Saving Energy with Wind Power

koru

Robert5988 wrote:

I would have thought noise would be a problem; they make a 'moaning' sound.

Interference with TV reception for you/neighbours?

NIMBY!!

I agree that it would be tactful to check with neighbours - mine have already said they have no objections.

The Swift document claims their design is not noisy. I haven't seen anything about TV interference, so I'll check that before buying, but I think it should be OK because they wouldn't sell many turbines if it does ruin your TV picture.

jlr_3

I swithced to Npower Juice, it is cheaper than British Gas and the power is generated by one of those windmills. Saves me money and saves our earth. By switching over I voted for a cleaner and healthier earth.

loon_2

you are not helping the enviroment by "going green", instead you are paying for a free service.

By 2010 all suppliers have been set legislation as to how much of the energy they produce is re-newable (in scotland it is lower as scotland is smaller than england). therefore, the extra that you pay for the "green" is just more money for something that they have to do anyway.

culpepper

loon wrote:

you are not helping the enviroment by "going green", instead you are paying for a free service.
the extra that you pay for the "green" is just more money for something that they have to do anyway.

I am considering this also.
The extra money? It is cheaper!

koru

culpepper wrote:

I am considering this also.
The extra money? It is cheaper!

Cheaper than BG, maybe, but that isn't saying much.

If you are saying you have used one of the comparison services and Juice is the cheapest of all, then fine. However, I think you will find you could be paying a lot less. If so, then you ARE paying extra for the supposed green credentials of Juice.

Loon may be right that NPower would be doing this anyway, so you are paying them extra to do something they would be doing anyway. Is there anything in the Juice arrangement that guarantees (or even makes it likely) that they will build extra wind capacity, over and above what they statutorily have to build?

scattycat_3

George_Bray wrote:

I wonder how easy it would be to build a DIY wind generator. Not impossible, I suggest.

The basis of my thinking is:
- the propellor design would be the most technically challenging aspect. Perhaps this element can be bought at half-reasonable cost, or made from fibreglass once you have a design
- the propellor would then go through a simple homemade gear box, to drive a generator producing up to 12 volts to charge one or more car batteries.

What else could the high-tech companies add to their products? I would hope that a DIY vesion might have a higher return on investment, even if it was only half as efficient, for some reason, as a commercial version.

Regards
George

One of the easiest to make is a vertical one, like the advertising gismos seen on garage forecourts. Think the original idea came from the West Indies, where they cut an empty oil drum in half, welded it back together offset and mounted it on a vertical shaft. There are now hi-tech vertical blade designs.


BUT to You All,
Wind generators are extremely expensive, inefficient, noisy and intrusive. What they supply is intermittent, no true on demand facility.
Even more expensive and NON GREEN if you want to store the stuff generated when there is no demand, for when there is demand and no wind ( invertors and batteries are both expensive and high maintenance, and need a lot of space ).

The only reason you are seeing a lot of new sites is that they are heavily subsidised. and are useless in both high or no wind.

Listen to the very green DAVID BELLAMY

Rave

I've been thinking about a little home wind energy project recently. The side road running past my mum's house is a dumping ground for abandoned cars. My plan was simply to grab the alternator, reg/rec and battery out of one of them and then hook it all up to a homemade wind turbine of some description. Then I could wire it in to a cheapo inverter from Maplin and use it to run her telly or something. I doubt it's produce much power overall, but given that the total cost would be the price of the inverter and whatever I use to make the turbine (I'll grab the necessary wire from a skip) I still think it'd be worthwhile from a monetary point of view. Since the car parts would probably be crushed by the council otherwise, I can't see how it could fail from an environmental perspective either.

I just need to read up on the regulator/rectifier side of things. I suspect that I might have difficulty persuading the alternator to spin fast enough for it to start taking a charge.

raeble

Well if anyone does rig up a wind turbine thingie in their back yard, you can sell the excess power to the national grid. Probably not viable in my urban mid-terrace yard, though! There always putting a solar power thingie on the roof to collect energy, there are quite a few 50% grants around for that. Still quite pricey though. The council in my area was doing a pilot project were people rented them for heating their water, I think it was only council tenants that got to take part in the pilot project.

wrightnick

Hi,

I have no experience with this company but noticed that they were going
a turnbine for £995, that plug's into your ring main...

The device generates 1kw as 12ms and will in the near future have a grant from the clearskies project - installation is around £250 - £300

The device has an Renewable Obligations Certificate - generating a revenue of £60 per year before any advantage from the renewable energy

The device is likely to save the average houshold 1/3 off their energy bill

http://www.windsave.com

Regards

koru

wrightnick wrote:

I have no experience with this company but noticed that they were going a turnbine for £995, that plug's into your ring main...

The device generates 1kw as 12ms and will in the near future have a grant from the clearskies project - installation is around £250 - £300

The device has an Renewable Obligations Certificate - generating a revenue of £60 per year before any advantage from the renewable energy

The device is likely to save the average houshold 1/3 off their energy bill

Thanks. Very interesting. I'm going to look into that.

Unlike the Swift turbine, they seem ready to go now, which is good. On the other hand, they don't seem to be able to let you receive credits from your elecy company for feeding power into the grid. So, if it is windy and you generate more power than you can use at that moment, the power goes to waste, which seems a shame.

I don't mean to dismiss the Windsave turbine, but I do want to point out some corrections:

They claim to save 1/3 of your elecy bill, not your total energy bill.

They actually say "up to 1/3", and of course "up to" is one of the marketing dept's favourite terms. Presumably this means that you might save 1/3 on the basis of lots of optimistic assumptions that will only apply to a few customers. I have written to them to ask.

From what I could gather, they don't actually have ROCs yet. They seem confident they will get them, but who knows whether that confidence is well founded. Similarly, if you read carefully, you will see that none of the grants they talk about are certain.

A ROC will not necessarily generate a £60 saving. They actually say that a ROC is worth £60 per megawatt. There is no indication whether you could expect to generate a megawatt. (Do they mean a megawatt hour? Scottish Power say that the average UK household electricity usage is 3,300KWh per year, or 3.3 MWh, so one third of that is 1.1 MWh. If so, the £60 may be realistic, assuming the 1/3 figure is realistic.)

Although it may indeed generate 1KW at 12 miles per sec, it also says the average UK wind speed is 6 miles per sec, so to give prominence to the 1KW figure is arguably misleading. [Edit: I have now read that the installation grants are assessed on the basis of power output at 12 ms, so perhaps this is why Windsave quote this figure.] On average it is only going to generate 1/2KW (assuming half the wind speed means half the power output).[Edit: I have now read here that power output is proportional to the cube of the wind speed. So, at the average wind speed, the windsave turbine will generate only 1/8 of a KW.]

They claim a payback period of 5 years, based purely on electricity savings (not grants and ROCs). I can't see how this can be right. If the average house uses 3300 KWh per year, that is an electricity bill of about £200, so even assuming a 1/3 saving, that is only £66 saved per year, which is £330 over 5 years. At that rate, it would take 20 years to recoup your investment, without even taking into account the interest you could have been earning on your £1300.