William Swim started Free Texas Electricty in April. He felt that he had a better idea of building renewable energy sources (wind turbines) using equipment available on the internet.
I purchased a setup in August for $5000 which included an Outback Inverter (good piece of equipment), a Xantrex charge controller (also good) a couple of 12V batteries and 2 wind turbines of his design.
After the install we had no wind (Winds in North Texas during August are nearly non-existent).in September, we started to get some decent wind.in October, when I saw no reduction in my power bill (his website and advertising state):
"This system typically produces 600 to 1000 KWHs of power per month"
When I asked him to provide proof that other people have experienced a reduction (he installed somewhere aropund 9 systems) he stated that all I had to do was look at my power bill and see how much it had gone down. I asked him for electrical proof... How many amps would the system generate, what voltage are we gewtting down from the turbines?
When I would attach volt and ammeters to the output to measure, he would get angry and tell me that I was breaking the equipment. His ONLY method of 'proving' what the system was doing was to reply 'check your power bill'.
In fact, the maximum that his system could POSSIBLY generate (based on the maximum ouput of the components) is approximately 260kWh per month and this is true ONLY if we had sustained (as in CONSTANT) winds over 25mph for 24 hours a day and 30 days a month.
Even a total idiot that had lived in Texas for very long would know that your electric bill goes down from August to September to October.
In December I filed a small claims court action against Mr. Swim seeking reimbursement for the useless equipment only to find out that he has fled the State of Texas and moved back to California.
All indications point to the fact that he might be working with Carl Vettes from Freetricity located in California reported elsewhere on this site
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