Living off the grid is a wonderful thing. It means that you are both saving money as well as helping the environment. There are a couple of things that you can do to get off the municipal grid and start producing your own power. First of all, you can build solar panels. You can also hook up an exercise bike and make a man-powered generator. Finally, you can make your own wind turbines. With all of the great diy guides that are out there these days, making your own wind turbines is a great option for people all around the country. There is always at least a little wind, whereas much of the country has cloudy days throughout the year, and especially during the winter.
When you start to build your own wind turbine, you will find that there are a lot of different design options available. However, regardless of the end design, you will essentially have five different components to your turbine. You are going to need blades, a generator, a mount, a tower, and other electrical components such as batteries.
For starters, you need to find a generator that will spin at a reasonable speed and produce about twelve volts of electricity at a steady pace. Getting something that has too many RPMs can blow out your storage batteries in the long run. A motor that will run at three hundred RPMs and thirty volts is a good option. When used as a generator, a motor will run at half its rated voltage.
Next you should look for your wind turbine blades. You can actually carve them out of the piece of wood if you so desire. That way you can make the perfect aerodynamic shape. However, this takes a lot of time, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience carving. Wooden blades also need to be occasionally replaced. That is why using PVC to make your blades is so much simpler and easier. You can make four blades from a single six inch pipe.
Your wind turbine mount starts out with a circular piece on which all of the blades can be attached. Then you should connect the circular piece to the motor so that the spinning of the blades will power the generator.
You can make the second half of this mount out of wood. You might even want to extend it out and put a fin on the back so that the blades will always be pushed into the direction of the oncoming wind.
The tower is what gets your mount off the ground and into the wind. It should be high, but only as high as you can safely build and maintain. A long metal pole works well for this, especially if you can sink it into the ground like a flag pole. Otherwise you might want to consider some type of radio tower type construction. At the top of the tower, make sure the mount can rotate freely.
The last step to make your own wind turbines is to connect the generator to the power supply. Since electricity is a dangerous substance to work with, the workings of the wiring are beyond the scope of this article.
