Who is using solar or wind generated electricity

Wind is tough. Areas that most people consider to be "windy" are generally rubbish for wind generation. Before 2009-2008, a.k.a. when credit was available, there were tons of companies doing various small scale wind concepts. They're mostly all gone now, some are still around. Do some googling. For example 1KW turbines can be had for $1k or so..

With wind the bigger the blades the more efficient. The big wind companies are always trying to one up each other in blade length to each more and more efficiency out of the machine. 100m plus designs are reaching the market now.

I highly suggest looking at a company such as Sun Run http://www.sunrunhome.com/. They do solar installs and financing. Its proabably the least painful, most efficent and best way to put solar on your home. They own the equipment and maint of the equipment. You pay them a set fee per month for x # of years. You then sell your excess power back to the energy company(rates will rise over time) and therefore generally do better than breaking even... No down payments.. No screwing around with finding contractors. It's not super GRM, but The technology is still very immature and locking yourself in now to something immature could be silly.

Curtis, A couple of points: If you're putting 5 HP (3.7KW) of wind into the system and only getting 500 Watts out (0.5 KW), your efficiency is in the toilet, at around 14%. Something isn't right there. As for the speed regulator, look at how the water well windmills do it. They've been working on the Plains for >100 years, so the design is pretty well worked out. Your 12V, high amperage problem with an auto generator, requiring high current carrying wire can be resolved by just rewiring the automotive alternator up to feed the exciter coil thingie from the output, taking the regulator out of the circuit which will give you an output of like ~100V AC. Do some googling. People make AC generators from lawn mowers like that. You could run that 150 ft on regular ROMEX with minimal losses. Then at the other end, drop it down with a transformer, rectify it and use feed it to a voltage regulator circuit, or use a switching power supply design of some type to get your 12V.

Just tossing out ideas.

aussiesmg wrote: I am leaning towards wind as my property gets a lot of constant wind and Ohio is not known for its sun....

they'll probably spin backwards because ohio sucks.

My family has a cabin in a national forest, and the cabin is off the grid. No water, power, phone... We have 230 watts of solar panels, 10 kW inverter, 4 deep cycle batteries (sold specifically for solar panel systems), and still have LP lights. On an average weekend of having some electric lights on for cooking, reading, watching a dvd movie or two, and listening to the radio non stop, it works great. We still use LP lights quite often but the intensity of the electric lights are nice for cleaning and the like. We have the system setup in a way that allows us to unplug the inverter and plug in the 3500 watt generator for days like Thanksgiving during deer hunting, with the directv satellite and LCD tv to watch football, and all the cooking and what not. Our neighbor has a wind turbine and although its higher than the closest trees and is in the relative open, its barely turns on the windiest days. It's just not far enough away from the trees which causes too much turbulence.

I had a 500w solor panel system from 1998-2003. Gov paid for most of the equip through annual tax return deduction. Back then sine wave inverters (a must for many household items) were just too expensive so I used a modified square wave (maybe 10 steps?). I rewired so most of the incandescent lights in the house to be on 5 dedicated circuits and then plumbed the inverter power to them though a fused manual transfer switch.

Believe it or not Georgia is not in one of the sunniest regions of the US. I had lots of cloudy/hazy days where the panels would not fully charge the six 100 AH battery bank so I had to manually switch to grid power. I tried to stay no lower than 20% discharge but on several occasions went to 50%.

Worked great but battery monitoring/maintenance and the manual switching was a total pain. The batteries finally died after 5 years so I gave up. I did save some monthly electric bill money but it just wasn't worth the hassle.

I still have the house wired and the transfer switch in place. One day I would like to put a hydro-electric generator on a waterwheel in a creek I have in my back yard. 24-7 power with no need for a large battery bank (just a couple to help regulate) or worry of the sun shining .

Your 12V, high amperage problem with an auto generator, requiring high current carrying wire can be resolved by just rewiring the automotive alternator up to feed the exciter coil thingie from the output, taking the regulator out of the circuit which will give you an output of like ~100V AC. Do some googling. People make AC generators from lawn mowers like that. You could run that 150 ft on regular ROMEX with minimal losses. Then at the other end, drop it down with a transformer, rectify it and use feed it to a voltage regulator circuit, or use a switching power supply design of some type to get your 12V. Just tossing out ideas.

Ooh, I shall google.

Wouldn't there be trouble with the frequency though? How do you make 60hz with such a variable alternator speed?

Pretty soon we're going to be hearing about how all these wind turbines are robbing the Earth of rotational energy. It'll be gloom and doom all over again!

how long do the elements in a typical panel last?

One thing on wind turbines not discussed by the enviro-whackos is the observation that the weather changes over those wind farms. OOOPS.

As for the alternator running 110v-ish AC, as I said, google up the lawnmower generator with a car alternator conversions and see how they do it. For a wind based system, if you just don't worry about the frequency and run a step down transformer on the other end, then the rectifiers and regulators, the frequency won't matter. Who cares if it is 45 Hz or 75 Hz input, you get DC out (0 Hz).

mm, I've heard a 20 year life on solar panels. I've also figured a 20 year payback period. Yeah, that's economical.

These were the links I mentioned in my previous post http://www.mdpub.com/Wind_Turbine/ for some reason I can't get the solar link to work.

I think I remember hearing solar panels can last up to 25 years. Sadly they're so expensive to have installed it might take that long to get your money out of them.

Dr. Hess wrote: mm, I've heard a 20 year life on solar panels. I've also figured a 20 year payback period. Yeah, that's economical.

As they get cheaper, that will change.

Yeah, I've been waiting 30 years for them to get cheaper. The cost of an integrated circuit, made from the same stuff, is a tiny fraction of what it was 30 years ago. But solar panels are only cheaper because our dollar is worth less. Why is that?

http://www.mdpub.com/SolarPanel/ Heres the link for the solar panel how to. Toy can get ok deals on solar cells on ebay.