Wind turbine for electricity

[dutch@home]

I want to start a litle experiment to make electricity by a wind turbine.
does anyone have any experience or any plans for making this??

Something like this.




All advice is welcome!!

greets dutch!

[Digger]

otherpower.com

enjoy, digger

[akeela]

homemadeenergy.org
enjoy

[Hack]

There's some cool stuff out there on it. This is one of the best ones I found when I was researching it. If I remember right he has plans on how to wind your coils and build your turbine from scratch. Somewhere I remember finding some free plans on it too.

http://www.scoraigwind.com/

Ultimately the conclusion for me was there there are too many trees and not enough wind to make it feasible around here.

[smokerscully1]

I fooled with it some 20 years ago--tubines have come along way since then. I found it a lot like stillin--it was a lot fun to fool around with but I didn't save no money.

[Hawke]

Don't know about Canada, but in the states, the power company has to buy your excess power from turbins or photo cells. With the right setup, you can actually make money.

[Ugly]

It differes by province in Canada. Anybody in Ontario can put up to 10KW biomass produced power back to the grid with no licensing , however it's not paid power, it's offset. Meaning, they credit you back kw/h per kw/h of juice and if you produce more than you use you don't get paid for it. There are small producer licenses available starting at 500 bucks in Ontario that cover 50kw-500kw generation capacity. Not much wind where I live but I do some generation from wood gas.

[bushido]

It has to be clean power to go back to the grid. The type of inverter necessary to create the smooth sine required is very expensive. At the present it is just not feasible on a small scale. If you were to have a wind farm now...
Cheapest way is to run solar to a bank of deep cell batteries, don't bother changing it to A.C. String some wire for D.C. lighting etc., and use the power as is.
Solar water heating (or pre-heating) however, is quite practical.

[HookLine]

Cheapest way is to run solar to a bank of deep cell batteries, don't bother changing it to A.C. String some wire for D.C. lighting etc., and use the power as is.

+1

Solar water heating (or pre-heating) however, is quite practical.

+1

Most houses in northern Oz have it, and it is mandatory in new ones. BIG savings on electrickery/gas bills.

[Ugly]

It has to be clean power to go back to the grid. The type of inverter necessary to create the smooth sine required is very expensive. At the present it is just not feasible on a small scale. If you were to have a wind farm now...
Cheapest way is to run solar to a bank of deep cell batteries, don't bother changing it to A.C. String some wire for D.C. lighting etc., and use the power as is.
Solar water heating (or pre-heating) however, is quite practical.

Not really that expensive, one of the easiest ways is the pure sine wave generator from a server grade UPS, they tend to be resold cheap, already carry the correct certifications and the larger units will handle massive loads for long stretches. I've also seen some fairly simple rotary style systems that work nicely. Basically all they are is a DC motor hooked up to a low RPM gen head, the downside of the rotary units is they often require large battery/capacitor type setups to handle the dips and surges.

One expensive part of a grid tie system is the auto disconnect switch to prevent your generated power from being dumped into the grid when and if the grid goes down. They don't want a linesman getting shocked when he knows he tripped the relay at a substation and that the line should be dead.

Personally I have no use for having batteries and the like, the grid is the cheapest storage out there and I'm not really interested in wiring DC anything into the house. If the grid dies and the auto disconnect releases me from the grid, I still have the generated power in pure AC form to keep my furnace blower and water pump running etc. I only have to consider the averages overall and never have to worry about handling the peak demand of the household. Going green is easy and if you're cheap and can think things through, it's a safe, legal and inexpensive thing to implement.

Batteries are where many of these systems fall down in my opinion. I can't believe the sums some of my neighbours have put into batteries and their limited life spans. The energy and cost to make, maintain and thence recycle a battery defeats the entire purpose imo.

For a low cost radical approach to green energy, take a look at this... I'm seriously going to stick one of these into my swamp this coming year. I really think it may be the easiest system for those of us with some land and it's super easy to use raw methane and heat by product from fermentation.

http://www.daenvis.org/technology/Jeanpan.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

Good luck to any and all who are trying to get off the fossil fuels with whatever approach they take.

[dutch@home]

okay guys,
thanks for all the info.i also did get some info at work from a coworker.
lets see what i can cook from it.
it might take a while before its ready, its just an inbetween fun project.
and the main goal is to make it for a litle money from scrap etc.
maybe some pics later.