What are the components of home wind power systems?

Home wind power systems seem to be the latest craze these days for environmentally aware home owners. They offer you the ability to slash your utility bills and even roll the meter back so that the utility company pays you each month. Let's take a look at the components of home wind power systems.

It all starts with our turbine. Every home wind power system will have a turbine as the starting point for capturing the kinetic energy of the wind. This usually has three or five blades that rotate as the wind blows past it. The rotating blades spin the central shaft which rotates the generator, producing electricity.

We could use this turbine to power an appliance directly, like a radio. The problem is that when the wind stops, the power stops.

So what do we do instead? The turbine can be used to connect to an array of batteries which are connected in series or in parallel. The electricity from the turbine recharges those batteries. The DC power from these batteries can then be used to power the radio. When the wind blows, the batteries get recharged and the radio can be used all the time, even when the wind is not blowing.

Now some appliances such as our radio are happy to be powered by DC power, but many more complex appliances require AC power. To transform our DC power from the batteries to AC power that can be used by our more complex appliances such as a refrigerator, we need an inverter.

Specific types of inverters will allow you to power your home in either an off -grid or an on-grid scenario. If you are creating wind power in a remote location or don't want the overhead of connecting to the grid, the off-grid set up is for you. If you want to sell your surplus wind power back to the utility company then the on-grid set up is the way to go.

In an on-grid set up you don't need the battery array unless you want to still have power during a black out. The wind power electricity goes via the AC grid tie inverter which means that your plugged in appliances are powered by the wind when it's blowing and the utility company when it is not.

Want to buy home wind power systems? Or perhaps home build a wind turbine yourself?

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