Talking About Green

If you are looking to reduce your power bill or get off the grid completely, residential wind power is currently the simplest and cheapest way to do it.

Why not just go out and buy one? Well, for starters if you are thinking of creating your own power then you are also thinking of saving money. The last thing you will do if you purchase one is save money as prices for these start at about $4000 dollars for a commercial one.

But not if you do it yourself. And with the right engineered manual, you can make a professional looking and powerful wind turbine for a fraction of the price of retail turbines. You can make a working turbine for around 200-300$ quite easily. Turbines aren’t actually that complicated.

What will you need to make your own wind generator?

You’ll need a work area, good blueprints, basic tools and four to seven days.

The components you’ll build:

Four main parts in a generator are the blades and hub, the body with a DC motor, the tail and the tower. The blades will be the toughest part to build of the whole machine. They are still fairly easy with a good guide to move you along.

The motor is the most expensive component – at around 50-150$ depending on size. Your manual will detail what size motor you will need and all the technical stuff. The DC motor converts the spinning energy to electricity.

For the body I recommend double walled stainless steel, which will last a long time and is very cheap. You can get it from a chimney pipe or a wood stove pipe.

The tail is very simple but usually essential to make sure your turbine is pointed in the right direction. Make it sturdy so it can withstand storm winds.

You can buy the tower or build your own out of piping. The best thing to use is old TV towers, which many people don’t use anymore and may actually pay you to take them down.

Now that you know some of the basics, you can see that it’s not that complicated or expensive to have your own residential wind power system to run your household. All you need now are the plans to get started.