Silentwind Gen won't spin....help!

[Sojourner]

Ciao all... The fairly new Silentwind on my new-to-me boat used to work great. Now, for no discernible reason, it doesnt spin. The red brake light is not lit up on the controller. I've clicked it on, the brake light goes on, off again, off, and nothing. Winds up to 30 knots at night, batteries draining from fridge etc (ie not full at marina on shore power and still nothing. I cycled through the menus and when I hit reset for a brief second (less than 5 seconds, which I gleaned from the manual was a soft reset...what does that do? it didn't tell me), the brake light came on and went out briefly. Still no turny.

How can I test it, or make the thing work? The PO of the boat was meticulous and like I said the thing worked for a few weeks fine, but then just quit a few weeks ago..... any ideas?

[CharlieJ]

Do you have the Technical Manual onboard? There are troubleshooting steps listed.

[zboss]

Disconnect the three wires from the controller (have a way to stop the wind gen by turning it away from the wind before doing this). If it starts up you have a short between the three wires somewhere. I've had a problem where the posts are so close together that two of the wires made contact when a thumbscrew got loose.