Home wind power

It is quite a disappointing area unless you are prepared to DIY it and have the experience to back it up. A lot of the generic mid-size horizontal axis turbines don't produce anything like the power rated in reality i.e. 600 watt on paper and you are probably generating 30. Never mind availability of high performance discreet style turbines.

We've got pretty decent conditions where I live for useful power from it but I don't want the efforts of planning permission for something larger and/or inflicting the ugliness of it on the surroundings (also my brother has an unfortunate reaction to turbine blades which makes him nauseous and can trigger migraines).
 
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One of the older Grand Designs had an application for a wind turbine, which wasn't massive that got voted out by the village and was dropped from the plans.

I guess and judging from the general groans raised everytime a wind farm or a small group of turbines are built, that those for home use would be difficult to get planning for.

Perhaps something along the lines of the tidal turbines for areas that suffer from wind tunnels could be an option, although I'm not even sure if that is available atm.
 
You don't need planning for domestic turbines specifically but at the moment the legislation makes it highly unlikely your house will meet the requirements unless its fairly uniquely situated.
The turbine cannot be within (I want to say 5m but its a while since I read the legislation) of a boundary, so for example my house if I was to put a turbine when I would logically do so, on my south facing wall it would be within 5m of a boundary, even though its around 10m from the nearest house.

Its the same issue with heat exchangers as well, the legislation was written when this stuff was unusual, now its becoming far more normal its a problem.
When I walk to the allotment I see houses with AC installed thats technically against the legislation but in modern housing its very hard to avoid that.

As said above the actual generation vs the boiler plate rating is well down. Thats not a problem as such but it can be very misleading as you only going to get close to the boiler plate reading if your very lucky and its only going to be occasional.
Wind is 100% not going to power your house, what wind will be great for is providing a smaller top up to batteries.
Eg trickling in 150w average for a day isn't an inconsiderable 3.6kWh over 24 hours.

The smaller house type designs are far less like the large turbines you see as houses tend to be in disrupted airflow so the designs are more like a spiral.

To me wind is more like solar from the 80s, it needs some massive effort and some decent advances. It needs to become more cost effective and it needs to be accepted as viable and not having to be basically out of sight from the boundary.
 
I remember seeing something about a compact Dutch Archimedes wind turbine they designed for cities. No idea if they output at any value though.
 
From what i read up most only produce their headline figure in pretty much gale force winds so day to day you're producing very little from the kinda of size you can install at home.

Also smaller home ones obviously need to spin a lot faster than big commercial ones so the wear on things like bearings is significant over it's life compared to say solar with no moving parts which can easily last 20+ years with no maintenance at all.

Also they can be more noisy being smaller so and then there's the planning issues of where you can actually install them, so many meters away from boundary etc.

While on a surface level they seem a good idea it quickly falls down compared to a proven tech like solar plus a battery for domestic use.
 
I watched a load of Youtube videos on this and basically not worth it. The output is too low, if you buy a cheap one it will likely break compared to the cost/reliability of a solar panel. I think they need to be a certain size before they start making more sense
 
sovietspybob said:
From what i read up most only produce their headline figure in pretty much gale force winds so day to day you're producing very little from the kinda of size you can install at home.

Also smaller home ones obviously need to spin a lot faster than big commercial ones so the wear on things like bearings is significant over it's life compared to say solar with no moving parts which can easily last 20+ years with no maintenance at all.

Also they can be more noisy being smaller so and then there's the planning issues of where you can actually install them, so many meters away from boundary etc.

While on a surface level they seem a good idea it quickly falls down compared to a proven tech like solar plus a battery for domestic use.
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There is definitely a future for domestic wind generation especially for those who already have solar with battery, domestic wind is never going to power your home but it could offer a significant top up charge in the winter when a lot of peoples solar installs don't fill the battery. It needs a change in planning regs to maker it easer to install small domestic turbines and ideally some sort of subsidy to drive innovation.

For me the best thing the government could do for the domestic renewables make them a building regs requirement on all new builds as this would inevitably leady to price reductions and innovations as the market grows but this is unlikely to happen as our regs still allow silly things like flushing toilets with drinking water.
 
swillsy said:
I watched a load of Youtube videos on this and basically not worth it. The output is too low, if you buy a cheap one it will likely break compared to the cost/reliability of a solar panel. I think they need to be a certain size before they start making more sense
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This is kind of disappointing.
a1ex2001 said:
For me the best thing the government could do for the domestic renewables make them a building regs requirement on all new builds as this would inevitably leady to price reductions and innovations as the market grows but this is unlikely to happen as our regs still allow silly things like flushing toilets with drinking water.
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I've seen things like home grey water collection/recycling for flushing toilets, but they all seem to be things where you'd be an early adopter beta testing some stuff rather than off the shelf ready.
 
Solar probably has a near linear cost with output. Wind will have some form of square relationship at a guess because of the area of the wind path and moment area of the blade. Small turbines as said above just won't be cost effective compared to other mechanisms but scale up well ut the larger they get the less suitable they are for domestic use.
 
The Blade doesn’t conform to Betz’s Law; according to this, such a wind turbine could just capture 59.3 percent of the wind’s kinetic energy and transfer it to mechanical energy. In practice, this limit is responsible for a fair number of high wind turbines with three large rotors; and just a few small turbines on rooftops. That is also the reason why people didn’t believe that The Blade would be able to deliver more electricity.
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From the link in your first post.
Run, run, run away.....

Betz's Law is pretty fudamental, and they're claiming it doesn't apply.
en.wikipedia.org

Betz's law - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Unless they've invented perpetual motion or something (clue- they haven't), the linked turbine is a total fraud.
 
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I was thinking of installing a few of these in a narrow (2m wide) gap between the house and garage instead of building a wall to stop strong winds messing up the garden. I am almost certain that planning permission is not required.
 
ver01@ said:
I was thinking of installing a few of these in a narrow (2m wide) gap between the house and garage instead of building a wall to stop strong winds messing up the garden. I am almost certain that planning permission is not required.
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Do you mean you would DIY it or you know some company that would do this?
 
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