Draft for review. The photographs of the unit and its crate are not in place yet.
This is an Atlas standing on the grass with its crate, before the blades go on and before it goes up a mast. It is the least flattering moment in the machine’s life and the most informative one, because everything you can argue about later is already visible on the front panel.
What you are actually looking at.
A powder-coated body, a machined top plate, and a steel shaft standing up out of a flange bearing. The blade set bolts onto that shaft. Everything else — the generator, the charge controller, the radio — is inside the box you can see. That is the whole point of the design: there is no separate controller cabinet to find a wall for, and no second run of cable to a shed.
Next to it is the crate it arrived in: plywood, steel-strapped on every edge, corner-bracketed, and lidded with a hasp rather than nailed shut. That matters more than it looks. A turbine that survives manufacture and fails in transit is a warranty claim, a replacement unit and a customer who waits twice. Crates are not marketing.
Reading the front panel.
Down the left are two rows of MC4 connectors. The lower pair is marked INPUTS — wind / solar, the upper pair OUTPUT — inverter / battery, with the polarity stamped above them. MC4 is the connector the solar industry standardised on years ago: keyed, latching, rated for outdoor use, and impossible to mate the wrong way round without deliberately trying. Using it here is not innovation. It is the opposite, and that is the argument for it — a fitter who has wired a solar array has already wired this.
In the middle: a display window and a rotary knob. The knob is the voltage limit, adjustable on the body itself, so the machine can be read and set standing in front of it with no phone and no signal. To the right, a circular multi-pin socket marked SENSOR, and a screw-on antenna for the radio link the Atlas uses to talk to the app. Beside the antenna is a small compartment labelled MyTESUP App 9V (rechargeable battery). The radio has its own power. That is deliberate: the part of the system that tells you what is happening should not go quiet at exactly the moment the rest of it does.
The warnings are the honest part.
There is a yellow triangle on the front that reads HIGH VOLTAGE — OUTDOOR USE ONLY, and a CE mark next to the knob. Neither is decoration. A wind turbine generates whenever the rotor turns, which means the output terminals can be live when nothing is switched on, nobody is expecting it and the machine is lying on the grass exactly as it is in these photographs. That is the single most common way people get hurt by small wind, and it is why the sticker is on the front of the machine rather than on page nine of the manual.
A turbine has no off switch. It has a brake, and a brake is something you have to remember to use.
What the serial number is for.
There are two identical labels on this machine, one on the front and one on the top plate, each carrying the same serial number and a QR code. Two labels because one of them will end up facing a wall, or under a bracket, or weathered past reading in five years, and a serial you cannot read is a serial you do not have.
The serial on this unit begins V7. That is a build code, not a model name — it identifies which generation of Atlas came off the line, and there is no separate product called a V7. What the number buys you is boring and worth having: which unit this is, when it was built and in which batch, so a support conversation starts from a fact rather than a description. If a component turns out to be wrong across a run, the run is identifiable. None of that is visible on a product page, and all of it is the difference between a warranty that means something and a warranty that means a form.
A 15 kW motor in a machine that will never ask for 15 kW.
Inside is a 24-pole permanent magnet generator rated at 15 kW continuous, 22 kW peak — the same motor that goes into the Magnum. The Atlas rotor will never drive it that hard. Our published figures for the Atlas are a 4.5 kW peak and around 1 kW in good wind, which puts the motor under seven per cent of its continuous rating on a normal day.
That gap is the design, not an accident of parts-binning. A generator loafing at a fraction of its rating runs cold, wastes almost nothing in the copper, and is not the component that fails first. Sizing the motor to the rotor instead would save money on the bill of materials and cost it back in service life. It is the least visible decision in the machine and one of the few that you would actually feel, ten years in.
What those numbers mean, and what they do not.
A peak figure is a ceiling measured at a specified wind speed. It is not an average and not a promise. A turbine sitting in a light breeze is not making its peak, and a turbine in a calm week is not making anything at all. Anyone quoting you a daily or annual figure without naming the wind speed it assumes is quoting arithmetic rather than output — multiply any rating by twenty-four hours and you get a number no wind turbine on earth has ever produced.
The honest version is a range that depends on where you live. We publish 0.5 to 8 kWh a day and 180 to 2,500 kWh a year for the Atlas, and the spread between those ends is not hedging — it is the difference between a sheltered suburban garden and an exposed coastal site. After the site, it is the blades: the Atlas takes low-wind, standard and high-wind sets, and fitting the wrong one is the most common reason a correctly working turbine disappoints its owner. Tell us your location and what you are trying to run, and we will tell you which set applies, and whether the answer is that a turbine is the wrong purchase for your site. Sometimes it is.
Where the parts come from.
The shaft in the photograph above started as a length of round steel bar on a bandsaw in our own workshop. This is that cut, filmed on a phone, nothing staged:
A machine you can read is a machine you can argue with.
Everything on that panel is a claim we have to stand behind afterwards, which is the only reason to print any of it.
The photographs on this page are of a single Atlas unit before installation, taken in daylight with no staging and no retouching. The 15 kW continuous and 22 kW peak motor ratings, the 4.5 kW turbine peak and the daily and annual yield ranges are our own published figures; a peak is a maximum at a specified wind speed, not an expected daily or annual output. Turbine output depends entirely on the wind at your own site. The serial number visible in the photographs belongs to this unit and to no customer. No installation address, customer name or order is shown or described here.