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Homemade Wind Generators - Thousands Less Than Buying

By: andrew richards

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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. Since I had no idea how they worked I hopped online and did some research. This left me with a basic understanding of them as I couldn't really find any good information.

One thing I was surprised to learn was that wind generators aren't really that complicated. There is the tower which gets them above the treeline where the wind moves faster. The blades are used to catch the wind to turn the motor. The last thing is the body which houses everything.

I knew that the tower was usually the most expensive part of a generator and I was stumped at what to use as a low cost equivalent. 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. Excited, I asked one of them if I could have their old TV tower. They actually looked relieved and said sure. I'm sure they were relieved to get rid of what they thought was an eyesore.

Since I had what was supposed to be the most expensive part for free I started 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 decided to use PVC pipe because it's very cheap and fairly 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.

I now had a tower and a set of blades. The last step was to build the body of the wind generator to tie everything together. Since I had some pipe left over from building the blades I used that to make the body. It's main purpose is to tie everything together and to keep any rain away from the motor. The motor is mounted on one end of the body and the blades were 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.

The total cost for our homemade wind generator was less than $150. After two years of use it's still sitting on top of the tower producing free power for our home.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

Andrew is very interested in renewable energy. He has 16 years experience living off the grid, and has completely built his own renewable energy system. If you want to learn more about homemade wind generators check out the previous link. There is also some great information in another article about build a wind generator.

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