Wind power

[slobodan]

Is anyone using a wind generator for their house or caravan?

Is it bought or built?

Anyone know anything about them?

[murph]

B&Q used to do a job leaflet on the wind turbine also the solar panels. Think at that time a couple of years ago they were about £1600 to buy & install the wind turbine. I think with £1600 & the maintenance you would need about 5 or 6 years before it starts to pay back. It's the independence thing I like. Not having to rely on the ullilities companys if you could generate your own electricty.

[slobodan]

I'm building a little weekend cabin, and they want about 2 grand for an electricity supply, so I'm thinking of perhaps wind or solar. I won't be needing much power.

[Albannach]

I think for smaller applications, solar tiles are the way to go. They can be used instead of slates on all or part of a roof.

[slobodan]

I think for smaller applications, solar tiles are the way to go. They can be used instead of slates on all or part of a roof.

I've never heard of them before. Thanks, I'll Googlerize them.

[Albannach]

As you're building from scratch, you should be able to optimise your roof angle and orientation.

http://www.solartiles.co.uk/

[Albannach]

You'll also save a wee bit on the installation cost as you're not replacing your existing tiles.

[Sancho]

As Andy says, unless you live in the middle of a hurricane, photovoltaics are the way to go for renewable power. Generally, I find that building a normal roof and putting panels on over it works out cheaper than solar tiles (no-one can explain this to me), also less of a faff when one inevitably breaks.

If you go with solar, though, you have to consider how you're going to store the energy to use when it goes dark. If you don't want much in your cabin, you could probably just hook up a 12v system with a load of car batteries somewhere.

The other option, if you've got gas or a decent stock of diesel is to go for some kind of combined heat and power system. Just get a water cooled diesel engine (surf one should do nicely.....) and run it as a generator, then run the coolant through a heat exchanger into a hot water tank / small central heating system and you've got a (loud) heating, power and hot water system. You need some kind of way of dumping the heat from the generator if your system isn't losing it fast enough or you don't want any heat or hot water. A normal car radiator with a stat should do the trick as you don't really want your heating system to run above 80 anyway.

If you want to go really weird, you can get a wood burning CHP, but you'll have to make it yourself from scratch unless you can find yourself an industrial stirling engine or some way of gasifying woodchip to run a diesel engine switched over to gas (both loud too).

All in all, 12v solar's probably the best bet for now, but look into taking heat from a generator too if you need more power and fancy some hot water.

[Apache]

Plenty of free wind power in our house...

[biosurf]

For hot water and heating I would go for wood burning if you are next to an easy source of fuel then for some extra leccy put up some kind of solar array with either deep cycle car batteries (I'm pretty sure normal car batteries are fairly useless for this as they are not meant to go through many charge and discharge cycles before giving out) or, I believe 2volt submarine or other batteries are used by some. With your location I would guess that some batteries of interesting provenance may be obtainable.

On the generator front, do remember that many diesel generat (some with some without conversion) ors will run happily on vegetable oil if its cheaper that way.

[garry]

sounds a bit hairbrained......... grab a big altinater (thats not spelt right)
and build a windmill, the wind will spin the altinator (still not spelt right) connect the altinatoir (argh!!!) to a bank of batteries couple up to an inverter plug in and enjoy......................... .............................. .............................. .............................. ........


........ the sound of fire engines who are coming to put the fire out

but, in theory it should work.

[garry]

ALTERNATOR

[Apache]

You'd likely need a gearbox in order to spin the alternator fast enough for it to work - losses there. AND you'd need a power feed to the alternator in order to make it work at all.

[che2318]

why not just build your own wind turbine, alot cheaper and easy to do. then rig up to some batteries for storage. a wood burner is good as you can always forage for fallen trees, branches, wood dumped at recycling centres etc etc.

anything to stop giving money to greedy corporations.

[slobodan]

why not just build your own wind turbine, alot cheaper and easy to do. then rig up to some batteries for storage. a wood burner is good as you can always forage for fallen trees, branches, wood dumped at recycling centres etc etc.

anything to stop giving money to greedy corporations.

This I would love to have a crack at doing. Also i think Sancho is right about the solar panel, for now that would be a cheaper option than solar tiles.
I won't require much power, some lighting maybe and some music, heating can be taken care of with wood. and cooking/coffee etc can be sorted by bottled gas.
Wind power I have read isn't viable without an average wind speed of at least 15mph. This place is on the top of a hill overlooking the Danube so it should get some wind current but I'm not sure about 15mph average.
For hot water, most people here use some form of holding tank painted a dark colour up at roof height.
I suppose the cabin needs will be that of an average caravan. So a couple of leisure batteries should see me OK.