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   <title>Blog Rss</title>
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       <item>
      <title>How we became the world&#039;s number one in household wind and flexible solar</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/how-we-became-number-one-in-household-wind-and-flexible-solar-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/how-we-became-number-one-in-household-wind-and-flexible-solar-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>We are the world&rsquo;s number one in household wind turbines and semi-flexible solar panels. That is our own claim, and a claim is only worth the evidence behind it, so this is the page where we set the evidence out: where the company came from, what we build ourselves, where it goes, and the three decisions that did most of the work. None of them was clever. All of them were arithmetic.</p>
<h2>Fifty years of large machines, then a small one.</h2>
<p>The company is young. The engineering is not. TESUP was established in London in 2018, but the expertise runs back to 1974, through hydroelectric, wind and solar power plants totalling more than 1,000 MW of installed capacity. Utility scale, national scale, the kind of project where a bearing that fails early is a headline rather than a warranty claim.</p>
<p>Most companies in small wind began with a small turbine and worked outward. We spent half a century building the large ones and then brought that discipline down to something that fits on a roof. The scale changed. The standards did not. A 15 kW continuous-rated motor running a household turbine at under 7% of its rating is not an accident of sizing; it is what happens when people who used to specify megawatts are asked to specify a kilowatt.</p>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/the-new-tesup-magnum-aluminium-body-horizontal-wind-turbine-04.png" alt="The TESUP Magnum horizontal wind turbine with its aluminium body"/></p>
<h2>Decision one: build both halves of the day.</h2>
<p>Almost every company in small-scale renewables makes one thing. Wind companies make turbines and point at somebody else&rsquo;s panel. Panel companies make panels and have never machined a blade. Two industries, one customer, nothing shared. We decided early that a household does not buy a turbine or a panel; it buys a battery that stays charged, and the sun and the wind keep different hours. The sun sets every day, everywhere, without exception. The wind blows hardest in the months the sun is weakest. Build only one half and you have built half a day.</p>
<p>So we build both: the Atlas vertical turbine and the Magnum horizontal turbine on one side, and the semi-flexible Flex panel on the other. It bends to the surface, carries no frame and weighs a fraction of glass, which is why it goes on the roofs, boats, vans and cabins where a rigid panel cannot. Building both halves is also why we can tell a customer which one they actually need, and sometimes that the honest answer is the panel alone, or rigid glass from somebody else.</p>
<h2>Decision two: cut it ourselves.</h2>
<p>Blade sets are laser-cut in our own building, from 1.2 mm high-strength aluminium, on our own fibre laser. Three profiles come off the same stock on the same bed: 2 to 20 m/s, 4 to 25 m/s, and a six-blade set for 5 to 35 m/s built for exposed coastal sites. Owning the machine means owning the shape. A subcontracted blade is a purchase order and a six-week conversation. A blade on our own bed is a file, a test cut and an afternoon.</p>
<p>When somebody else cuts your parts you pay for four things: the part, their margin, the freight and the wait, and you accept their minimum order, which is how a company ends up carrying four hundred of something on a shelf. Cutting in-house removes the margin, removes the freight, removes the minimum and shortens the wait from weeks to that afternoon. It is not a strategy. It is arithmetic, and it is most of the reason a household turbine from us costs what it does. Manufacturing runs mainly in Slovakia and London, with Turkey as well, and it is the reason we could hold our prices this year while aluminium climbed on the London Metal Exchange.</p>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-laser-cutting-video-1600x900.jpg" alt="A fibre laser cutting aluminium turbine parts in the TESUP factory"/></p>
<h2>Decision three: go to every country properly, or not at all.</h2>
<p>Global is not a word you earn by shipping abroad. We run 38 retail storefronts in 34 countries plus a rest-of-world store, in 23 languages, each with its own currency, its own tax treatment, its own shipping and its own terms, and every one mirrored again for wholesale. A customer in Osaka, in Rio, in Riyadh and in Trégunc each opens a page written for them and priced for them, and none of them can tell which one we built first.</p>
<p>The shipping side is less romantic and matters more. Since 2018 more than 100,000 orders have left us, from a single blade set to a full turbine, and in the last two and a half years alone they have gone to 75 countries, carried by DHL and UPS to the customer&rsquo;s door, every carton labelled individually rather than by the pallet so that a single unit can be traced after it has been split off a delivery. Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States are the largest markets; Turkey, Spain, Italy and Portugal follow. It is the largest household wind turbine installation footprint in the world, and it is why we use the word leader.</p>
<div>
<table>
  <caption>What the claim rests on. The store and language counts come from our own store configuration; the order figure from our own company records since 2018; the country figure from our order records since February 2024.</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th scope="col">Measure</th>
      <th scope="col">Figure</th>
      <th scope="col">Source</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr><th scope="row">Engineering lineage</th><td>Since 1974; more than 1,000 MW of plant</td><td>Company history</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Storefronts</th><td>38 retail, 34 countries, 23 languages; 76 with wholesale</td><td>Store configuration</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Countries shipped to</th><td>75 since February 2024</td><td>Order records</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Orders</th><td>More than 100,000 since 2018</td><td>Company records</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Manufacturing</th><td>Slovakia, London, Turkey; own fibre laser</td><td>Our own factories</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Products</th><td>Atlas 4.5 kW peak, Magnum 12 kW peak, Flex 460 W</td><td>Product pages</td></tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-produced-today-shipped-today-10kw-wind-turbines-01.jpg" alt="Pallets of TESUP wind turbines packed for worldwide shipment"/></p>
<h2>The part most companies leave out.</h2>
<p>Leading a market is not the same as selling to everyone in it. If your roof sits deep in a dense old city, walled in on four sides, do not buy a turbine from us; buy the panel. If you are inland with no real wind, measure first, then decide. If you have a strong flat roof that will carry the weight, buy rigid glass instead of semi-flexible, because for that job it is the better panel. We can say all of that because we build both halves and because a customer who was told the truth comes back.</p>
<p>It is the same reason we print the air density beside the power curve, publish a 2 m/s start-up speed and then say it is a fair-weather number, and tell you that a photograph of ten finished units is ten finished units and not a promise about your delivery date. Number one is a position you keep by being the company people can check.</p>
<p>Fifty years of engineering. Both halves of the day. Cut in our own building. Sent to 75 countries. That is the whole method.</p>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/flex-hero.jpg" alt="TESUP semi-flexible solar panels in production"/></p>
<h2>What comes next.</h2>
<p>A machine that runs is an asset. In a year the laser will be an unremarkable thing in the corner of a workshop, covered in swarf, with somebody&rsquo;s coffee on the control cabinet, and the only trace of it will be a price that did not go up. That is what growth looks like from inside a factory: not a launch, but a bill of materials that gets a little shorter every quarter, and a map of deliveries that gets a little denser.</p>
<p>The mission has not changed since London: to be the world&rsquo;s leading provider of household clean energy products, at the best possible price, for everyone. We are number one because we started there and kept checking our own claims. We intend to stay that way the same way.</p>
<p>Anyone can sell you a machine.<br/>Only a company that builds both halves can tell you which one you need.<br/>That is how you become number one, and how you stay it.</p>
<p>The founding dates, the 1974 lineage and the 1,000 MW figure are our own company history as published on our corporate page. The storefront, country and language counts are drawn from our own store configuration and can be checked against the store switcher at the top of this page. The order figure is our own company record since 2018 and includes small parts and accessories as well as turbines and panels; the countries-shipped figure is a count from our order records from February 2024 to September 2026. The product ratings, blade ranges and per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications. &ldquo;Number one&rdquo; and &ldquo;largest installation footprint&rdquo; are our own assessment of the household wind turbine market and are not a statement by any independent body. The photographs are our own, taken in our own factories and warehouses.</p>
]]></description>
              <pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 03:13:33 +0000</pubDate>
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      <title>Atlas is going to snow country</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/an-atlas-is-going-to-snow-country-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/an-atlas-is-going-to-snow-country-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>An order came in from Niigata Prefecture this month: one Atlas and a set of blades. Every order has an address, but this one is going to the place the Japanese call <em>yukiguni</em>, snow country &mdash; the coast where Siberian air crosses the Sea of Japan in winter, picks up the sea, and drops it as some of the deepest snow that falls anywhere people live. It is a hard place for a machine and a very good place for a wind turbine, and the two facts are the same fact.</p>
<h2>Where the wind comes from.</h2>
<p>Niigata faces north-west, across the Sea of Japan towards the continent. In winter the pressure pattern over Asia sends cold, dry air out of Siberia and across that water. The sea is warmer than the air, so the air fills with moisture; then it meets the mountains that run down the spine of Honshu, is forced upward, and lets go. The Niigata side of those mountains gets the snow. The Tokyo side, a short train ride away, gets the sunshine.</p>
<p>The same pattern is why the wind here is a winter wind. The north-westerly comes in off the sea steadily and hard from December to February, exactly when the days are shortest and a solar panel under half a metre of snow is producing nothing at all. A house in Niigata that wants to make its own electricity through the winter needs something that works in the dark and in the cold. That is the whole case for putting a turbine next to the panels rather than instead of them.</p>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-niigata-coast-1600x900.jpg" alt="The rocky Sasagawa Nagare coast in Niigata Prefecture, with clear blue water breaking on the shore"/></p>
<h2>What cold air is worth.</h2>
<p>A wind turbine does not make power from wind speed alone. It makes it from the mass of air passing through the rotor, and cold air is heavier. Our published power curve is quoted at the standard air density of 1.225 kg/m&sup3;, which is sea level at 15 &deg;C. Niigata&rsquo;s coast in January sits close to sea level and close to freezing. At 0 &deg;C the same wind carries about 5% more mass than the curve assumes; at &minus;5 &deg;C, about 7% more. A winter gust that would read 960 W on the curve at 12 m/s is worth a little over 1 kW in Niigata air.</p>
<p>That is a small bonus, and we would rather state it precisely than let it grow in the retelling. The larger point is that the wind is there at all, in the months when it is needed, on a coast where the sea keeps the air moving.</p>
<div>
<table>
  <caption>The published Atlas curve at standard density, and what the same wind is worth in cold coastal air. The density figures follow from the ideal gas law.</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th scope="col">Wind speed</th>
      <th scope="col">Published, 15 &deg;C</th>
      <th scope="col">Same wind at 0 &deg;C</th>
      <th scope="col">Same wind at &minus;5 &deg;C</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr><th scope="row">8 m/s</th><td>290 W</td><td>about 305 W</td><td>about 310 W</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">12 m/s</th><td>960 W</td><td>about 1,010 W</td><td>about 1,030 W</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">15 m/s</th><td>1.85 kW</td><td>about 1.95 kW</td><td>about 1.99 kW</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">18 m/s</th><td>2.15 kW</td><td>about 2.27 kW</td><td>about 2.31 kW</td></tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-niigata-snow-1600x900.jpg" alt="Skiers on a snow-covered slope at Yuzawa in Niigata Prefecture, with snow-laden trees behind"/></p>
<h2>What snow does to a machine.</h2>
<p>Snow country earns its name. Towns in the Niigata hills routinely measure their winter snow in metres, not centimetres, and the houses are built for it: steep roofs, raised entrances, heated pavements in the town centres. A turbine going there has to be built for it too.</p>
<p>The Atlas is a vertical-axis machine. It does not have to turn to face a wind that swings round the compass in a storm, and it has no tail to be loaded up with ice. Its windings carry Class 200 &deg;C insulation (IEC 60317-13 GR 2), which is a thermal margin the machine will never use in Niigata but which says something about how it is made. The body is aluminium, which does not care about salt from the sea or meltwater from the roof.</p>
<p>The honest caveat is start-up. We publish a 2 m/s start-up speed and it is a fair-weather number. Bearing grease stiffens as it cools, and a still, freezing morning wants more than 2 m/s to break the rotor away from standstill. In Niigata that hardly matters, because a still morning on that coast in January is the exception, but we would rather say it than have an owner discover it.</p>
<p>The mountain takes the snow. The sea sends the wind. A house in between can use both.</p>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-niigata-morning-1600x900.jpg" alt="Early morning mist over the rice fields of Minamiuonuma, Niigata Prefecture, with sunlight breaking through the clouds"/></p>
<h2>The blade set decides the winter.</h2>
<p>An Atlas is ordered as a body and a blade set, and the set is the decision that matters. Low-wind blades run from 2 to 20 m/s and must come off before sustained winds above 20 m/s. Moderate-wind blades run 4 to 25 m/s. High-wind blades run 5 to 35 m/s on six blades with a smaller swept area, and that is the set the 4.5 kW peak belongs to.</p>
<p>On a coast that sees winter gales off the sea, the choice is between the blades that flatter the average and the blades that survive the storm. We say the same thing to every customer: choose the set for the worst wind your site sees, not the mean, and let the quiet days take care of themselves.</p>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/leadership-built-on-technology-tesup-atlas-wind-turbine-10kw-01.jpg" alt="TESUP Atlas wind turbine generator units on a pallet, ready to ship"/></p>
<h2>Rice, snow and a pallet from Europe.</h2>
<p>Niigata grows more rice than any other prefecture in Japan, and the terraces in the photograph at the top of this page are the reason it can: the same snow that buries the villages in January melts into the paddies in April. It is a landscape that has always run on what the weather delivers for free. A small turbine on a house there is not a novelty. It is the same idea, with copper in it.</p>
<p>The Atlas and its blades are being packed at our factory in Europe now, each carton labelled individually, and will cross a good deal of sea of their own on the way. When they arrive, the winter wind will already be waiting.</p>
<p>Snow country.<br/>Winter wind.<br/>Atlas, on its way.</p>
<p>The power-curve figures, the 2 m/s start-up speed, the three blade ranges, the 4.5 kW peak system output, the Class 200 &deg;C wire grade (IEC 60317-13 GR 2) and the per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications and can be read there. The cold-air figures are the ideal gas law applied at constant pressure: air at 0 &deg;C is about 5.5% denser than at 15 &deg;C, and at &minus;5 &deg;C about 7.5% denser. The description of Niigata&rsquo;s winter climate, snowfall and rice production is general geographic knowledge. The order is described only by prefecture and product; no customer, address or installation is named or shown. Photographs: Hoshitoge rice terraces, Tokamachi, by Fumihiko Ueno via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, cropped; Sasagawa Nagare coast, Yuzawa ski slope and Minamiuonuma morning licensed via Adobe Stock; the Atlas photograph is our own.</p>
]]></description>
              <pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:59:09 +0000</pubDate>
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       <item>
      <title>Armies, Maersk, MSC and Petrobras use wind turbines on their ships</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/armies-maersk-msc-petrobras-wind-turbines-on-ships-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/armies-maersk-msc-petrobras-wind-turbines-on-ships-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>Armies, Maersk, MSC and Petrobras use wind turbines on their ships. A rooftop asks a turbine to work. A ship asks it to survive &mdash; salt, vibration, permanent motion, and months between service visits. This is what a vessel demands of a wind turbine that a house never does, and what we publish so that a fleet engineer can check us.</p>
<h2>Why a ship wants a wind turbine at all.</h2>
<p>A ship at anchor still has a hotel load: lighting, navigation electronics, communications, pumps, battery banks that must not go flat. That load is normally carried by a diesel generator idling for hours at a fraction of its rating, which is the least efficient thing a diesel can do. A small wind turbine feeding the battery bank takes hours off the generator, and every hour off the generator is fuel not burned and maintenance not booked.</p>
<p>Under way, the physics get better, not worse. The rotor does not see the true wind; it sees the apparent wind, which is the true wind plus the ship&rsquo;s own motion. A vessel making 12 knots into a 10-knot headwind puts roughly 22 knots &mdash; about 11 m/s &mdash; across the rotor. On our published curve that is close to the 960 W we quote at 12 m/s, from a breeze that on land would barely turn a flag.</p>
<p>That is why the same machine we sell for a farmhouse roof ends up on a supply vessel, a patrol boat, a survey ship or a platform tender. The load is the same shape &mdash; a battery bank that must stay up &mdash; and the wind is more reliable at sea than almost anywhere on land.</p>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-navy-ships-close-1600x900.jpg" alt="Warships of two navies steaming close together in a grey sea"/></p>
<h2>What the sea does to a machine.</h2>
<p>Salt is the first enemy. Spray reaches every surface, dries, and leaves a conductive crust that finds its way into anything that is not sealed. The second is vibration: a ship&rsquo;s structure hums at the engine&rsquo;s frequency for weeks at a time, and a fastener that would hold for twenty years on a chimney will walk loose in a season on a mast. The third is motion itself. The turbine is never level, the wind never comes from one direction for long, and the rotor is asked to start, stop and yaw thousands of times more often than it would on land.</p>
<p>A turbine that goes to sea therefore needs a body that does not corrode, fasteners that do not loosen, a generator that is sealed rather than merely covered, an electrical brake that can hold the rotor in a gale, and a blade set chosen for the worst wind rather than the average one. Our High-Wind blade set runs 5&ndash;35 m/s on six blades with a smaller swept area, and that is the set we recommend for anything that lives on the water.</p>
<p>None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary discipline of building for the wrong conditions on purpose, and it is the same discipline that keeps a rooftop machine alive through a coastal winter.</p>
<h2>What a fleet asks before it buys.</h2>
<p>A homeowner asks what a turbine does. A shipping line, an oil major or a navy asks how you know. Every figure has to arrive attached to a standard, a test or a document with a number on it, and a fleet engineer is not going to take our word for a power curve. The useful thing about being asked is that it forces a supplier to separate what it can evidence from what it merely believes.</p>
<div>
<table>
  <caption>What we publish about the machine, and why a fleet buyer asks for it. Every line can be checked against the product page.</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th scope="col">Specification</th>
      <th scope="col">What we publish</th>
      <th scope="col">Why a ship asks</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr><th scope="row">Motor rating</th><td>15 kW continuous, 4.5 kW peak system output</td><td>Runs cold at typical loads; thermal margin at sea</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Insulation grade</th><td>Class 200 &deg;C wire, IEC 60317-13 GR 2</td><td>Continuous operation in a hot engine-room air stream</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Blade ranges</th><td>Low 2&ndash;20 m/s, Moderate 4&ndash;25 m/s, High 5&ndash;35 m/s</td><td>Survive the storm, not flatter the mean</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Certification</th><td>CE and UL</td><td>Electrical safety and flag-state acceptance</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Country of manufacture</th><td>Designed and manufactured in Europe</td><td>Supply chain and audit trail</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">Traceability</th><td>Every carton labelled, not the pallet</td><td>Warranty and replacement by individual unit, ship by ship</td></tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p>Each line is a published specification with a source, not an adjective. That is the only kind of claim a fleet buyer can act on, and the only kind we are willing to make.</p>
<p><img src="/media/magefan_blog/leadership-built-on-technology-tesup-atlas-wind-turbine-10kw-01.jpg" alt="TESUP Atlas wind turbine generator units on a pallet, ready to ship"/></p>
<h2>The curve, and what it assumes.</h2>
<p>The Atlas reaches 4.5 kW peak system output with the High-Wind blade set. The published curve is 290 W at 8 m/s, 960 W at 12 m/s, 1.85 kW at 15 m/s, 2.15 kW at 18 m/s, 3.8 kW at 25 m/s and 4.5 kW at 35 m/s. It is quoted at the standard air density of 1.225 kg/m&sup3;, sea level and 15 &deg;C &mdash; which, for once, is exactly where a ship lives. A cold sea will beat the figure slightly, because cold air is denser. A tropical one will fall a little short.</p>
<p>The published 2 m/s start-up speed is a fair-weather number. Bearing grease stiffens as it cools, and a still, freezing morning on deck will want more than that to break the rotor away from standstill. We say so because a fleet engineer will find out anyway, and we would rather be the ones who told them.</p>
<p>A rooftop asks a turbine to work. A ship asks it to survive. We build for the second, and sell it to both.</p>
<h2>What this page is not.</h2>
<p>It is not a statement by anybody but us. The customers named above are our own account of our commercial relationships; none of them has reviewed this page, approved it, or endorsed TESUP, and armed forces do not endorse commercial products as a matter of policy. No vessel, unit, order, installation or contract is named or described here, and we have not reproduced anyone&rsquo;s seal or insignia.</p>
<p>The ship photographs at the top of this page are licensed stock images. The photograph of warships within the article is a public-domain image released by the US Navy; its appearance does not imply or constitute endorsement by the US Navy, the US government or any armed service. None of the photographs depicts any customer installation, vessel under contract, or personnel of ours.</p>
<p>A homeowner asks what it does.<br/>A fleet asks how you know.<br/>Every figure on this page has a source, and the source is our own product page.</p>
<p>The 15 kW continuous motor rating, the 4.5 kW peak system output, the power-curve figures, the 2 m/s start-up speed, the three blade ranges, the Class 200 &deg;C wire grade (IEC 60317-13 GR 2), the CE and UL certification, the European manufacture and the per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications and can be read there. The apparent-wind example is arithmetic: 12 knots of ship speed plus 10 knots of headwind is 22 knots, or about 11.3 m/s. The air-density figures are from the International Standard Atmosphere. The customers named in the opening line are our own account of our commercial relationships and not a statement made by, or on behalf of, those companies or any armed service. Header photographs: licensed via Adobe Stock. Warship photograph within the article: US Navy, public domain (070318-N-HX866-077).</p>
]]></description>
              <pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:32:43 +0000</pubDate>
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      <title>What altitude does to a wind turbine</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/the-mountain-takes-15-percent-the-cold-gives-half-back-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/the-mountain-takes-15-percent-the-cold-gives-half-back-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>Say you own a building high in the Italian Alps &mdash; a hotel, a lodge, a mountain refuge, anything with a roofline well above a thousand metres. The grid up there is long, thin and expensive, the wind is free, and a turbine looks like the obvious answer. It may well be. It is also a place where one number on our own product page quietly stops being true. The power curve on our Atlas product page is built on a formula we print right there beside it: P = &frac12; &times; &rho; &times; A &times; V&sup3; &times; Cp &times; &eta;. Everybody reads the V&sup3;, because wind speed cubed is the dramatic term. Almost nobody reads the &rho;. It is the density of the air, it is not a constant, and 1,300 metres up a mountain in February it is doing something very different from what it does at the coast in May.</p>
<h2>The air thins fast.</h2>
<p>Atmospheric pressure at 1,300 m is about 867 hPa &mdash; 85.5% of the pressure at sea level. Put that through the ideal gas law at the same temperature and density follows it down: at 15 &deg;C, sea-level air is 1.225 kg/m&sup3; and air at 1,300 m is 1.048 kg/m&sup3;. The mountain has taken 14.5% of the mass out of every cubic metre of wind crossing your rotor. Power is linear in density, so it has taken 14.5% of the power with it.</p>
<p>That is a real loss and we are not going to dress it up. In the same wind speed, on the same day, a turbine at 1,300 m has about 85% of the energy available to it that the identical turbine has on a beach. It is also the reason a power curve quoted without an air density is an incomplete number &mdash; ours included. Our product page prints the curve and not the density behind it, so everything below takes that curve to be quoted at the standard 1.225 kg/m&sup3;. That is an assumption, and you should know we are making it.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-air-density-altitude-en-1600x900.jpg" alt="Line chart of air density against air temperature, showing sea level above and 1,300 m below, both rising as temperature falls"/>
  <p>Air density against temperature, at sea level and at 1,300 m. Pressure from the International Standard Atmosphere, density from the ideal gas law. Both curves are computed rather than measured, and anyone with a calculator can reproduce them.</p>
</figure>
<p>Which brings us to the part that is easy to miss, because it pushes the other way.</p>
<h2>Cold air is heavy air.</h2>
<p>Density is inversely proportional to absolute temperature. Cool a parcel of air from 15 &deg;C to &minus;10 &deg;C at constant pressure and it becomes about 9.5% denser. That has nothing to do with altitude &mdash; it happens on the beach as readily as on the ridge. But mountains are where you actually spend your winter at &minus;10 &deg;C, and a high site is cold far more of the year than a low one.</p>
<p>So the two effects work against each other, and at a cold high site the arithmetic is a good deal kinder than the altitude figure alone suggests. At 1,300 m the thin air costs 14.5 points of density. At 0 &deg;C the cold has handed back 4.7 of them; at &minus;10 &deg;C, 8.1 of them; at &minus;15 &deg;C, 9.9. On a properly cold day the mountain has given back more than half of what it took.</p>
<p>To match a sea-level turbine working in 8.00 m/s at 15 &deg;C, the same machine at 1,300 m on a &minus;10 &deg;C day needs 8.18 m/s. A shade over two per cent more wind.</p>
<h2>Cold and the machine.</h2>
<p>Two things get better and one gets worse. The generator&rsquo;s N42 neodymium magnets get stronger as they cool: remanence in this material carries a temperature coefficient of roughly &minus;0.12% per kelvin, which means it rises as the temperature falls. A magnet at &minus;10 &deg;C is running about 3.6% stronger than the same magnet at +20 &deg;C. Neodymium&rsquo;s enemy is heat, not cold.</p>
<p>The windings tell the same story from the other end. We publish a Class 200 &deg;C insulation grade for the wire (IEC 60317-13 GR 2), and at an Atlas&rsquo;s typical output the motor is running at under 7% of its 15 kW continuous rating &mdash; it was never going to be thermally troubled in the first place. Copper resistance falls as copper cools, so a cold generator is a fractionally more efficient generator. Nothing on the electrical side of this machine minds winter.</p>
<p>What does mind winter is everything mechanical. Bearing grease stiffens as it cools, and stiffer grease raises the torque needed to break the rotor away from standstill &mdash; the 2 m/s start-up figure we publish for the low-wind blade set is a fair-weather number, and a still, genuinely cold morning will want a little more than that to get moving. Ice matters more. A rime deposit adds mass and changes the section the wind is working against, and an iced rotor is simply not a rotor whose output you should be counting on that day.</p>
<h2>The bigger problem.</h2>
<p>None of the above is the real difficulty with a mountain site. The real difficulty is that you probably cannot find out how windy it is.</p>
<p>Here is a worked example anyone can repeat. PVGIS is the European Commission&rsquo;s public solar and wind dataset. We like it, we have used it on this blog before, and for a coastal or lowland site it is a sensible place to begin. Ask it for a typical meteorological year at 45.08 &deg;N, 6.70 &deg;E &mdash; an Alpine valley at 1,314 m &mdash; and it returns 8,760 hours with a mean wind speed of 0.92 m/s and a maximum, across the whole year, of 3.3 m/s. Not one hour above 4 m/s. Not one.</p>
<p>Read literally, that is a site with no wind worth having. It is not. It is a site the model cannot see. The reanalysis grid underneath these figures is tens of kilometres across and its terrain is smoothed to match, so an Alpine valley, the ridgelines above it and the thermal winds that run up and down it twice a day do not exist at that resolution. The series also fails a check we run before quoting any dataset: in September a single wind-speed value repeats for 10.4% of the month&rsquo;s hours. That is what interpolation looks like. It is not what weather looks like.</p>
<p>We are saying this about a dataset we rate and continue to use. On flat, open, coastal ground it earns its keep. In complex terrain it is the wrong instrument, and a figure from the wrong instrument is worse than no figure at all, because it arrives looking like knowledge.</p>
<h2>What to do.</h2>
<p>Measure it. A recording anemometer at hub height through a season costs a small fraction of a turbine and is the only thing that will tell you what your own ridge, valley or roofline does. We have made this argument before about ordinary sites. In the mountains it stops being good practice and becomes the whole job.</p>
<p>Then choose the blade set from what you measured rather than what you hoped. We publish three: low-wind at 2&ndash;20 m/s, moderate at 4&ndash;25 m/s, and high-wind at 5&ndash;35 m/s with six blades and a smaller swept area. A high site is not automatically the high-wind case &mdash; a sheltered valley floor can be calmer than a coastline &mdash; but a ridge or a col can gust well past what the low-wind set is rated for, and that set has to come off before sustained winds above 20 m/s. Fitting it because the site is usually quiet, then leaving it up through the one storm a year that matters, is how blades get destroyed.</p>
<p>And when you do the yield arithmetic, put the density in. Take our published curve, multiply by the density ratio for your altitude and your typical working temperature, and you have a number roughly 8&ndash;15% below the brochure and a great deal closer to what you will actually see on the meter.</p>
<div>
<table>
  <caption>Our published Atlas power curve, rescaled for air density at 1,300 m and &minus;5 &deg;C &mdash; a factor of 0.919. The left column is what we print on the product page; the right column is what that page implies for a cold site 1,300 m up. We would rather you planned around the right-hand column.</caption>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th scope="col">Wind speed</th>
      <th scope="col">Published curve</th>
      <th scope="col">At 1,300 m, &minus;5 &deg;C</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr><th scope="row">8 m/s</th><td>0.29 kW</td><td>0.27 kW</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">12 m/s</th><td>0.96 kW</td><td>0.88 kW</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">15 m/s</th><td>1.85 kW</td><td>1.70 kW</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">18 m/s</th><td>2.15 kW</td><td>1.98 kW</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">25 m/s</th><td>3.80 kW</td><td>3.49 kW</td></tr>
    <tr><th scope="row">35 m/s</th><td>4.50 kW</td><td>4.14 kW</td></tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p>The mountain takes about 15% of your air.<br/>A cold night gives more than half of it back.<br/>What neither of them will tell you is how hard the wind blows on your own ridge.</p>
<p>Air pressure at altitude is from the International Standard Atmosphere; density is the ideal gas law for dry air with R = 287.058 J/(kg&middot;K). The reference density of 1.225 kg/m&sup3; is the standard value at sea level and 15 &deg;C. The remanence temperature coefficient quoted for N42 neodymium is a published material property, not a measurement of our own. The 2 m/s start-up speed, the three blade ranges, the Class 200 &deg;C wire grade and the power-curve figures in the left-hand column are our own published product-page specifications; the right-hand column is those figures multiplied by a computed density ratio and nothing else. The PVGIS query was made against the v5.2 typical-meteorological-year endpoint at the coordinates given, and the criticism of it here is a criticism of resolution, not of the dataset&rsquo;s honesty. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page. The photograph at the top of this page is a licensed stock image of an unrelated Alpine resort, not of any customer&rsquo;s property.</p>
]]></description>
              <pubDate>Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:06:16 +0000</pubDate>
           </item>
       <item>
      <title>One pallet, one truck, and no customs border</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/one-pallet-one-truck-and-no-customs-border-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/one-pallet-one-truck-and-no-customs-border-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>A pallet of turbines is leaving Slovakia for Germany. Two countries, one truck, and &mdash; because both are in the European Union &mdash; no customs frontier in between. That last part is unglamorous and it is one of the few things about buying hardware that genuinely changes depending on where it ships from.</p>
<h2>Slovakia to Germany, without a border stop.</h2>
<p>Slovakia and Germany are both EU member states, which means they are inside the same customs union and the same Schengen area. Goods already in free circulation move between them the way they move between two counties: no customs declaration to file, no import duty to pay, no clearance to wait on. The truck does not stop at a barrier because there is no barrier to stop at.</p>
<p>Compare that with a consignment arriving from outside the union, where somebody has to file an entry, a duty may be assessed against a tariff code, and the pallet can sit in a shed until the paperwork clears. None of those steps is dramatic on its own. Together they are the difference between a delivery date you can plan around and one that depends on an office you have never spoken to.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-shipping-sk-de-en-1600x900.jpg" alt="Map of central Europe with Slovakia and Germany highlighted and a dashed arrow running from Slovakia to Germany, alongside a panel reading zero customs declarations, zero import duty and one vehicle"/>
  <p>A direction, not a route. We know which two countries this pallet moves between and nothing else is ours to publish.</p>
</figure>
<p>One thing worth separating out: customs and VAT are not the same question. There is no tax collected at the frontier on an intra-EU movement, but who ultimately accounts for VAT depends on whether the buyer is a business with a valid registration or a private individual, and on which country they are in. That is a question for your own accountant rather than a claim we are going to make on a blog.</p>
<h2>The symbols speak no language, on purpose.</h2>
<p>Printed on the top cartons are four pictograms: a broken wine glass, a pair of upward arrows, a box held in two hands, and an umbrella. Fragile, this way up, handle with care, keep dry. There is no text with any of them, and that is deliberate &mdash; they are the international handling marks, drawn the same way everywhere, so that a person loading a trailer understands them without knowing a word of the language on the box.</p>
<p>It is a small thing that tells you something about how freight actually works. Between our workshop and a German delivery address, this pallet will be handled by people who never speak to each other and may share no common language. Nothing about the box can rely on a conversation. Everything it needs to communicate has to be printed on it in a form that survives being handled by a stranger at three in the morning.</p>
<p>A shipping carton is a set of instructions to somebody you will never meet.</p>
<h2>A label on every single box.</h2>
<p>Every carton on the stack carries its own white label with a QR code, not one label for the pallet. That costs more to print and more to apply, and it is worth it for the same reason the serial number on a charge controller is worth it: the moment a pallet is broken down &mdash; and it always is, at a depot or at the far end &mdash; a box with no identity of its own becomes a box nobody can trace.</p>
<p>If one carton out of a stack goes missing or arrives damaged, we want to be able to say which one, from which batch, holding what. That is not possible if the only identification was on a shipping note stapled to the outside of the wrap.</p>
<h2>What a pallet needs at the other end.</h2>
<p>This is the part people are most often surprised by, so it is worth saying before delivery day rather than after. A loaded pallet is not a parcel. It arrives on a lorry, it comes off with a tail lift, and it needs firm level ground to be set down on and something with wheels to move it once it is there. A gravel drive, a flight of steps, or a narrow lane a rigid truck cannot turn into are all real problems, and all of them are much easier to solve a week early than on the morning.</p>
<p>So: check access before the pallet is booked, not when it is on the road. Tell us if the answer is awkward. A delivery that has to be attempted twice costs everybody more than a conversation beforehand, and we would rather have the conversation.</p>
<h2>And what this page is not.</h2>
<p>It is not a customer story. We are not naming who this pallet is going to, what town it is bound for, or what is on the invoice &mdash; not in Germany and not anywhere else. What is publishable is the route between two countries and what is printed on the outside of a box, which is all that appears here.</p>
<p>It is also not a promise about your own order. A pallet photographed on its way out is one pallet on its way out. Our product pages say plainly that delivery runs from as little as one day to as long as four months depending on stock, and a photograph of freight does not change that number in either direction.</p>
<p>No declaration, no duty, no border stop.<br/>Just a stack of boxes, a wrapped pallet, and a drive across two countries.</p>
<p>Slovakia and Germany are both member states of the European Union and of the Schengen area, so goods in free circulation move between them without customs formalities; that is a matter of public law rather than a claim about our own arrangements. Nothing here is tax advice, and a buyer&rsquo;s VAT position depends on their own status and country. The handling pictograms described are the standard international marks for fragile, this way up, handle with care and keep dry. The one-day-to-four-month delivery range is our own published figure from our product pages. The map shows two countries and a direction; it does not show a route, a facility or an address. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.</p>]]></description>
              <pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:09:07 +0000</pubDate>
           </item>
       <item>
      <title>In Dublin the sun and the wind take turns</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/in-dublin-the-sun-and-the-wind-take-turns-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/in-dublin-the-sun-and-the-wind-take-turns-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>We pulled the public wind and solar record for Dublin. The wind is not remarkable &mdash; it averages 3.6 metres per second and it gets above 8 for two per cent of the year. What is remarkable is when it arrives. In this city the sun and the wind are almost exactly out of phase, and that turns out to matter more than either number on its own.</p>
<h2>January has the wind. June has the sun.</h2>
<p>In the typical year for Dublin, January carries seventeen per cent of the sunlight and one hundred per cent of the wind energy. June carries one hundred per cent of the sunlight and sixteen per cent of the wind. The two series are near mirror images of each other: measured across the twelve months, their correlation is <strong>&minus;0.78</strong>.</p>
<p>That is a cleaner inversion than we usually find. On a Greek island we looked at recently the two sources diverged in places and overlapped in others; here they trade places almost month for month. A solar roof in Dublin does most of its work between April and August. A turbine does most of its work between November and February. They fail at opposite ends of the year.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-dublin-sun-wind-en-1600x900.jpg" alt="Monthly chart for Dublin comparing sunlight on the ground with energy in the wind, each as a share of its own best month, showing sunlight peaking in May and June while wind peaks in January and November"/>
  <p>Each series against its own best month, so the shapes can be compared rather than the units.</p>
</figure>
<h2>Why that is the whole argument for running both.</h2>
<p>Adding more of one source does not fix the months when that source is absent. Doubling a Dublin solar array doubles a July surplus and changes December by almost nothing, because in December there is very little sunlight to collect twice. The gap in a renewable system is rarely a shortage of capacity. It is a shortage of capacity <em>at the wrong time of year</em>.</p>
<p>Two sources that fail together are one source with extra steps. Two that fail at opposite ends of the calendar are genuinely worth having as a pair, and Dublin is close to the textbook case. That is not a claim about our product; it is a property of the weather over this city, and anyone can check it against the same public dataset we used.</p>
<p>The useful question is not how much a source gives you. It is what it is doing in the month you need it.</p>
<h2>Now the part that does not flatter us.</h2>
<p>An annual average is close to useless for wind, because the energy available goes as the cube of the speed: doubling the wind gives you eight times the power, so a mean hides everything that matters. The honest way to describe a site is to sort every hour of the year and look at the shape.</p>
<p>Do that for Dublin and you get this. Of 8,760 hours, 1,922 &mdash; nearly a quarter of the year &mdash; are below 2 m/s, where a low-wind blade set has not started turning. Most of the year, 3,576 hours, sits between 2 and 4 m/s: turning, but gently. Only 902 hours reach 6 to 8 m/s, and just <strong>152 hours in the entire year</strong> are above 8. The windiest single hour in the typical year is 12.3 m/s.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-dublin-wind-hours-en-1600x900.jpg" alt="Chart of all 8760 hours of the typical year in Dublin sorted into wind speed bands, showing most hours between 2 and 4 metres per second and only 152 hours above 8"/>
  <p>The unflattering graphic. Two per cent of the year above 8 m/s is the number a seller leaves out.</p>
</figure>
<p>So Dublin is a <strong>consistent</strong> wind site rather than a strong one. Seventy-eight per cent of hours are usable and very few are dramatic. That shapes what you should expect and it shapes which blades belong on the machine: a low-wind set that starts early and keeps turning is worth far more here than a high-wind set waiting for a gale that arrives for a hundred and fifty hours a year.</p>
<h2>What we checked before publishing any of it.</h2>
<p>We have been caught out by this dataset before. On another site the December wind series turned out to be a stuck value repeated for two thirds of the month, which inflated the annual mean by a third until we found it. So we now test every month before drawing anything: if a single wind speed accounts for an implausible share of a month&rsquo;s hours, the month is broken.</p>
<p>Dublin passes. Across all twelve months the most repeated single value never exceeds 3.6 per cent of that month&rsquo;s hours, which is what ordinary weather looks like. Nothing here has been excluded, smoothed or adjusted.</p>
<h2>What this page is not.</h2>
<p>It is not a survey of your roof. These figures come from a reanalysis model on a grid of tens of kilometres, ten metres above open ground. A courtyard between two buildings, a line of mature trees, or a parapet that accelerates air over an edge will all beat the model by more than the difference between the months on the chart above. A model cannot see your site.</p>
<p>And it is not a customer story. We do not publish who buys from us, where their machines go, or what they paid &mdash; not in Ireland and not anywhere else. If you are weighing this up for a building in Dublin, the useful thing to send us is your own situation: what you are trying to run, how exposed the site is, and whether you are storing the energy or using it as it arrives. We will tell you what applies, including when the honest answer is that your site does not suit a turbine.</p>
<p>Dublin&rsquo;s wind is ordinary. Its timing is not.<br/>That is a better reason to put a turbine next to a solar roof than any figure on a datasheet.</p>
<p>Wind and solar figures are from the European Commission Joint Research Centre&rsquo;s PVGIS v5.2 typical meteorological year for 53.3498&deg;N 6.2603&deg;W at 13 m elevation, radiation from PVGIS-SARAH2 and wind from ERA5, drawn from 2005 to 2020. Solar is global horizontal irradiation; wind is plotted as the mean cube of the ten-metre wind speed, which is the energy available in the wind and not the output of any turbine. A typical meteorological year composes each month from a different real year, so it describes a normal year rather than any year that happened. The correlation of &minus;0.78 is between the twelve monthly values of the two series as plotted. Hour counts are of all 8,760 hours in that year. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.</p>]]></description>
              <pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:50:40 +0000</pubDate>
           </item>
       <item>
      <title>The machines we sell have serial numbers. This one does not.</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/the-lathe-that-turns-our-rotor-shafts-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/the-lathe-that-turns-our-rotor-shafts-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>We have already shown you a bar of steel being cut on a bandsaw. This is the machine it goes to next, and where it stops being a length of bar and becomes a rotor shaft. It is a manual lathe. There is no screen on it, no program, and no memory &mdash; every dimension it produces comes from a person turning a handle and reading a line on a dial.</p>
<h2>What happens after the saw.</h2>
<p>The saw gives you a slug of round bar, cut roughly to length and not much else. It is not straight enough, not the right diameter anywhere along it, and both ends are saw-cut. Turning is where all of that gets fixed: the bar is gripped in the chuck at one end, supported by the tailstock at the other, spun, and a fixed tool is fed along it taking metal off until the diameters are where the drawing says they should be.</p>
<p>Every one of those operations removes material and none of them puts any back. That is the whole discipline of the job. A shaft turned two tenths of a millimetre undersize is scrap, and it is scrap after all the time already spent on it, which is why a good turner creeps up on a dimension rather than aiming straight at it.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-lathe-machine-1200x1274.jpg" alt="A KNUTH V-Turn 410 manual lathe in a workshop: headstock and control panel on the left with speed range labels, a chuck, a four-way tool post on the cross slide, the tailstock and the bed running to the right, with swarf in the chip tray"/>
  <p>A KNUTH V-Turn 410. Levers, dials and handwheels, and a chip tray that tells you it gets used.</p>
</figure>
<h2>Two speed ranges and a warning in German.</h2>
<p>On the front panel are two labels either side of a lever: <strong>30&ndash;550</strong> in blue and <strong>550&ndash;3000</strong> in amber. Those are the two spindle-speed ranges, in revolutions per minute, and the lever picks between them. Steel of a given diameter wants a particular surface speed at the cutting edge; a big diameter wants a low spindle speed and a small one wants a high speed, so a shaft that steps down along its length may get turned at more than one setting.</p>
<p>Next to the lever is a small red-printed plate: <em>ACHTUNG &mdash; Motor ausschalten, bevor die Getriebestufe ge&auml;ndert wird.</em> Switch the motor off before changing the gear range. It is there because this is a real gearbox with real dogs and gears in it, and shifting one under power damages the machine and can throw a lever. On the apron further down the bed there is a second one, in English this time, with an arrow pointing straight at the bolt it means: <strong>CAUTION: Please release this bolt before operation</strong>.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-lathe-panel-1400x1064.jpg" alt="Close-up of the KNUTH V-Turn 410 front panel: a gear range lever between labels reading 30 to 550 and 550 to 3000, a red ACHTUNG plate in German, the KNUTH logo with a CE mark, the model name V-Turn 410 and an empty box beside the words Serien-Nr"/>
  <p>The gear range lever, the warning, the maker&rsquo;s mark &mdash; and, under the model name, a box that was never filled in.</p>
</figure>
<h2>The red marks nobody printed.</h2>
<p>Look at the two levers in that photograph and you will see smears of red paint on the boss of each one. Those are not from the factory. Somebody in the shop marked the positions they actually use, by hand, because finding a setting by feel in the middle of a job is faster than reading a chart every time.</p>
<p>That is what a machine looks like after it has been worked rather than owned. The manufacturer supplied a set of charts screwed to the front; the shop has added its own layer of memory on top of them, in gloss paint, for the four or five settings that come up again and again. You cannot buy that layer. It accumulates.</p>
<h2>A brass table for cutting a thread.</h2>
<p>Bolted to the carriage is a small dial with an engraved plate above it reading <strong>INDICATOR TABLE</strong>. It exists to solve one specific problem, and it is worth explaining because it is a lovely piece of pure mechanism.</p>
<p>Cutting a screw thread takes several passes, each one a little deeper. The tool has to follow exactly the same helix every time; if it starts a fraction out of step on the second pass it cuts a new thread crossing the first, and the part is ruined. The dial turns with the leadscrew, and the table tells you which numbered line to engage the half-nuts on for each pitch &mdash; 0.5, 0.75, 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, 6 mm and the rest, against gear options marked 11T, 13T and 14T. Follow it and every pass lands in the same groove.</p>
<p>No electronics, no sensors, no software. A geared dial and a table of numbers, doing arithmetic in brass.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-lathe-apron-1200x1200.jpg" alt="The carriage and apron of the lathe with the threading indicator dial, a yellow CAUTION sticker reading please release this bolt before operation, the half-nut lever with a red ball handle, the leadscrew and feed rod, and the cross slide handwheel in the foreground"/>
  <p>The carriage. The red ball engages the half-nuts; the dial above it decides when.</p>
</figure>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-lathe-threading-900x1143.jpg" alt="Close-up of the engraved threading indicator table on the lathe carriage, listing thread pitches against gear tooth counts of 11T, 13T and 14T and the dial lines to use for each"/>
  <p>Pitches down the middle, gear options on the left, and which lines on the dial you are allowed to use.</p>
</figure>
<h2>The box that was never filled in.</h2>
<p>Under the model name on the front panel are the words <strong>Serien-Nr</strong> and a blank white rectangle. Nobody ever wrote in it.</p>
<p>We have just published a whole piece about why the serial number on the front of every <a href="https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/ten-charge-controllers-on-a-pallet-explained-ie">charge controller we build</a> matters &mdash; which unit, built when, in which batch, so a support conversation starts from a fact and a bad component can be traced across a whole production run. Every machine we sell carries one. The machine that turns the shafts for them has an empty box where its own should be.</p>
<p>That is not hypocrisy, but it is worth being honest about the difference. A serial number is a promise to somebody else. It exists so that a person who bought a thing, years later and possibly from a different continent, can find out what they have. Nobody was ever going to need to trace this lathe: it sits in one building, one shop knows its habits, and if it breaks the people who fix it are standing next to it. Traceability is not a virtue we perform. It is a specific tool for a specific problem, and this machine does not have that problem.</p>
<h2>Why a manual machine at all.</h2>
<p>The honest answer is setup time. A CNC lathe wins decisively when you are making the same part hundreds of times over: you pay once in programming and fixturing, and then every part after that is nearly free. For a handful of shafts, a modification, a repair, or the first one of something you have not made before, a person at a manual machine is simply quicker to get cutting &mdash; and quicker to stop and change their mind halfway through.</p>
<p>This is not an argument that manual machining is better. It is an argument that the two are good at different things, which is the sort of claim that survives contact with a workshop. What decides the accuracy of the parts coming off this lathe is not the machine anyway. It is whether the person running it measures, and how often.</p>
<h2>The operation before this one.</h2>
<p>Here is the bar being cut to length on the saw, filmed on a phone in the same workshop. Nothing staged. It is the step immediately before everything described above:</p>
<div>
  
</div>
<p>The shaft that comes off the lathe goes into the generator inside an <a href="https://tesup.com/ie/tesup-vertical-wind-turbines-for-homes.html">Atlas</a>. You will never see it once the machine is assembled, which is exactly why it is worth showing now.</p>
<p>Turning takes metal off. Nothing puts it back.<br/>That is the entire reason a shop measures more often than it cuts.</p>
<p>This page uses two unretouched photographs taken in our own workshop, plus detail crops from them. The make and model, the CE mark, the two speed ranges, the German and English warning plates, the threading table and the empty serial-number box are all read directly from the machine in those photographs and are not quoted from a specification sheet; we have not stated the lathe&rsquo;s capacity, motor rating or dimensions, because those are not visible in the pictures. The video is our own footage of an earlier operation on the same part. The supplier&rsquo;s name plate on the machine bed carries a third party&rsquo;s telephone numbers and has been kept out of frame. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.</p>]]></description>
              <pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:33:02 +0000</pubDate>
           </item>
       <item>
      <title>Ten charge controllers on a pallet, explained</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/ten-charge-controllers-on-a-pallet-explained-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/ten-charge-controllers-on-a-pallet-explained-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>A pallet of finished charge controllers, photographed on the workshop floor. Ten to a pallet, consecutive serial numbers, the same yellow warning sticker in the same place on every one. This is the least flattering picture we take and the one that tells you the most.</p>
<h2>What the box actually does.</h2>
<p>A wind turbine does not produce electricity you can put in a battery. The generator puts out three-phase alternating current whose voltage and frequency rise and fall with the wind, second by second. A battery wants steady direct current at a voltage it chooses. The <a href="https://tesup.com/ie/tesup-wind-turbine-charge-controller.html">Magnum Charge Controller</a> is the box that stands between those two facts: it rectifies the AC to DC, holds the output where you set it, and decides what to do when the wind gives it more than the battery can take.</p>
<p>That last part is the job that matters. Our published figures for this unit are power management up to 15 kW, batteries from 24 to 48 volts, and it works with every TESUP turbine. It also carries automatic turbine protection and a manual emergency brake &mdash; because the failure mode of small wind is not the turbine stopping, it is the turbine not stopping.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-magnum-controller-panel-1200x1600.jpg" alt="Close-up of the front panel of a TESUP Magnum charge controller on a wooden pallet: a TESUP serial label with a QR code, a three-digit display, a machined rotary knob, a yellow HIGH VOLTAGE OUTDOOR USE ONLY sticker, three indicators, three terminals labelled WIND under a TURBINE bracket, a SENSOR connector, MC4 connectors and a CE mark"/>
  <p>Every argument you can have about this product is printed on the front of it, in the order you will use it.</p>
</figure>
<h2>Three wires in, two wires out.</h2>
<p>Along the bottom edge are three positions marked <strong>WIND</strong>, with the word <strong>TURBINE</strong> bracketed underneath them. Three, because the generator is three-phase. There is no polarity to get wrong on those three: swap any two and the machine works exactly as before. It is one of the few connections in a renewable installation you genuinely cannot make backwards, and that is not an accident of the design so much as a happy property of three-phase rectification.</p>
<p>The DC side is the pair of MC4 connectors on the top edge, with <strong>+</strong> and <strong>&minus;</strong> stamped beside them. MC4 is the connector the solar industry settled on years ago &mdash; keyed, latching, rated for outdoor use, and hard to mate wrongly without meaning it. Using it here is not clever. It is the opposite of clever, and that is the argument for it: an installer who has wired a solar array has already wired this.</p>
<p>Between them sits a circular multi-pin socket marked <strong>SENSOR</strong>, a three-digit display, and a machined knob. The knob is the voltage setting, adjustable on the box itself. That means the unit can be read and set by somebody standing in front of it in a field, with no phone, no app and no signal &mdash; which is where these boxes actually live.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-magnum-controller-radio-1200x1600.jpg" alt="A TESUP Magnum charge controller on a pallet with its stub radio antenna screwed into the side, seen from above with several more units stacked behind it"/>
  <p>The stub on the left-hand side is the radio. The knob on the front is what you use when the radio is not the answer.</p>
</figure>
<p>The short black stub screwed into the side is the antenna for the IoT link, which is how the unit reports to a phone. We think remote monitoring is worth having and we ship it as standard. We also think a controller whose only interface is an app is a controller you cannot fix on a wet Tuesday, which is why the knob and the display are still on the front panel and always will be.</p>
<h2>The stickers are the honest part.</h2>
<p>On the face of every unit in these photographs, in the same position, is a yellow label reading <strong>HIGH VOLTAGE! &mdash; OUTDOOR USE ONLY</strong>. Next to the terminals is a CE mark. Neither is decoration, and neither is there to reassure you.</p>
<p>A wind turbine generates whenever its rotor turns. It does not wait to be switched on and it does not stop because you have opened something. That means the turbine terminals on this box can be live while nothing is powered up, nobody is expecting it and the installation is half finished. It is the single most common way people get hurt by small wind, which is why the warning is on the front of the machine rather than on page nine of a manual nobody keeps.</p>
<p>A turbine has no off switch. It has a brake, and a brake is something somebody has to remember to use.</p>
<h2>What the label on each one is for.</h2>
<p>Every unit carries a white label with the TESUP wordmark, a serial number and a QR code. On the two labels you can read clearly in these photographs, every field of the serial is identical except the last, which differs by one: the units came off the line one after another and were labelled in order. That is not a detail we are showing off. It is the whole point of the label.</p>
<p>What a serial buys you is boring and worth having. It says which unit this is, when it was built and in which batch, so a support conversation starts from a fact instead of a description. If a component turns out to be wrong across a production run, the run is identifiable and we can go and find it rather than waiting for complaints to arrive one at a time. None of that is visible on a product page, and all of it is the difference between a two-year warranty that means something and a two-year warranty that means a form.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-magnum-controller-batch-1200x1600.jpg" alt="A batch of TESUP Magnum charge controllers arranged on a wooden pallet on the workshop floor, with a pallet stacker to the left and a pallet of flat laser-cut sheet metal blanks behind them"/>
  <p>Behind the pallet, on another pallet: flat sheet-metal blanks. That is the same enclosure, several operations earlier.</p>
</figure>
<h2>Do you need one of these at all?</h2>
<p>Sometimes not, and it is cheaper for everyone if we say so here rather than after you have bought one. Our <a href="https://tesup.com/ie/tesup-vertical-wind-turbines-for-homes.html">Atlas</a> carries its charge control inside the turbine body, which is why that machine has no separate cabinet to find a wall for and no second cable run to a shed. If an Atlas is what you are installing, the electronics in these photographs are already inside it.</p>
<p>This box is the standalone version: for the larger machines, for installations where the controller needs to live indoors while the turbine does not, and for people adding a TESUP turbine to a system that already exists. There are two ways it goes in the chain &mdash; turbine to controller to battery, or turbine to controller to grid inverter &mdash; and which one applies to you depends on whether you are storing the energy or using it as it arrives. Tell us which, and we will tell you what you need. If the answer is that you already have it, that is the answer you will get.</p>
<h2>What &ldquo;ready for delivery&rdquo; honestly means.</h2>
<p>It means these particular units are built, labelled, on a pallet and waiting for a pallet truck. It does not mean every order ships tomorrow. Our own product page says it plainly, and we would rather repeat it than have you find it in the small print: depending on stock, delivery runs from as little as one day to as long as four months. A photograph of ten finished controllers is ten finished controllers &mdash; it is not a promise about your order date.</p>
<p>What it does tell you is the thing a rendered product image never can. These were made, in a building, by people, on equipment that leaves marks on the floor. The pallet is scuffed, the stacker is scratched, the sheet metal for the next batch is stacked behind them. Every manufacturer&rsquo;s catalogue photograph looks the same. The floor is where they differ.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-magnum-controller-pallet-901x1600.jpg" alt="Ten TESUP Magnum charge controllers arranged in three columns on a wooden pallet, seen at an angle, with a pallet stacker and workshop equipment behind"/>
  <p>Ten to a pallet. Count them.</p>
</figure>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-magnum-controller-pallet-truck-901x1600.jpg" alt="The same pallet of ten TESUP Magnum charge controllers seen from above on the forks of a pallet stacker, painted floor markings visible around it"/>
  <p>On the forks, about to become somebody&rsquo;s delivery.</p>
</figure>
<p>Ten identical boxes with ten different serial numbers.<br/>That is what a batch is, and it is the only claim on this page you can check by looking.</p>
<p>The photographs on this page are unretouched and unstaged, taken in our own workshop. The 15 kW power-management figure, the 24 to 48 V battery range, the compatibility with all TESUP turbine models, the automatic protection and manual brake, the IoT monitoring, the two-year TESUP Care warranty and the one-day-to-four-month delivery range are all our own published figures from the product page linked above. The serial numbers visible in the photographs belong to these units and to no customer; the units were photographed as stock, before allocation to any order. The QR codes on the labels are not machine-readable at the resolution published here. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.</p>]]></description>
              <pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2026 06:23:51 +0000</pubDate>
           </item>
       <item>
      <title>What the wind actually does on a Greek island</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/what-the-wind-actually-does-on-a-greek-island-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/what-the-wind-actually-does-on-a-greek-island-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>Samothraki is a small island in the north-east Aegean with a 1,611-metre mountain in the middle of it &mdash; the highest peak of any Greek island. We pulled the public wind and solar record for it, and the interesting part is not the number we found. It is the month we had to throw away.</p>
<h2>Where this is.</h2>
<p>Twenty-odd nautical miles off the Thracian coast, with the Turkish island of Gökçeada to the east and Límnos to the south-west. Kamariotissa on the west shore is the ferry port and effectively the island&rsquo;s front door. It matters for wind that the island is small, steep and surrounded by open water on every side: there is no long fetch of land to slow the air down before it arrives, and a mountain that size makes its own weather on the way past.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-samothraki-map-en-1600x900.jpg" alt="Locator map of Samothraki in the north-east Aegean, with Kamariotissa marked on the west shore and Gokceada, Limnos, Alexandroupoli and Kavala labelled nearby"/>
  <p>A locator, not a survey. The coastline is Natural Earth 1:50m, which renders this island as a seven-sided blob &mdash; enough to show which water it sits in, and no more.</p>
</figure>
<h2>What the wind actually does here.</h2>
<p>Not what you would guess. The windiest month in the typical year is February, and the second peak is autumn &mdash; October and November. The calm months are May and June. That is not the northern European pattern, where the windy half and the dark half of the year line up neatly; the Aegean has its own shape, and the summer lull sits right in the middle of the tourist season.</p>
<p>Across the eleven months we could use, the mean wind speed at ten metres is about 5.7 m/s. Eighty-seven per cent of hours are at or above 2 m/s, which is where the low-wind blade set on an <a href="https://tesup.com/ie/tesup-vertical-wind-turbines-for-homes.html">Atlas</a> starts turning. Sixty-two per cent of hours are above 4 m/s and a quarter are above 8. Those are good numbers by any standard, and they are the reason islands like this one come up in our inbox more often than their population would suggest.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-samothraki-sun-wind-en-1600x900.jpg" alt="Monthly chart for Samothraki comparing sunlight and energy in the wind, each as a share of its own best month, with the December wind bar drawn as an empty dashed outline labelled no data"/>
  <p>Sun and wind for the same location. The empty slot in December is not a rendering fault.</p>
</figure>
<h2>The month we cannot show you.</h2>
<p>December is missing from the wind series because the data for it is broken. In the typical year for this grid cell, 477 of December&rsquo;s 744 hourly wind values are pinned at exactly 37.79 metres per second &mdash; the same number, hour after hour, for nearly two thirds of the month. That is a stuck value in a dataset, not a storm. No island in the Aegean sustains hurricane-force wind for three weeks.</p>
<p>Left in, it would have dragged the annual average from 5.7 m/s to 7.6 and made this island look a third windier than it is. That is the kind of error that flatters a turbine seller, which is exactly why it is worth saying out loud. We checked every month the same way &mdash; in the eleven we kept, the single most common wind value accounts for under 3.2 per cent of hours, which is what real weather looks like.</p>
<p>A number that makes your product look better is the one you should check twice.</p>
<h2>Why sun and wind are worth having together here.</h2>
<p>Samothraki gets a lot of sun: about 1,664 kWh per square metre a year, which is roughly double what northern Britain sees. But the shape of the year still bites. December sunlight is a fifth of July&rsquo;s, November barely better &mdash; and November is one of the windiest months on the island. The two sources are out of phase, which is the entire practical argument for running both rather than doubling down on one.</p>
<p>That is also why the Atlas body carries inputs for wind and solar on the same panel and a single output to the battery. Not because combining them is clever, but because on a site like this one they genuinely fail at different times of year.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/catalog/product/t/e/tesup-atlas-10kw-vertical-wind-turbine-generator-for-home-best_1_13.png" alt="The TESUP Atlas vertical wind turbine, product photograph"/>
  <p>The Atlas as it ships. This is our own product photograph, not a picture of one installed on Samothraki.</p>
</figure>
<h2>One number, twenty-two kilometres wide.</h2>
<p>Here is the problem with every figure above, drawn to scale. This is a section straight across the island: out of the sea west of Kamariotissa, through the port at sea level, over the summit of Fengári, and down to the water on the far coast. Twenty-two kilometres of ground and 1.6 kilometres of vertical &mdash; and the model that produced our wind numbers sees all of it as one cell, with one wind speed.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-samothraki-profile-en-1600x900.jpg" alt="Coast-to-coast elevation section of Samothraki from SRTM 30 m data, rising from sea level at Kamariotissa to 1,598 metres at Fengari and back down to the sea, with vertical-axis turbine symbols marked at the port, at 254 metres on the lower slope and at 990 metres on the high ridge"/>
  <p>Real elevation, 200 measured points about 110 metres apart. The vertical is stretched five-fold, and the turbines are symbols &mdash; an Atlas is two metres tall, which at this scale is a hairline.</p>
</figure>
<p>The three marks are not addresses. They are just three heights off that profile: the harbour on the water, a sheltered slope at 254 metres, and an exposed ridge at 990. In reality those are three different wind climates. Air speeds up as it is forced over rising ground, and it slows in the lee of everything upwind of it; the gap between the sheltered and the exposed side of a mountain like this one is easily larger than the gap between the windiest and calmest months on our chart. The model has one number for all three marks. So does every other free dataset you will find.</p>
<h2>What this page is not.</h2>
<p>It is not a survey of anybody&rsquo;s roof. The figures here come from a reanalysis model on a grid of tens of kilometres, at ten metres above ground, over open terrain. A model cannot see your garden, and the section above is the reason why.</p>
<p>And it is not a customer story. We do not publish where our turbines go, who bought them or what they paid &mdash; not on islands where the population is small enough that a new turbine on a roof identifies a household, and not anywhere else either. If you live here, or somewhere like here, the useful thing to send us is your own situation: which side of the island, how exposed, what you need to keep running. We will tell you which blade set applies, and we will tell you honestly if the answer is that the site does not suit a turbine at all.</p>
<p>Eighty-seven per cent of hours with usable wind is a good site.<br/>Eleven months of data and one honest gap is a good answer.</p>
<p>Wind and solar figures are from the European Commission Joint Research Centre&rsquo;s PVGIS v5.2 typical meteorological year for 40.45&deg;N 25.53&deg;E at 132 m elevation, radiation from PVGIS-SARAH2 and wind from ERA5, drawn from 2005 to 2020. PVGIS treats the coastline itself as sea at this island&rsquo;s scale, so the reading is from an inland point. Wind percentages are the mean cube of the ten-metre wind speed, which is the energy available in the wind and not the output of any turbine; a typical year composes each month from a different real year. December wind is excluded for the reason given above. The terrain section is built from SRTM 30 m elevation data served by opentopodata.org: 200 samples about 110 metres apart on a straight line from 40.4779&deg;N 25.4587&deg;E to 40.4457&deg;N 25.7173&deg;E, fixed at one end by the ferry port and passing through the highest sample we could find on the island, which reads 1,601 m against a published summit of 1,611 m &mdash; a ten-metre difference is what a thirty-metre grid does to a sharp peak. The vertical scale on that graphic is exaggerated by a factor of 4.9, stated on the graphic itself, and the turbine marks on it are symbols rather than scale drawings. The position of Kamariotissa is a public geographic fact. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.</p>]]></description>
              <pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 10:50:58 +0000</pubDate>
           </item>
       <item>
      <title>What an Atlas looks like before the blades go on</title>
      <link>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/what-an-atlas-looks-like-before-the-blades-go-on-ie</link>
      <guid>https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/what-an-atlas-looks-like-before-the-blades-go-on-ie</guid>
      <description><![CDATA[<p>Before an Atlas goes up a mast it is a powder-coated box with a steel shaft standing out of the top of it, and everything you can argue about later is already printed on its front panel. This is what is on that panel, what is inside the machine, and &mdash; at the end &mdash; the workshop where the shaft itself gets made.</p>
<h2>What you are actually looking at.</h2>
<p>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 &mdash; the generator, the charge controller, the radio &mdash; 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Reading the front panel.</h2>
<p>Down the left are two rows of MC4 connectors. The lower pair is marked <strong>INPUTS &mdash; wind / solar</strong>, the upper pair <strong>OUTPUT &mdash; inverter / battery</strong>, 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 &mdash; a fitter who has wired a solar array has already wired this.</p>
<p>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 <strong>SENSOR</strong>, and a screw-on antenna for the radio link the <a href="https://tesup.com/ie/tesup-vertical-wind-turbines-for-homes.html">Atlas</a> uses to talk to the app. Beside the antenna is a small compartment labelled <em>MyTESUP App 9V (rechargeable battery)</em>. 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.</p>
<h2>The warnings are the honest part.</h2>
<p>There is a yellow triangle on the front that reads <strong>HIGH VOLTAGE &mdash; OUTDOOR USE ONLY</strong>, 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 halfway through an installation. 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.</p>
<p>A turbine has no off switch. It has a brake, and a brake is something you have to remember to use.</p>
<h2>What the serial number is for.</h2>
<p>Every Atlas carries two identical labels, 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.</p>
<p>On current units the serial begins <strong>V7</strong>. That is a build code, not a model name &mdash; 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.</p>
<h2>A 15 kW motor in a machine that will never ask for 15 kW.</h2>
<p>Inside is a 24-pole permanent magnet generator rated at 15 kW continuous, 22 kW peak &mdash; 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>What those numbers mean, and what they do not.</h2>
<p>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 &mdash; multiply any rating by twenty-four hours and you get a number no wind turbine on earth has ever produced.</p>
<p>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 &mdash; 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.</p>
<h2>Where the shaft comes from.</h2>
<p>That steel shaft standing out of the top plate does not arrive as a shaft. It arrives as a length of round bar, and two machines in our own workshop turn it into a part. Neither of them is glamorous and both are worth seeing, because this is the half of manufacturing that never appears on a product page.</p>
<p>First the saw. A bar is clamped, flooded with coolant and cut to length &mdash; filmed on a phone, nothing staged:</p>
<div>
  
</div>
<p>What comes off the saw is not straight enough, not the right diameter anywhere along it, and saw-cut at both ends. Fixing all of that is the lathe&rsquo;s job.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-lathe-machine-1200x1274.jpg" alt="A KNUTH V-Turn 410 manual lathe in the TESUP workshop: control panel and speed range labels on the left, a chuck, a four-way tool post on the cross slide, the tailstock and the bed running away to the right"/>
  <p>The lathe the rotor shafts are turned on. Levers, dials and handwheels &mdash; no screen and no program.</p>
</figure>
<p>It is a manual machine. Every dimension it produces comes from a person turning a handle and reading a line on a dial, and every operation takes metal off while none of them puts any back. A shaft turned two tenths of a millimetre undersize is scrap after all the time already spent on it, which is why a good turner creeps up on a dimension rather than aiming straight at it.</p>
<figure>
  <img src="/media/magefan_blog/tesup-lathe-panel-1400x1064.jpg" alt="Close-up of the lathe front panel: a gear range lever between labels reading 30 to 550 and 550 to 3000, a red ACHTUNG plate in German, the KNUTH logo with a CE mark, the model name V-Turn 410, and an empty box beside the words Serien-Nr"/>
  <p>Two spindle-speed ranges, a warning in German &mdash; and, under the model name, a serial-number box nobody ever filled in.</p>
</figure>
<p>There is a small joke in that photograph. This page has just spent several paragraphs on why every Atlas carries a serial number, and the machine that turns its shafts has an empty box where its own should be. That is not hypocrisy so much as a difference in purpose: a serial number is a promise to somebody else, and nobody was ever going to need to trace this lathe from another continent. We wrote about the machine at length in <a href="https://tesup.com/ie/blogs/post/the-lathe-that-turns-our-rotor-shafts-ie">a separate piece</a>, threading tables and all.</p>
<p>And this is the work itself, still going:</p>
<div>
  
</div>
<p>A machine you can read is a machine you can argue with.<br/>Everything on that panel is a claim we have to stand behind afterwards, which is the only reason to print any of it.</p>
<p>The photographs on this page are of the lathe in our own workshop, unretouched and unstaged; there are no photographs of a finished Atlas here, and nothing above is written as a caption to one. The make, model, CE mark, speed ranges, German warning plate and empty serial-number box are read directly from the machine in those pictures rather than quoted from a specification sheet. The videos are our own footage of the saw and lathe work. 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, and turbine output depends entirely on the wind at your own site. The supplier&rsquo;s plate on the lathe bed carries a third party&rsquo;s telephone numbers and has been kept out of frame. No customer, order, address or installation is named, described or shown on this page.</p>]]></description>
              <pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:38:45 +0000</pubDate>
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