More On Wind Generators and Home Wind Power
(Page 2 of 3)
July/August 1975
By James B. Dekorne
Since the average American household uses about three hundred kilowatt hours per month, we can quickly see that we must either learn to get along on one-third our average consumption, or lay out over $7,000 for a new Elektro SW-50 model capable of producing the power we've come to think we "need". That price tag, by the way, was current in the summer of 1973 so you can bet it's higher now. But you can still buy an awful lot of Reddy Kilowatt's own polluted juice for seven grand!
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So with the used windplant market all but dried up and new systems mainly limited to the wealthy-the only choice left for someone determined t6 harness the wind as a source of electricity is the construction of his own machine from scratch.
In the past couple of years, there've been several different designs for and concepts of the fabrication of a home-built wind driven generator. Some of these schemes aren't worth the time and money called for, but many have promise for folks with some basic tools and the skill to use them. I'm particularly partial to a design I wrote about in Chapter II of Producing Your Own Power (Rodale Press, 1974, available in hard cover from MOTHER'S Bookshelf for $8.95). This do-it-yourself system is based on the very rare Jacobs Model 15, which was a 1,500-watt flywheel-driven unit that sported two 750-watt generators. (See the accompanying diagrams taken from Jacobs' M-15 owner's manual-for the basic idea.)
In my version, surplus high-wattage aircraft generators are utilized to bring potential power output to as high as 4,800 watts or more! Design your props right, and you could come close to getting 300 kwh a month in an area with an average windspeed of 10 mph! In one stroke, two of the major drawbacks of most home-built windplants are eliminated:
[1] low wattage, and
[2] complicated gearing to attain the high rpm's required by generators not specifically designed for wind power. within the prop and governing mechanism (which i simplified in my plan as best I could for ease of construction). The problem is caused by the air-brake governor, which-in machines with props larger than six feet-puts a fair amount of stress on the unit at high rpm's. (The governor can't be totally impractical, however, because the Wincharger Corporation used to manufacture them in this size 1 know, because I own one!) Anyone with some ingenuity and access to a machine shop should be able to improve the device without much difficulty.
Another source of hope and encouragement for folks yearning to be energy self-sufficient is the recent proliferation of new ideas in the field in fact, the days of the horizontal axis windplant may soon be past. The May 1375 edition of Popular Science magazine features a 5-kilowatt, vertical-axis wind generator now being tested by Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The design has many advantages over the more traditional "windmill" type: Most notable are the easier and less expensive construction of the blades (usually the most complicated part of a do-it-yourself unit), no need for a tail vane (because the generator accepts wind from any direction), and the fact that the machine can be mounted at ground level (which means a lot if you're not the tower-climbing type!). With growing interest in wind power as a source of electricity, I expect that models of this design will eventually be on the market at prices most of us can afford.
