A Magnum has been turning at a college in the south-west of England since February 2023. It isn’t being replaced because it wore out.
The south-west coast is one of the windiest parts of Britain, and very little of that wind is polite. It comes off the Atlantic carrying salt, it arrives in gusts rather than steady streams, and it does not stop for the winter holidays. It is a good place to generate electricity and a hard place to put a machine.
In February 2023, a further-education college put a Magnum up in it.
We can be precise about the date, because it is stamped into the machine. The build date sits in the middle of the serial number on the control box: the twenty-seventh of February, 2023. The installation is a straightforward one — the turbine, a charge controller, a mounting pole, an inverter and a battery to hold what the wind delivers at three in the morning when the campus is empty.
Three years and five months later, we heard from the college’s installer. They needed a replacement turbine.
Not because it had failed. Because somebody had vandalised it.
Why that’s the interesting part
Every manufacturer will tell you their equipment is durable. What none of us can do honestly is tell you how a machine behaves in year three, because most of the case studies you read were written in month two, when everything is new and the photographs are clean.
This one wasn’t. A college campus is an unusually unsentimental test. Nobody is watching the output every morning the way an enthusiast at home does. Nobody nurses it. It runs unattended through term time and through the summer, in coastal air, and it is expected to simply be there. For three and a half years, it was — right up until the moment it met something a turbine is not designed to survive, which is a person with intent.
The rest of the system says something too. The inverter, the battery and the charge controller are all still in place, all still working, and none of them are being replaced. The college is buying one part. That is what a well-matched system looks like after three years: when one component goes, you replace one component.
What we’d tell anyone siting a turbine somewhere public
We are not going to pretend we have a vandal-proof product. Nobody does. But this is the second thing worth taking from this installation, and it is more useful than the first:
- Height is the cheapest security you can buy. A turbine that cannot be reached from the ground cannot be reached casually. Most vandalism is opportunistic rather than determined.
- Put the electronics where the people aren’t. At this site the control box and inverter are in a cabinet — which is exactly why the college is replacing a turbine rather than a whole system.
- Cover it with whatever camera you already have. Sites like colleges almost always have CCTV somewhere. Pointing an existing camera at the mast costs nothing.
- Tell your insurer it’s there. Vandalism is very often covered. It is much less often claimed for, because nobody thought to list the turbine.
The replacement
The Magnum is still in the range, still in stock, and still designed to bolt onto the same mounting pole. The college will be turning again shortly — on the same mast, into the same battery, in the same coastal wind.
We would rather have written this story in a few more years, and about a turbine that finally stopped on its own. We’ll take this one.