Home Made Wind Power

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How home made wind power can be stored in batteries for later use

Wind power is a great way for the average homeowner to take advantage of a passing breeze to generate some electricity for use in their homes. Modern wind turbines as smaller and more powerful than older models and do a great job of catching the slightest breeze. Even home made wind power can help you reduce the amount of energy you buy each month from your local power utility. The trick is knowing how to generate it, and how best to convert it into useful power for your home.

When a wind powered turbine spins in the breeze, it drives a generator that will convert the rotation of the blades into a DC current that can be used to help offset the power you buy from the local power utility for your home. This DC current needs to be converted to AC current before it can be used in your home, and this is done by a device called an inverter. This inverter typically sits right near your electrical panel and will constantly monitor your wind turbine system and convert any power being generated into AC current and supply this to your home.

If you generate more power than you can use at that moment, the inverter will send this back up the power lines to the local utility and generate a credit for you. This way you can buy back power you need in times of low wind from the power company with these credits. The challenge with wind power is that it is less consistent than a solar power system since it relies on a constantly changing wind to generate its power.

This means that on a particularly gusty day, your inverter might have to switch back and forth between home made wind power and utility supplied power quite often. To help alleviate this problem, you may want to install a bank of batteries when you build a wind turbine system to help even out the power fluctuations. By having a bank of batteries as part of your homemade wind turbine system that are constantly being charged by the electricity generated, you eliminate the intermittent current that the turbine produces. The batteries sit between the wind turbine and the inverter and provide a bit of a buffer for the power that allows the inverter to stay in conversion mode longer and eliminates flipping back and forth between utility power and homemade wind turbine power.

Another advantage to using a battery bank is that you can save some of this power for use in periods when there is a utility outage due to a storm or other event. Having these batteries fully charged means the inverter has a source of DC current that it can convert when there is no power coming in from the power company. This can be a big help for most homes when a big storm has knocked out power in your community. When this happens, this battery bank becomes your backup power source and can supply power to your home for as along as the batteries hold out.