With renewable energy prices still not going down homemade wind generators are turning out to be a good alternative. We had been wanting to live on renewable energy for quite awhile because our electricity bill kept going up in price. When we moved it was our vow to run our house on clean renewable energy. The problem was that we simply couldn't afford it! We decided that if we couldn't buy it we would build it. It couldn't be that hard could it?
It turned out that it really wasn't hard at all. I have a habit of breaking down complicated projects into smaller simpler pieces and I did the same here. According to what we had learned the tower is the most expensive part of any wind generator installation. I decided to start with that part. The tower had to be strong and have a small footprint (the amount of ground it takes up). I was in despair until I was over at a friends house helping him put a new roof on. The ladder was all the way on the other side of the roof so I decided to climb down the TV tower he still had up. He had switched to satellite several years ago, but had never gotten around to taking it down. As I was climbing down all I could think about was "strong, tall, and easy to install!" I asked him if I could have it for our wind generator project and he said sure because he hadn't used it in years. We now had the most expensive part of the wind generator for free! You can do the same by simply driving around your neighborhood and looking for houses with a TV tower and a satellite dish up. Chances are they aren't using the tower anymore and will be more than happy to let you tote it away.
The next part that I decided to work on was the blades and hub. I thought this was going to be very difficult, but it really wasn't. I needed something that was very strong and had a slight curve to it. I really didn't want to make blades out of wood because I had no idea as to how. I settled on PVC pipe. I cut it into thirds and trimmed each piece into a blade shape. Than we sanded down the edges so the wind would move over them better and coated them with a coat of UV protective paint. The coat of paint is particularly important because PVC gets brittle when exposed to sunlight and the paint protects against this. I used an old pulley for the hub. A couple holes got drilled into it and I mounted the blades to it. Now I was ready to start working on the last piece of our homemade wind generator.
The body is the part of the wind generator that brings the whole thing together. It houses the motor which the blades get attached to, the tail, and the piece that allows you to mount it to the top of your tower. I used some leftover PVC pipe from the blades to build the body. I mounted the motor in one end and attached the blades to the shaft of the motor. The tail was attached to the other end of the body. I made the tail from some steel rod and leftover plexiglass from another project. The last thing I had to do was mount a flange on the underside of the body with some 2" steel pipe attached to it. This would allow me to mount the wind generator to the tower. TV towers conveniently have a 2" hole in the top of them so there's no extra work that you need to do.
Homemade wind generators are a good alternative to buying one. They really aren't that hard to build and they look and function just as well as their very expensive counterparts.
Autor: Andrew Oke Andrew Oke
Level: Basic PLUS
I grew interested in renewable energy about 16 years ago. WE decided to make the move to off grid living about that time as well. ... ...
Andrew Oke is very interested in renewable energy. He has 16 years experience living off the grid, and has completely built his own renewable energy system. You can learn more about homemade wind generators at the previous link. In addition, here's another great article about homemade wind generators.
Added: May 26, 2009
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/
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