Home Wind Turbine

There’s a lot going on right now in wind turbine design, and many new designs are trying to maximize the potential of the urban microgeneration site.  Rural areas are ideal for wind energy because well, they get more wind.  Urban settings are less than ideal but have many more locations that are more likely to be candidates for microgeneration.  That means generation of wind power using a small wind turbine, with a rating of 2.5 kW or less.

Large wind turbines in wind fields that product power at mass scale for utility use are very tall and powerful.  They can generate 1,650 kW, the equivalent of 970 households per year.  That’s according to the Carbon Trust’s 2008 study on the application of small scale wind energy systems.

You can see from the diagram the the small wind turbine is at a great disadvantage compared to the utility scale turbine simply in terms of catching the wind.  The difference in size is dramatic and so is the difference in yields.  The yield is directly related to the size of the rotor size and also height of the turbine. Wind turbine design also tries to maximize energy production by tweaking things like rotor friction and angle.

Winds are a their fastest high up in the air.  So, to catch the fastest winds you want your turbine to be as high as possible.   Winds also tend to speed up when the ground is hilly so hilltops are great places for wind turbines.

One solution to the height problem, besides advances in wind turbine design,  is mounting the small urban turbine on a pole or from a mast on a building.  That can overcome some building obstacles that block the wind from the rotors.

You know about wind farms, but the small wind turbine can have a place in reducing carbon emissions too.  Any turbine that produces or is rated less than 50kW is considered small, and most of them are used to produce electricity for buildings.

Every year there are new developments in wind turbine design and a study put out by the Carbon Trust tries to clarify whether the small wind turbine’s potential can be maximized.  The cost of installing a small wind turbine, plus the fact that most of them actually only produce 20% of their rated capacity, makes it questionable whether anyone who installs a small wind turbine will ever get their money back out of the project.

One thing is for sure: rural areas benefit much more from small wind turbine installations.  The carbon savings on a small home wind turbine  in the country will be around four times the savings as the same unit in a city.  It’s windier in the rural areas so only there will a small wind turbine possibly pay for itself in carbon emissions and financially.

Interest in the home wind turbine is stronger than ever, what with oil prices through the roof and no end in sight to geopolitical problems arising from fossil fuel issues. There are still challenges, however, before the home wind turbine takes off and becomes generally accepted as a viable alternative to grid energy.

One obstacle to home wind power, however, isn’t as much of an obstacle as one might think.  That is local zoning boards, or HOAs.  People who don’t know a lot about home wind turbines sometimes imagine large, noisy pole mounted blades that ruin the neighborhood’s visual attractiveness.  This is not always true these days.  Usually these people, and the local zoning boards just need to be educated about the home wind turbine kits.

After HOAs are educated about the home wind turbine kits then they will usually rewrite ordinances to allow the systems.  There also many laws on the books that overwrite HOA rules.  Some towns have laws that supercede local ordinances.

Going up a level, some states have laws that overwrite town ordinances for the home wind turbine.  The up another level of legislation, we have federal laws that supersede any HOA rules for solar energy home systems.  That’s not yet the case for the home wind turbine but they’re working on it.  While the feds aren’t superseding any state laws for wind we are seeing some states are are overriding local ordinances for wind.

Honeywell has come out with a new idea for the home wind turbine, and it’s pretty exciting because it can be mounted on a rooftop and it requires much less wind to rotate than other types of home wind turbines. The rooftop home wind turbine uses bicycle parts and actually looks rather like a bicycle wheel.

To understand the rooftop home wind turbine, picture taking a traditional turnbine and turning it inside out.  The idea behind this is to create a home wind turbine that works in less wind.  Traditional systems’ blades do not rotate until the wind gets up to eight or ten miles per hour.  This is because there is mechanical resistance in the nestle, the gears,  etc.  This resistance needs to be overcome before the blades will rotate.

In Honeywell’s  new rooftop home wind turbine, the gears have been eliminated, which greatly reduces the mechanical resistance.  It’s a gearless home wind turbine.  The blades rotate at less than 1 mph.  The system generates voltaage at 2mph.

Now the other new feature: usually we thing of wind turbines and imagine a tall pole with blades at the top, a pole mount.  Honeywell’s product is a rooftop home wind turbine, which eliminates the pole.

The rooftop home wind turbine cost for a typical installation is $2000-$4000.  The unit itself is $6500. IRS Refund Status IRS Extension

Well these days back to the earth isn’t all that popular like it once was. But the renewable energy movement has its roots in back to the land movements of previous decades, and if it weren’t for folk movements of the 1930s and 1970s well research on today’s highly technological home wind turbines wouldn’t be where it is today.

Another area of back to the land is nutrition.  More veggies, more whole grains and less meat.  It’s just better for the environment and better for you, too.   Baking with whole wheat, for example, means using ingredients in a form that’s closer to what they are in nature.  Whole Wheat Pancakes are better for you because they contain complex carbohydrates, not processed white flour that spikes your sugar levels and gets digested faster. There’s less processing, more nutrition. In fact, whole wheat anything is better than white flour anything when it comes to nutrition and health. Why not try Whole Wheat Pizza Dough? It’s delicious and nutritious and easy to make.  One last easy dish to make more nutritious and more tasty is a favorite standby: Corn Bread. Try it and you’ll never go back.

Cooking with vegetables raised on your own farm or garden is one of the easiest ways to get back to nature.  Imagine a beautiful garden behind a house where you’ve installed a home wind turbine.  You’re practically off the grid right there!  A really easy crop is Swiss Chard. It’s a leafy green that is also very hardy so it can be grown anywhere.

And to mention one last nutritious yummy food: Greek Yogurt. This can be made at home with milk and a starter container of yogurt. Once you’ve got your first batch, you’ll always have another jar of starter to make your own. No trips to the grocery store, no extra packaging, and it’s cheap too.