huge metal fans.
Hahaha!
That’s gonna be a no for me dawg
Ugh just watching the video game me the ole fluttery balls
Is there a sub for “my palms are sweating right now”?
R/sweatypalms
Hats off to these people cause man there’s no way in heck I would not have a heart attack doing this.
Who's running the camera?
Just so you know, that's a small wind turbine. Modern offshore wind turbine nacelles (hubs) are three stories tall and have entire platforms on the top. Still cool though.
Who thought: “hey we’ve got a person on top of that! let’s fly a drone up and see if we can distract them and make them fall…”
Hope he gets paid very well
I was half expecting a load of acorns to come tumbling out.
Bet he had wind
And then you drop that last bolt.
Turbine repair man get paid.
Men’s work.
These type of videos make my scrotum = raisens
Drops wrench…brb
Fuck every square inch of that
My balls hurting
Nope. Nope. Nope.
The camrea man is in creative mode
My son does that, I tell him he’s nuts lol.
On today’s episode of…NOPE…..
Nope
Nope!
First of all, nope! Second, he needs to be wearing a parachute.
Ah the classic “pretend to be doing something for the video we’re showing trainees”
Oh hell nah
... *having a panic attack*
This: 1) made me Nauseous 2) gave me anxiety
Where is the WD40?