Has anyone here started a project like this? We have an average wind speed of 6 MPH and I can go up as high as I want with a pole. What has stopped anybody from doing this??

Does anyone have a set of plans or one of those DIY videos?

Well, they don't work for one thing.

Er... they work pretty well actually. The smaller ones don't make a lot of power, however as long as the wind is blowing, it's making at least a little juice to offset your bill. You need to make sure your area supports net-metering before you do anything else. The more wind, the more power, however you can get too much wind which could really screw up the unit unless it has a safety cut off to allow it to spin. They may have fixed all this in recent years, I don't know.

But yes, they do work.

ETA: The house I'm in has a small one and it produces about 7 or 8 kw/ on a good day. Not much, but it's tiny. It was here when we moved and I've never bothered to find out much about it. Landlord deals with it.

Bun

Is that 7-8 k/w of 110v. ac? Or does it use some sort of an inverter. Or does it simply offset use from the meter? That may be the way to go, since the wind is fickle.
I know they "work" technically, but are not practical. They need to find a way to store the power for when the wind dies down. I have seen the ones on boats in the Virgin Islands where the wind is blowing 15-20 all the time, and they are used to charge batteries. I haven't heard of running refrigeration and certainly not A/C.
Every time I fly over the giant wind farms in the west, most if not all are standing still. You would think they would be humming.

First I'm not a expert but from what my brother has explained to me wind has it's issues. My brother works for a power company and from what he says the windmills they have are only used 20-30% of the time to add power to the grid. They are ether spinning too fast or too slow the rest of the time. If they aren't spinning in the right range they need to spend a small fortune on equipment to change the freq of the power to the standard of 60Hz.

I'm told the way around this for a house is to have a bank of battery's that are charged by the windmill. This way it charges the battery's and a big inverter then is used to power your house. Needless to say these big banks of battery's aren't cheap, and do need to be replaced every few years.

I know lots of people that run generators and battery banks up here to do the same thing. My Ex's parents had enough battery's in the basement to run the basics for the house for 24hours. If they were using the dryer or something that needed quite a bit of power they fired up the generator.

The one here just does net metering. I work for a power company that is going to (hopefully) have a large part in a new wind farm. Unfortunately, XX_rider is correct. Not always producing.

But you can store the power with batteries and and invertor, otherwise it just runs the meter backwards. I'm probably going to be putting in a fairly large solar array in my next house with a small wind generator for evenings/ nights and cloudy days. Won't do a whole lot, but small wind turbines aren't terribly expensive.

Money !

Currently for 95% of the population... it is NOT cost effective to invest in almost any form of personal power generation.

But...

That's not to say you can't go out and impress on everybody your own stupidity.... Like Buying a Prius... just to tell yourself " I'm doing my part, I'm helping the environment ". Blah blah blah.



My advise.... Do your Homework, and amortize the cost out over 10+ years.. and see how it comes out.

Yeah but the Messiah said he would subsidize me and I would break even in 3 years. He wouldn't lie to me would he?