Is this a double standard?

The  concert at Villa Maria estate was fantastic on Friday night.

It is an excellent venue by the winery and the music was outstanding. Dave Dobbyn's 'Loyal' was outstanding.

It occurred to me as the concert wound up at about 10pm, were they required to stop then as part of a duty to avoid excessive noise?

I mean this is in a rural setting. Surely there are only rural people about who should be accustomed to this sort of entertainment occurring (it was billed as part of a winery tour). What would be the harm in letting it run a bit longer? 

If a frost fan can make as much noise as a lawnmower running at the end of the bed all night, it seems to be a bit ironic to have a concert closed down at 10pm because of noise.

I might be wrong. Perhaps Dave and Anika prefer an early night?

Orchard Rite fans take flight

The observant reader will recall an article on an Orchard Rite fan that had been secured with a resulting bend in the blade. 

Shortly after the article the fan was erected along with several others in the location.

They were there over the spring growing season, but I noticed a couple of week ago that they were gone. Not lying down for maintenance. Not one gone while the others remained, but all gone from this particular paddock.

I have no explanation for the disappearance. I could speculate, but that would simply be tall tales of mechanical misadventure or neighbour complaints. 

Very curious.

Hopefully the accuracy will get better for the Defender

Thanks to 'Anonymous' (I don't think that's their real name) for their tip that the Defender frost fan will be releasing their measurement data in the near future.

That was so interesting that I decided to have another search around the web for a little more info.

There's plenty of advertising blurbs about the machine, but little hard data as such.

Except for a few things...

Now one of the pieces of information that has accompanied the press release for these things has been the statement attributed to Dr John Pearse of the Acoustics Research Group (University of Canterbury) that the blades are the same length as the Amarillo. You can find these statements here and here, amongst other places.

Now this is curious, since we have previously published an estimate of the length of the blade as 6.4m (here and here). Now I know that the Amarillo frost fan has a length of 5.8m. That's a matter of public record. So I presumed that our estimate was out. I mean, I'm sure the University of Canterbury has a tape measure! All we can go on is some photos. The length of the Defender must therefore be 5.8m. Right?

Imagine my surprise to see on this page a length published for the Defender of 6.36m.

So this is the situation;

Either Dr John Pearse meant to say "The blades for the Defender are over half a metre longer than the Amarillo, making them the longest of any blade on a frost fan"

or he was misquoted (you can never trust a journo, even when you release the press release yourself)

or he doesn't know how long an Amarillo frost fan is (even though he tested one)

or part of the process of peer reviewing measurements is to publish a wildly inaccurate figure to see if anyone notices, and if they don't, you know you can say any thing you like

or The University of Canterbury doesn't own a tape measure.

or some other perfectly reasonable explanation that involves a difference of 2 feet in length between an Amarillo and a Defender frost fan.

You be the judge.

Defender on Show

The new Defender frost fan is apparently going to be on display at Yealands estate during the Terroir viticultural field day later this month.

The latest advertising blurb continues to make bold claims about its performance including that it has been designed so that any special audible characteristics have been removed. The noise figures are also given a little more accurately as less than 50dBA L10 at 300m.

Bold claims indeed! We remain hopeful that the independent testing that the company claims to have carried out bear this out when it is released. 

It does seem a little strange not to have it released yet. Especially since it appears to have such good news.

One particularly interesting note from the advertisement in the Nelson Marlborough Farming newsletter is that they (FMR) make the claim that the fan (the Defender) is 10dB quieter than any other machine on the market. This does tend to indicate that their Amarillo frost fan (which attracts a 5dB penalty because of special acoustic characteristics) would be exceeding the permissible limit in Marlborough. Additionally, the Frost Boss folks should be a bit peeved since their 4 bladed unit is rated to produce 54dBA L10 at 300m. Someone doesn't have their story straight.