Wind Generator
 

I was wondering if anyone has a wind generator at there house?
Hooked up to the grid?

I was doing some research and a 300 watt generator is about 30-50kw a month. I currently only use about 100-150kw a month. I was thinking about getting a 500 watt wind generator, and was wondering how hard they are to hook up to my home power.

It would be nice to reduce my electric bill by 25-50% every month.

DONT just randomly hook it into the house/grid. talk to your power company about synchronizing the sine-wave to the AC coming in and all that. wouldn't want to muck up the power for the whole block. that's part of what costs so much for solar... not just the panels but the inverters and hardware to match it to the grid. and unless you have a switch and only use one or the other, your house connects it to the grid.

It's more complicated then you make it sound, first step would be to get a wind site assessment to find out how high up you will need to go to get at the wind, just because you have trash blowing around your yard doesn't mean you have usable wind, from where I sit I can see our wind generator spinning away at the top of the hill on a 60 foot tower (should be on a 90-120 foot tower), it starts spinning with around 7mph wind, starts putting out usable power in 10-12mph wind, hits it's peek at around 22mph, the airomometer that is next to the house on a 30" tower appears to be reading about 2mph... why? because it's near buildings and on a low tower, a wind site assessor will be able to tell you how high up you need to go, should have wind maps that will tell you your average wind speed for your area, and will then be able to tell you what size machine you will need to fill your electrical needs based off the resource that you have available to you.

Anyone have some loose estimates on the price of generators, installation, etc etc?

Yea the most expensive part of putting one into the grid is the power inverter and controller.

Your looking at about $2600 for a small system. But I guess anything worth while is about $6000-$10000

Check out Home Power magazine's wind generator buyers guide that was published about 6 months back, it will answer most of your questions.

What kills me is that my parents have property where two seperate creeks run through half the year, providing as much as a 30' head, but they have next to no interest in micro-hydro. I know that at the very least they could run a 300W low head draft tube generator (or perhaps several of them).

Wind is not so easy for their situation, but they could certainly do solar water heat and have lots of room with good exposure for mast mounted PVs as well.

For our house, our only realistic hope would be solar hot water. Nothing else is remotely practical.

Here's a good basic article written by two experts on home sized wind power: https://www.homepower.com/article/?fi...pg28_Woofenden

A wind generator capable of providing the electricity to run a house that does NOT have electric heat, hot water, or cooking might cost $20,000 installed if you have low power needs in a windy area, to $60k or more if you are a power hog and your wind isn't so great. It's sort of like asking how much a vehicle will cost. We need to know lots more!

And, yes, I do have a wind generator in use, since around 1977, but it isn't set up to sell power back to the grid, although I have all the appropriate inverters, etc., to do that. It is a 2500 watt unit, and produces 200 to 400 kw-hrs per month, at a rough estimate.

:eek: 20K ,,what about small systems ??