I have been mulling the beginnings of an idea for a while. Just went to one of those “Bottom Up” Hickenlooper-promoted forums in Lamar this week, and while many people would really like to see us turn the damn wind into something that would whip up something besides grass fires, a lot of other folks seem stuck on projects they totally love which can’t be implemented without the intervention of the Magical Cash Fairy.
But I digress.
We have a little book shop we started last summer, which has a couple nice meeting tables down the middle. We could start a group or club for people to get together and talk about making (maybe making and selling?) devices that would generate some energy for ONE home, ONE family. It COULD succeed and go viral, stranger things have happened.
What I want to know about are books, plans, projects and experiences that real people have already used in the real world. So I’ve started asking…and Pols is one of the places I am asking. Anybody got a helpful comment?
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and at the time, wind was still a little too pricey to be reasonable for a single home. A quick google search for personal wind turbines brings up quite a few results on kits and instructions on building your own, so it might be in the realm of possibility these days. Living within city limits put a stop to those ideas real quick anyway since my town didn’t even have the first notion about how to approve a project like that, and the county was equally out to lunch at the time.
If your area is sufficiently rural and you can sweet talk the county, I think google will be your best friend in getting up to date info. According to them looks like Ace Hardware sells a pole mounted Honeywell personal wind turbine for about $7k and it generates about 2000kW/year. The average residential electric usage is about 1000kW/year. Along with some batteries and a backup generator, that might do the trick for what you want to do.
I would also check around any local community colleges for knowledgeable people, since a chunk of stimulus funding went toward job training for sustainable energy projects.
If you have access to old issues of Mother Earth News, they used to have regular articles on this sort of thing that would be woefully outdated now but still useful as a starting place.
The trouble I have with Google is that it’s sometimes hard to filter out the scammers. Your idea of consulting someone at our community college is great! It always feels like we are under the gun and at risk of being de-funded, even though it’s such an important resource to our SE CO community and student population. A program like this might be double helpful!
This is mostly about solar but there is a bit on wind also. Note the stuff about grid vs. off-grid, inverters, batteries, etc. Some of this applies to both forms of alt energy generation.
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Yo…
I will check this out in more detail, but I HAVE bookmarked it! Sorry for taking so long to say thanks!