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The Search for an answer... After an exhausting
search we finally found the best plans for building our own home wind
generator with materials that are easily found. Yes, the plans cost us a
nominal $20, but we figured it was well worth the price, compared to the
cost of buying a new wind generator in the thousands!
The story of how we built
our own wind generator follows.
Compared to the $2,500 price tag of buying a new 1000 watt wind generator, the
$20 we paid for the plans we used was very reasonable, and
we had fun building it.
What about buying a Used Wind Generator?
After careful checking around on E-bay, and other online
sources, and scouring newspapers and magazines we couldn’t find a single wind
generator that fit our budget.
There were lots of small 100 to 400 watt generators
out there, but not one that was large enough to run our home.
We looked for weeks and
finally stumbled on to the answer for us. I happened to be looking through
some old Mother Earth News magazines when I found it. In there was a story
about how this family had ‘built’ their own wind generator instead of
buying an expensive new model.
I was excited about the prospects of building one
ourselves. Upon further investigation the plans from the magazine turned
out to be old and outdated calling for parts from old cars that I had
never heard of… but the idea of building a wind generator was again brand
new. We looked on the Mother Earth News website for
updated plans and found some at a cost of $20. The price was right but the
date of the plans was 1975. Yikes, again old and outdated plans.
What we needed were some
up to date plans… and it would be nice if they came in at that
same $20 price tag too, compared to the thousands it would cost
for a new wind generator.
The search continues…. We continued
our search for new plans and finally found a couple websites that offered plans
for sale. The first one we found , ‘Wind Turbine- Guide to Building One’ was
priced at $49. We were excited to get started on our project
so we bought the book.
What a mistake! The plans turned out to be so
complicated that space engineers would have been hard pressed to figure them
out- Airfoils, Auto-furl? What the….??
So, we continued our search for plans that didn’t have
complicated instructions or use big words just to show us how much
‘they’ knew about wind generators.
We were now out the $49 and
had not figured out how to build a wind generator yet. We
were a little wiser though!
Not too wise I guess,
as we ended up doing the same thing 3 more times! The plans were either
all so complicated or obscure, or they called for special tools and
materials we could not purchase.
Weren’t there any plans out there for wind
generators that could be built by people with no experience?
Finally… We bought a book with high hopes and started in
at making our own wind generator. The plans were easy to follow and
thankfully step-by-step. We had no trouble following the plans. The
parts were readily available and in a lot of cases we were able to use
material we already had at home. The body of the wind generator was built
out of metal that was once our washing machine. The tail assembly was made
from the same stock. The blades, which we thought would be the
most difficult to build (find the right pitch, attaching it to the
generator assembly?) turned out to be not that difficult at all. The book
showed us exactly what to do and how to do it. We even found
a great solution to the expensive tower problem. Old TV towers are
everywhere these days and we found a 40 foot model that the owner actually
‘paid’ us to take down. “Oh! Keep that thing will you” he said. We smiled
and said, “yes sir”, knowing that our wind generator now had found
a place to call home.
Up and Running !
Our newly built wind
generator now sits on top of the rebuilt TV tower spinning away
producing power for our home.
We had a lot of fun learning how to build a
wind generator. All it took was finding the right plans to set
us on the right path.
We could have spent thousands on a new wind
generator but why? At the small cost of $20 we had the
challenge of building our own.
Included in the book was also a source of free
batteries that we had not considered. We looked into it and sure enough
'Free Batteries!' Since Batteries
are at the heart of every renewable energy system we were very happy to
find this advice along with our plans on how to make a wind generator.
This advice alone saved us hundreds of dollars, all that for
$20!
Now, go
build your own!
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