Want a wind turbine for your home? You’re in luck, because you have several options available – and because these days it’s easier than ever before to go off the grid and power your house entirely with clean energy.

Here are the 3 main options you have:

Option 1: Buy a Professionally-Produced Wind Turbine

The easiest option, if you don’t have much time, is to simply buy a wind turbine from a large company. Depending on your location and the wind speeds in your area, it might cost between $5,000 and $20,000 to completely power your house like this and eliminate your electricity bill.

If you have that kind of money to invest and don’t like to build things yourself, this is your best option – but be aware that it is most effective if you’re in the Midwest or near the ocean, where there is sufficient wind to make the investment worthwhile.

Advantages: Requires minimal time; no potential to mess up your wiring or electricity

Disadvantages: Very expensive; not worth it unless you have very strong winds in your area

Option 2: Acquire or Find a Broken or Not Fully Functional Wind Turbine

This is another option that most people completely overlook – rather than buying or building a wind turbine, why not just get a broken one from a neighbor or from a company looking to get rid of some of their windmills?

The only problem here is that it’s a little unreliable to do this, and you never know what you’re getting with a broken wind turbine – it might collapse in a week, leaving you without power. But it’s the cheapest option if you’re up for a challenge.

Advantages: Cheapest option; requires less time than building your own wind turbine

Disadvantages: Unreliable; may not last very long; may be difficult to find broken turbine depending on your location

Option 3: Build Your Own Wind Turbine

This is the alternative that you’re probably the most interested in – building your own wind turbine. If you like to get your hands dirty and have a few days to spare, you can power your home – or at least greatly reduce your electricity bill – for a few hundred dollars and several days worth of work.

The main problem is that not everyone is comfortable doing this, and you may not get good results if you live in an area without much wind.

Advantages: Relatively inexpensive; only requires a few days worth of work; can be “worth it” even if you don’t have strong winds in your area

Disadvantages: Requires some familiarity with cutting metal and assembling machines; may get unpredictable results if it’s your first time

So you’ve just followed my basic tutorial for building your own wind turbine, and you’re now powering your house with clean energy. Congratulations! Most people never even make it this far.

But if you want your DIY wind turbine to last well into the future, you’ll need to take good care of it and make sure it’s properly maintained – otherwise you’ll have to start all over again in a few months to a year when it breaks down due to the sun and environmental damage.

Here are the most important points to keep in mind for wind turbine maintenance:

1. Before you even set up your own DIY wind turbine, make sure that you coat the pipes you’re using for your blades and any parts you’re making out of plywood with UV inhibitor – these materials were never meant to be used outside, so you need to make sure the sun doesn’t wear them down. If you’ve forgotten to do this, simply apply the UV protector ASAP, and try to re-apply it at least a few times per year to protect against damage.
2. Always check the electrical parts of your wind turbine – the battery, DC motor, charge controller, dump load, and inverter – for rust, dust, and water leaks. If you keep these outside, you’ll want to clean them out, inspect them, and replace them if necessary at least 2-3 times per year. UV protector won’t help too much, but your main concern is not sun damage – it’s water damage and rust. You can also cover these with protective flexi-glass or other materials.
3. Maintain your blades – you want to make sure that the edges are still properly rounded, and that each of the 3 blades attached to your wind turbine is the same weight. You can inspect the edges for proper rounding yourself, and use sandpaper and a metal edge to shave off metal if necessary. To check for equal weighting, number the blades, and spin them around a few times to make sure the same blade does not always end up at the bottom – if it does, then you need to shave metal off the shaft connecting it to your hub.
4. Secure fastening: with a wind turbine, you absolutely need to make sure all the parts are securely fastened – but especially the blades, hub, and tail shaft. You can check for this every few months, and if the parts are growing loose, you can tighten them by re-drilling and re-aligning the holes. If the tail shaft becomes loose, you can use something as simple as bungee cord to fix it, tie a few loops to the tower, and make sure it stays in place.
5. General cleaning – there’s nothing too special here. Unlike with DIY solar panels, you’re not too concerned with dust because it won’t build up on blades that are constantly moving – instead, you should worry about rust buildups and possible water damage.

Those are the 5 main points you need to be concerned with when it comes to wind turbine maintenance – the most important part is to make sure your wind turbines are properly set up in the first place, because if you don’t use UV protector or forget to securely fasten everything in the beginning, you’re sure to encounter problems later on.

If you’re getting interested in using wind turbines to power your home, you might be wondering how electricity is actually generated from the wind.

It’s actually quite straightforward, and only a little more complicated compared to how solar power works.

At a basic level, a wind turbine generates electricity by transferring wind energy into kinetic energy in your blades – this kinetic energy then rotates magnets around a conductor, which generates electricity.

Let’s go through it step-by-step:

Wind: The wind itself is moving at least several miles per hour, which means it’s carrying energy.

Rotor Blades: When the wind hits your blades, it causes them to rotate and it therefore turns into kinetic energy stored in the blades as they move.

Shaft/Tower: When the blades rotate, they cause the tower that you have used to mount everything on to rotate, which transfers mechanical energy into your generator – the DC power motor if you’ve followed my recommendations for building your own wind turbine.

Generator: Inside the generator are sets of magnets located around a conductor in the center. The rotation of your tower causes these magnets to also rotate around the conductor, which means that the magnetic field around the conductor is constantly changing – and that generates electricity.

If you’re wondering why a rotating magnetic field generates electricity, you should review Faraday’s Law on Wikipedia, which states that an electric current can produce a magnetic field and vice versa since the two are intimately linked.

So, how much electricity can you generate from your own wind turbine?

It’s greatly dependent on the materials you use, how well your blades are constructed, and, of course, the average wind speeds near your home.

On average, if you have a wind turbine with 3 blades about 6 feet long and wind speeds of around 20 mph on average, your wind turbine might produce anywhere from 300 to 500 Watts of power.

That alone will significantly cut your electric bill – but if you want to completely eliminate it, you’ll probably need at least 5-6 wind turbines so you can generate several kilowatts of power.

Ok, so you’ve now gathered up all the parts you’ll need for your wind turbine, you’ve figured out your wind turbine costs, and you’ve decided to finally go off the grid and make your own windmill – now, how do you assemble everything?

This is actually a very lengthy and complicated question to answer, but for now I’ll give you the basics – there are a lot of nuances here that I’m skipping over, but those will be covered in future tutorials.

Step 1: Acquire or buy all the parts on eBay or from your local hardware store – DC power motor, metal sheets, PVC pipe, hub, tower, deep-cycle battery, charge controller, dump load, AC inverter, and enough nuts and bolts to connect three blades to your tower.

Step 2: Cut your PVC pipe into a 3 ft. length, and then cut the pipe into quarters – 3 of these will be blades, and one is a spare. You then need to shape these so that one side narrows into a 2” tip. The blades themselves should be about 6 feet in length – you can go smaller, but try to make each one at least 4 feet or they will not spin easily.

Step 3: Drill holes on the “non-narrow” side of your blade so that their positions match up with your hub.

Step 4: Weld or bolt a coupling to the center of your hub, and then attach the 3 blades to the hub, and the hub to the motor shaft – small steel bars about a foot long and 2” wide work best for this.

Step 5: Balance the blades and hub by numbering the blades and spinning them to make sure that the same one does not land at the bottom each time – if it does, then you need to shave some metal off your connecting steel bars.

Step 6: Slide the DC motor shaft into the hole in the middle of your hub (or drill it if it’s not there yet) – make sure the hub is secure.

Step 7: Measure the height of your tail shaft and drill a hole through the top (smaller) part of your tower, right above where the top of the tail shaft would go.

Step 8: Now cut the actual tail shaft from your metal, and make it about 3 to 4 feet long – and fix it to the tower with a flat bracket.

Step 9: Now, make sure your hub and the blades are attached to your tower, and wire the remaining parts together – you should connect the DC motor to the charge controller, then connect that to the battery and the battery to the AC inverter, which goes into your utility box. The gauge of wire you’ll need is depends on the materials you used – you should call an electrician to make sure you’re using the right one if you’re not confident.

As I said, this just scratches the surface in terms of DIY wind turbines – but now you should at least have a basic idea of how to make a simple turbine to power your home and meet all your energy needs.

This type of wind turbine should produce at least 300 – 500 Watts of power, assuming your average wind speed is at least 10-20mph or higher.

How much does a wind turbine cost? It’s an important question, but one that is rarely, if ever, addressed by existing guides and websites.

Some people claim that you can make your own wind turbine with as little as $50, but this is almost impossible unless you have a lot of spare parts on hand in your garage.

Just to review, here are the parts you’ll need to construct your own wind turbine:

• DC Power Motor
• Sheets of metal (to assemble the body and tail)
• ABS or PVC pipe (to construct your wind turbine blades)
• Hub (to connect your blades to the motor)
• Tower (to hold up your blades)
• Deep-Cycle Battery (to store your energy)
• Charge Controller (to prevent the battery from overloading)
• Dump Load (to send extra power to)
• AC Inverter (if you need to use AC power)
• Nuts and Bolts (for connecting the blades to the hub and other pieces)
• Tools: socket set, screwdrivers, a grinder, a jigsaw, and sandpaper

Now let’s look at what each of these will cost you – either from your hardware store, or online via eBay or other sites.

DC Power Motor – You can find an Ametek 30-40 vdc generator online on eBay for around $30-$50 – this is my recommended motor, especially if your wind speed is not great.

Sheets of Metal – You can find these online or at your hardware store for about $5.

ABC or PVC pipe – Again, you can find pipe between 8” and 12” in diameter online for around $10.

Hub – You can either buy this at your hardware store for around $10, or make it yourself out of a circular piece of metal alloy.

Tower – You can find old satellite TV towers or simple steel pipe that’s about 2-3” thick and 8-12 feet tall online for around $10 – going to your local hardware store or asking neighbors also work.

Deep-Cycle Battery – This should be free if you go to your local golf club or a fork lift distributor and ask for old batteries – otherwise you could find a deep-cycle battery online for around $10.

Charge Controller – You can find one on eBay for about $25.

Dump Load – This should be free because you can just use a simple appliance you already have, like a water heater or backup battery pack.

AC Inverter – If you don’t already have one, you can get one for $50 (300 Watts) to $75 (1500 Watts) online.

Nuts and Bolts / Tools – Allot about $10 for these if you don’t already have your own tools and some nuts and bolts – your best bet is your local hardware store.

Adding all these parts up, we see that the cost may range from $160 to $205 – and if you already have certain parts like the inverter or motor, you could build your own wind turbine for only $100.

Are you thinking about finally going green and powering your house completely with wind power? If so, you’re not alone – more people than ever before are looking to wind power to meet their energy needs and go off the grid.

You have a couple options if you want to use wind power to eliminate your electric bill: the easiest and least time-consuming is to simply buy an existing wind turbine (called a “prefabricated wind turbine”).

A wind turbine with enough output to fully power your house can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 – for most households, that means that your investment will pay for itself within 10-15 years, assuming average utility bill expenses.

That’s an “ok” investment, but if you really want to see a high return on your money and don’t mind getting your hands dirty, the best option with personal wind power is to build your own wind turbine.

If you do it correctly, you can achieve the same results as a manufactured wind turbine, all for much less than $5,000 – in some cases, it may only cost you $200.

Here’s what you’ll need to make your own wind turbine and start using personal wind power to meet all your energy needs:

• DC Power Motor
• Sheets of metal (to assemble the body and tail)
• ABS or PVC pipe (to construct your wind turbine blades)
• Hub (to connect your blades to the motor)
• Tower (to hold up your blades)
• Deep-Cycle Battery (to store your energy)
• Charge Controller (to prevent the battery from overloading)
• Dump load (to send extra power to)
• AC Inverter (if you need to use AC power)
• Nuts and bolts (for connecting the blades to the hub and other pieces)
• Tools: socket set, screwdrivers, a grinder, a jigsaw, and sandpaper

As you can see, building your own wind turbine is a bit more complicated than creating your own solar panels – it is a more complex device, so more mechanical know-how and assembly are required.

The good news is that even a DIY wind turbine can produce far more power than a solar panel – properly constructed and with sufficient wind, your own windmill might produce anywhere from 300 – 500 Watts of power. So you won’t need too many of them to completely power your house, or at least significantly cut your electric bill!

However, be careful before making your own wind turbines – unless you have enough wind in your area, they will be completely useless! As a general rule of thumb, you want the average wind speed near your house to be at least 10 mph or a wind turbine won’t do much good. Mountains, plains, and anything near the ocean are therefore much better locations for a wind turbine than lower elevations with a lot of tree cover.

If you really don’t have enough wind to properly use personal wind power, then you may want to consider creating solar panels instead to go off the grid!

Most existing guides and resources make the process of solar panel construction far more complicated than it needs to be.

The truth is, building your own solar panels doesn’t have to be hard – it’s only hard if you start it without having a clear idea of what you need to do and how to get there.

I cover this in more detail in my article on how to create solar panels, but here’s a quick overview of the process and just how easy it really is:

1. First, decide if you actually want to build your own solar panel at all – you can often get them for free from neighbors, from the hardware store, or even from highway patrol. So don’t assume that you need to even construct your own solar panel in the first place!
2. If you do want to go ahead with the solar panel construction, here’s what you need to get started:

First, you might be tempted to completely eliminate your electric bill with your own DIY solar panels, but I would actually recommend against doing this for your first project.

It’s best to start small and take it from there – try building a simple 40 or 50-cell solar panel first, see how that goes, and then adapt accordingly.

Here’s how you can set up your first solar panel “experiment”:

First, gather the necessary parts – maybe 40 or 50 solar cells off eBay, some plywood (cut to the necessary length and width), as well as tabbing wire, solder, and a rosin flux pen.

Then, arrange the solar cells in series, face-down, and drop a small amount of solder onto each of these tabs.

Then, wire all these cells together by attaching wire from the back of one cell to the front of another cell, and so on until everything is connected.

Next, connect each individual row together in parallel, and then fix the cells to your plywood using silicone.

Finally, drill some holes at the bottom of the plywood for positive and negative wiring from your solar cells – and then connect these to your inverter before connecting them to the power box on your house.

If you’re uncomfortable with this last step, you can always get an electrician or the power company itself to help you out – it can be tricky to get everything perfect on your first try, and if you’d rather not risk it, going to the “experts” is always a viable option.

This is a very quick overview, but you get the basic idea just from this article – the most tedious part of this whole process is wiring the solar cells together, but you’ll get better at it with time and practice.

I covered before how I strongly recommend against building your own homemade solar cells.

If you’re not building the cells yourself, you’ll either have to find them (unlikely, unless you have a friend at Evergreen Solar), or buy them (much easier).

There are a couple places you could look to buy cheap solar cells – you could go to your local hardware store, or you could check with highway patrol to see if they’ve picked up any solar panels destroyed in car accidents lately.

Those are both possibilities, but the best way to buy cheap solar cells is through eBay – and here’s how you do it:

1. Search eBay for “broken solar cells” or “chipped solar cells” – this should give lots of auction results.
2. Try to find cells that have not been damaged too badly and that are relatively the same size – this will make it far easier to assemble everything onto one panel and figure out how many you need to buy.
3. If you want to go for a higher-priced option, you could look for transparent cells on eBay, or find newly produced cells by large companies like Evergreen Solar. This is a more expensive option, but it will make it easier to calculate your expected power output and get the right number of cells.

How much should you expect to pay?

That depends on what condition the cheap solar cells are in when you get them off eBay, but if you do it the way we recommended above, you should pay no more than a few cents for each individual cell.

100% functional or professionally-produced cells like those from Evergreen Solar will be more expensive, of course – but you should still not pay more than ten cents or so per cell.

In all likelihood, the shipping costs for the cells will be your highest expense – you might pay upwards of $20 for that, depending on where the seller is located relative to you and the shipping method.

Just doing some quick math here, you might expect to spend around $30-$50 for 500 chipped solar cells on eBay – probably not enough to completely eliminate your electric bill, but enough to substantially reduce it and save you thousands of dollars each year.

If you’re new to DIY energy and are just learning to power your home with wind and solar panel, you might be tempted to create your own homemade solar cells.

There are lots of websites out there that claim it’s “easy,” or that relatively little work is required to make your own solar cells – unfortunately, nothing could be farther from the truth, as it’s an extremely time-consuming process!

Why?

1. Just to make the solar cells, you’ll need to buy a lot of your own materials from the hardware store, including sheets of copper foil, wires, and your own electric stove.
2. To create a single solar cell requires about an hour of time, because you need to heat it up using your stove or electric heater, and then wait for it to cool down before you can begin testing it.
3. To actually power your house with your own solar cells, you’ll need thousands of them – if you have thousands of hours of free time, this might be a viable option for you, but most people can’t spend half a year working full-time on their own DIY solar cells.

So if homemade solar cells are such a pain, what’s the better alternative?

The best option is to buy cheap solar cells off eBay by searching for “chipped” or “broken” solar cells.

Yes, it costs money but think about how much time and money you’d waste by spend 6 months of full-time work on making your own solar cells.

Also, note that solar cells by themselves are not expensive – what makes “professional” solar panels so expensive is the assembly process – taking all those cells and attaching them together on panels, then wiring them to your house.

Fortunately, that process is far easier and more cost-effective to do yourself compared to making your own solar cells – so I would strongly recommend buying the necessary cells and then doing the assembly work yourself, as opposed to trying to do everything by yourself from the ground up.

So, should you make your own homemade solar cells?

Unless you have oodles and oodles of free time on your hands, the answer is almost certainly “no.” It might be a fun science experiment for a weekend to do it and say, “I built my own solar cell!” but it’s not a practical option for going off the grid and making your home solar-powered in the long-run.

Want to create your own solar panel? Well, you’re in luck because it’s not difficult at all – even if you’re relatively new to creating your own power systems and have just started going green!

The entire process of creating a solar panel can be broken down into about 10 main steps, depending on what you’re looking for, how much power you want to generate, and how many solar panels you’re interested in making.

How much does it cost to make your own solar panels? You can create one that saves you quite a bit off your electricity bill for under $200, if you do it correctly.

If you want to completely eliminate your utility bill, or go 100% “off the grid” then it will cost more and you’ll probably need at least 4-5 solar panels along with good sunlight exposure and environmental conditions.

We’ll be going into each of these steps in more detail in future articles, but here are the basic steps you need to follow:

Step 1: Calculate how much power you need to generate, and therefore how many solar panels you’ll actually need.

As a general rule of thumb, an average house in the US consumes anywhere from 10,000 Watts to 30,000 Watts of power each day. Yours may be more or less depending on how many appliances you use, whether or not you have air conditioning, and other factors. If you’re in doubt, look at your recent utility bills to get an idea of your house’s average power consumption.

A typical solar cell produces about 2 Watts of power – so you’d need around 5,000 – 15,000 individual solar cells to completely power your house. That many cells would require at least 5-15 individual solar panels, if not more.

Of course, you don’t need to completely power your house with them – if you just want to halve your electric bill, you could do that as well and still make your DIY solar panels well-worth your time.

Step 2: Once you know how many solar cells you’ll need, get the cells on eBay by searching for “chipped” or “broken” solar cells. They’re cheap, and they work almost as well as the fully functional cells.

You could also check your local hardware store, but eBay is the most convenient option here.

Step 3: Now, you need to gather the other parts necessary for your solar panels. Here’s what you’ll need besides the cells themselves:

1. Thin plywood (Local hardware store)
2. Flexi-glass about 0.5 inches thick (hardware store).
3. Tin-coated tabbing wire (look on eBay).
4. Silicone (for sealing up holes).
5. Solder iron (for connecting the cells).
6. Rosin flux pen (for connecting your cells).
7. UV Protector (to avoid damaging your new solar panel).
8. Volt meter.

Once you have all those parts together, you can start assembling your first solar panel.

Step 4: First, prepare the plywood by cutting it to the approprate width and height, cleaning it, and making sure that all the cells you’ve collected can actually fit on it.

Also, apply a few layers of UV protector to the wood to protect it from sun damage.

Step 5: Now, you need to attach the solar cells themselves together. This is quite a complex process, and I can’t go into all the details here – but here are the basics of what you need to do:

First, find the tabs on the backs of all your cells and drop a small amount of solder (using an iron) onto their backs.

Connect all the cells together using the tabbing wire, with the front of one cell attaching to the back side of the next cell, and so on until you have completed rows.

Step 6: Now, you need to affix all these rows of cells to the back of your plywood using silicone.

You’ll also need to attach wires to each row of cells, and then drill a hole in the back of your plywood so that you can run wiring from the cells themselves out to your battery and/or other power storage system.

Step 7: Attach the flexi-glass to the border of your plywood and cover the cells, again using the silicone.

Step 8: Fill in any gaps or holes (around the holes that your positive and negative wires are coming through, or elsewhere) using the silicone.

Step 9: Drill a breather hole into the bottom of your plywood near where the wires come out to avoid moisture build-up inside the solar panel.

Step 10: Now, join the electrical wires from your solar panel to the panels junction box – which will connect to your charge controller, and to your batteries.

You should consult with your local hardware store when doing this to make sure you have the proper volts and amps for your wiring – they’ll know what to do if you can show them your setup.

Now you’re done – to test it out, simply put your cells in the sun, attach a volt meter, and see what kind of power your new solar panel is outputting!

Again, this was a very, very simplified overview of the entire process and I’ll be going into more detail on each step here and giving more detailed instruction in future articles.