Thursday, May 28, 2009

Homemade Wind Generators - Thousands Less Than Buying

I still can't believe the the price of wind generators hasn't really gone down at all. After searcing around and finding that there was no way we would be able to afford one we decided to go with homemade wind generators because they are thousands of dollars less than buying one. I didn't really know where to start so I went online to try and figure out exactly how wind generators work. This left me with a basic understanding of them as I couldn't really find any good information.

What I learned was that wind generators aren't really very complicated machines. There is the tower which gets them above the treeline where the wind moves faster. There are the blades and tail which helps point it into the wind and turn the motor. Lastly, there is the body which ties everything together. Breaking it down in this manner made it seem a lot simpler for me.

I was driving around one day doing some errands and still thinking about what I could use for our wind generator tower. I happened to pass a couple houses that had TV towers and satellite dishes hooked up. These towers looked very strong and they got above the treeline where the wind moves faster. I went up and asked them if I could take their old TV tower off of their hands. They actually looked relieved and said sure. I'm sure that they were glad to get rid of what they thought was an ugly part of their house.

Now that I had what is supposed to be the most expensive part of a wind generator for free I decided to work on the blades. A friend suggested to me that I cut some pipe into 3 sections. The resulting pieces should work very good as blades. I settled on PVC pipe as it's quite cheap and is very strong. One word of caution though: PVC gets brittle when exposed to sunlight so make sure to give it a couple coats with a UV protective paint to help protect against this.

We now had our tower and blades built. That last part was to build the body which would tie everything together. The body is made from some of the pipe that we had left over from building the blades. It's main purpose is to tie everything together and to keep any rain away from the motor. The motor go mounted in one end and the blades attached to the shaft. I used a cap with some silicone so that only the shaft is sticking out. The tail got mounted in the other end and is made from steel rod and plexiglass we had laying around. Lastly, we had to attach a flange to the bottom of the body with some 2" steel pipe attached to it. This served two purposes. It would allow us to mount the wind generator on the tower and it would allow the wind generator to turn and face the wind.

In total our homemade wind generator cost less than $150 and it sits atop it's tower spinning away happily producing free power for our home.



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 article about homemade wind generators


Added: May 28, 2009
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/

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