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How To Build A Wind Turbine

With the increase in the cost of electricity these days, interest in generating one's own electric power is on the rise as well.

Renewable energy (or "green energy") is high on most people's lists of the best ways to do this, for many reasons: it helps the environment, the most popular types incur no fuel costs, and it's the closest to being maintenance-free. Three types of renewable energy are most commonly used for the purpose: solar, wind, and biofuel.

Domestic wind power is attractive for homeowners who live in areas with strong and steady winds a number of feet above rooftop level. Depending on prevailing wind conditions, wind turbines for the home can be cheaper to install than domestic solar panels, and produce energy in both day and night, unlike solar panels.

Commercially-purchased wind generators for home use have costs running in the neighborhood of $2 per watt, and the installation costs and prices for other necessary components for regulating the power generation and turning into something you can use to run appliances push the cost of the system up further still. For that reason, building a wind turbine for themselves may interest many people.

Building your own wind turbine requires some tools and some mechanical knowledge. It's not as simple as making a solar panel. The reward can be very great, however. What will be presented here is not a detailed guide but a general overview giving you an idea of what is involved in the way of work and materials.

Components Of A Wind Turbine

A wind turbine capable of generating electricity has the following components: blades to catch the wind and turn a shaft; a mounting that keeps the blades turned into the wind; a tower to raise the mounting up where the wind blows; a generator to turn the motion into electricity; and an electronic control system with batteries or an apparatus for net-metering. Of these, the last is probably best bought commercially (good buys can be found on eBay), unless you have a lot of electronics expertise.

The blades of a wind turbine can be made of wood, but that's a lot more work than making them from sections of ABS piping cut into the proper curved shapes and fitted to a hub. Six inch piping works well and possesses the right curvature for the blades.

Begin with a two-foot length of pipe. Quarter it into four pieces lengthwise, so that you end up with four 24-inch pieces.

Each quarter will be cut into a shape that includes a stub for attaching it to the hub and tapering blades down to an outside end roughly half the size of the original quarter. Each length of pipe thus makes four blades, and you will want three of them for your turbine.

The hub, to keep it simple, should attach directly to the generator shaft, so that you have the generator positioned right behind the blades.

The tower needs to be capable of standing in a high wind -- 1 1/4 inch steel electrical conduit works well for the purpose, but any really strong pole that will allow mounting a bearing at the top which allows the turbine housing to pivot will work.

The generator itself can be bought commercially for the purpose, or you can use a permanent magnet motor as the generator, since a generator is basically a motor run backwards. For this, you want a motor that is rated with low rpm to high voltage.

A motor that converts low voltage to high rpm's will do the same in the other direction, and may not generate much power with the relatively slow rotation driven by wind turbines.

As noted above, you will need some mechanical aptitude to make your own wind turbine, but most of the parts are fairly simple to acquire and the design isn't tremendously difficult to put together.

The savings in your electricity bill can be well worth it.