Learning How to Build a Home Made Wind Turbine
January 27th, 2010
Learning how to build a homemade wind turbine became important to our family when we first started looking to buy a wind generator to run our off gird home. The price of 1000w models needed to run our renewable energy system cost nearly $4000 including the tower. We had to even assemble it ourselves. We figured there must be a better way. Our solar panel array just wasn big enough to run our home and we figured a large wind turbine would add to our power supply enough to meet the increased demand of 3 children growing up in a mostly normal home. What did we need? 1000w of power production 40 foot tower Could we build a homemade wind turbine?We decided to look at the option of building our own, as we said when we saw the price of new ones. Scandinavian countries 70% of the heating for domestic properties is produced by such things as ground and air source heat pumps. These are fantastic things, when I first heard about them I could not believe how much energy could be produced from essentially nothing. There is of course the electricity used by the pumps but this could be produced by solar photovoltaic cells or a wind turbine. Solar thermal panels are capable of providing 70% of a households hot water requirements. Some heat pumps will provide all heating and hot water requirements. With the use of affordable materials, you can easily devise some of these parts for assembly of an effective energy-producing device. To begin with, the design of the wind turbine blades is the most important factor in defining the efficiency of your windmill in generating electricity. The horizontal spinning blade that resembles an airplanes propeller is one of the most ergonomic designs that can effectively capture strong winds. Source: Wind Power
Entry Filed under: Science Parlor, Useful Tips