From candles to hot water — A journey to renewable energy — Wind turbine
By living in a place that the ancients from the valley called “the crazy wind”, in the local dialect, our first choice was to turn to a wind turbine. Even during the summer holidays we always felt like it was a windy place.
Without further due, we went to the nearest renewable energy shop to ask for some advices and guidance on how to setup a wind turbine. At that time, the extent of my knowledge on energy and electricity summed up to the weekly hour of “technology ” class I had in high school, which can be summarised to plugging a LED on a circuit board and powering it with a 3v battery.
We bought the followings from the shop:
- a 400w wind turbine with a 10m (30ft) pole
- two 150Ah 12V batteries
- a 200w converter
According to the guy from the shop it would be plenty to have one or two lights at night and a laptop for a couple hours a day. He roughly explained how to setup everything and sent us on our way to the mountains full of hopes.
Having set up the essentials such as wood for the fireplace and drinking water from the spring (you know that Volvic water you can find in plastic bottles at your nearest supermarket, we get it straight out of hole in the ground), we installed the wind turbine.
A couple of things we didn’t expect regarding private wind turbines, first of it’s small and needs to spin very fast (at least 450 Rpm) to produce electricity. We all have in mind the huge wind turbines that slowly turn and produce a couple hundreds kilowatt but for a private one it’s going to spin really fast for a couple hundreds watt. Then once the wind turbine is set up, the tricky part is that you need a very constant and stable wind rather than a strong wind, it takes some time for the wind turbine to start spinning and producing electricity so if you have squalls rather than continuous wind it’s not going to work.
Thankfully for us the wind turbine wasn’t very complicated to install once it’s on its mast, it’s just a question of plugging the wind turbine to the battery, the 12VDC -> 220VAC converter on the battery and the outlets you need on the converter, the charge regulator was installed directly in the wind turbine.
But seeing where our house is located, the wind is more gusty than constant and the wind turbine didn’t have enough time to start producing as the squall was already gone.
So after thinking of other alternatives we turned to solar power, stay tuned for the next article about it.
