Very cool and thanks for sharing. What will 300 watts power?

looked for an old DIY wind project, it’s been discussed here before, but came across this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UPe6A_UVPc

Hey Matt,
That’s a pretty cool video. Thanks for the research!

How do you harness/harvest the energy?

I am actually looking at CHP microturbines right now. capstone has units which are 30 kilowatt and higher. I wrote to them asking why not make residential size units, they apparently considered it but have decided not to. the units I envision would run on several different fuels, so if kerosene is cheaper one year you could use it, or biodiesel, or gas, or possibly even other fuels such as wood gas. so you could switch between fuels any time. this way you not only generate electricity, but heat and hot water at the same time. you could use a battery storage so in the summer when you dont need heat, you could run on batteries and when the level drops the unit would kick on and recharge. This way you wouldn’t need to pay for both electric and other fuel, whatever fuel you use would provide everything. you could also supplement with wind or solar or both. I am looking into financing options to perhaps develop this so that the average homeowner would be able to afford a unit and it would likely pay for itself in a few years.

by the way katherine, 300watts would run 3 100 watt light bulbs. not a lot but if you keep adding to the panels, start by switching some lights(the ones you use in the day only, then keep taking lights off your main system until you have enough storage and panels to power most of your house.I thought of this before starting with say 50watt unit and some 12volt lights in some areas of the house where lights arent used all the time then keep adding as I could afford.

Hi Shawn,
Keep me posted on that. I just started a company called Zoe Energy Solutions and one of my goals is to provide affordable energy solutions for DYI installations. Obviously some of the AE stuff like photovoltaics w/ grid tie-in, are a little to dangerous for most homeowners. But there is a lot that can be simplified and made to sell in “hometown energy stores” and designed for the DYI market. My first set of products involves a solar hot water heating package with a 2-3 yr payback. If we are going to see alternative energy go mainstream, we have to get to work.

I agreee David. Although much focus on alternative energy is great and well worth it, I am also looking at more efficient and better ways of using what we have. I believe that if you can use a fuel such as gas, biodiesel, etc and provide not only heat but hot water and electric, and use the same amount of fuel(or preferably less) doing it, then you would be doing the planet far better than what we do now by paying for electric and our heat source. Obviously wind, solar, and geothermal should be in the near future available to everyone, right now practical is a more realistic option. Even if solar were reduced to dirt cheap for equipment, not everyone could afford to have it installed, same for wind, and some climates like here solar may not be the best option (unless you like scraping snow and ice). If you could have an ultra efficient turbine(or even an internal combustion engine for that matter in some instances) and generate everything you need, it would be great. even if other means are used, it would be great to have a backup system. If such a system were used as a sole source of electric, then you would make installation easier rather than having grid tied units(which would still make sense and likely would be the best). For example, if I wanted to and would likely do myself, if I had such a unit I would likely just break the circuit at the mains and tie my unit right in and put a second breaker box and be done with it. that way I would not be unhooking the main power, but simply bypassing it without needing a switching system(just so long as the code enforcement officer doesn’t know).

David, I had been looking at some other ideas and came across something which might also be of use which is a wood gas generator. these were used in world war 2 and also for stationary combustion engines earlier than that with what was known as town gas. Might be an option for generating heat or hot water(though should preferably use outdoors as it can produce dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide. I am wondering if something like this might be used to heat my garage when it is finished. the link is
http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/suppor…

Cool, I will check it out.

How come nobody answered Penny’s question about the harvesting of wind energy? Or maybe you guys did and it went over my head. But once your wind turbine is up, then what??? How do you get it to power something in your house?

I cannot speak for anyone else but I think I actually overlooked it, just looked and there it is. Penny, wind energy is harvested very simply. the wind turns the blades on a turbine(like a fan blade) the rotational energy turns magnest which pass by coils, when a coil has a moving magnetic field through it electrons flow, hence electricity and voilla you have turned wind into electricity(in a simplified manner).
To answer your question katherine, the electricity produced by the moving magnets is AC, generally it needs to be converted to DC then can be stored in batteries(except for the very large units which are designed to be connected to the grid). the energy is converted by a converter then goes to the batteries for storage. from the batteries it is then inverted to household current and supplies power. Since most turbines (and I am not sure if my figures are exactly correct) for home use produce either 24 or 48 volts, this needs to be stored and then converted back to 110 volts by an inverter(unless you convert most of your house to run on 24 volts). in most cases this is where you want an electrician to come in because you can get in a heap of doo doo if you try it yourself. The best options are to use both wind and solar, so you increase your production, and since like here in northern ny the sun isnt always out and the wind isnt always blowing.

Hey, Shawn, for a male nurse, you’re pretty clever. This is a very interesting topic. I’ve always thought there oughta be a way to store summer’s heat for use in winter. And daylight for use at night.

BTW, my hubby is a nurse, too, also male. He’s also pretty clever. He’s an ASE master technician, has motor oil in his veins. If I can get his head out of his latest four wheeled project, I’ll have him read your posts. Maybe he can figure out a way to reduce our utility bill. (;^)

Linda, I worked in various fields, with education in chemistry and physics, most of my work though was in industrial maintenence or related areas. I moved to upstate ny for reasons other than work but there were no jobs here that paid more than min. wage so I went back to school for lpn and figure that would give me a good income until i get my business going. working for the govt gives me a steady income. but my heart is always in building, fixing, and designing.

Let me know what y0u come up with. I have some property with a cabin and trout pond in West Virginia and would love to disconnect from the grid. Wood is abundant and I’ve thought of burning wood to make steam to run some type of Tesla turbine. I’ve done some wiring and last time I wired a shed I was only shocked three times so I’ll need someone else to hook it up. My inventions are all low tech. Once I did invent an energy monitor that had a collar around my electric meter and counter the revolutions of the meter with a laser light. The blips could be seen in my house on a panel where they were converted into KWH and then cumulative dollars and cents. It worked great. Florida Power and Light complained that the meter was their property and that I was tampering with it. Bull crap. In order to commercialize it I would have had to hook up a 2nd meter, which was costly. The utility companies make meters difficult to read for a purpose. It’s kinda like having Exxon own the speedometer in your card and not make it readily accessible. The faster you drive the more gas you use. Studies show if consumers had accessible and readable real time info on how much electricity they used they would reduce their monthly consumption by 20%. Despite what you read in the media, utilities don’t make money by having you reduce electric use. They will push expensive alternative light bulbs all day long because they only account for a pittance of our electric use. I wonder how many electric utilities advise you to switch your electric water heater to a gas water heater (much more efficient use of energy).

Enough of my ranting. Someday I would like to go back to the original concept of electricity and have small hydrogen cells at each home and each business that produce their own energy. This whole energy grid thing is ridiculous. Sending electricty over power lines is not only ugly, its extremely ineffecient. Please – someone invent a low cost home fuel cell.

Don, the link I posted gives detailed information on building a wood gas generator. the size of the fire tube is determined by the horsepower of the engine. I was thinking about the possibility of using something like that to run a generator. If I only had the time (between working full time, helping my fiance a couple of days a week, and my business, as well as building a garage, mowing grass, fixing cars, etc) I would work on this in a heartbeat but it will have to wait until time is available (or until I get my garage up and can work on it over the winter when it’s 20 below out). You certainly could use a steam turbine, which shouldnt be difficult to make (if they made them in the 1800’s with the technology they had a west virginian ought to be able to come up with it- where I am from they would just have to divert some of the power from their still lol).