We recently hired a new employee at work to be our sustainability engineer, and to all of our benefit, she brought with her a whole stack of books about sustainable construction, architecture, and life at home to assemble a “Green Library” in our office.  Perusing through it the other day, one title in particular caught my eye – Homebrew Wind Power: A Hands-on Guide to Harnessing the Wind.  I was excited.  One of my long-term goals in life is to make my home carbon neutral and entirely off the grid.  I’m still a renter, and to be honest, I may never live somewhere where wind power would be feasible to employ, but I’m always interested in learning something new when it comes to sustainable do-it-yourself projects.  So I checked it out and spent a few minutes reading each night before bed.

Homebrew Wind Power, authored by Dan Bartmann & Dan Fink, leads you step by step through the process of building your own wind turbine as part of a renewable energy system. The Dans live entirely off the grid in a small community in the Colorado Rockies and have devoted a huge chunk of their lives to building and testing wind turbines made from easily obtained materials.  For an instructional manual, I was fairly impressed with the friendly, conversational tone that they kept throughout the course of the book.  The dog and cat haikus that are sporadically placed throughout the text are especially fun (you can tell how much they love their pets):

Nap under turbine
Blades spin, but no birds are killed
I was so hungry…

The book is basically divided into three sections which provide a comprehensive review of what you’ll need to know in order to take on a project like this.

1. Intro to renewable energy and wind turbines

In the beginning, the Dans give a run down of how a renewable energy system works, particularly with a windmill, from the turbine itself to all the bits and pieces that make a complete system function like inverters, battery banks, meters, and controllers.  I was happy to see that they also spent a bit of time making sure their readers understand the importance of energy conservation – adding a windmill to your property won’t make a lot of sense if you’re wasting all of the electricity it produces!  They even include a section on shop safety.  There are a few safety concerns specific to wind turbine building and the Dans hammer them into your head over and over again.  While it gets a bit tiring after awhile, I appreciate it.  They don’t want you pinching your fingers between any magnets, and neither do I.

Most importantly, this section helps you to decide if you have a feasible site for a wind turbine.   You need to know your area’s average wind speed (a complicated measurement to make), the height of obstacles around your site, as well as a host of other things when deciding if a wind turbine should be in your renewable energy future.

2. Assembling a homebrew wind turbine

The second part of the book moves into the meat of the topic, assembling the big, sexy machine.  If you’ve decided that you just can’t help but take on such a cool project, this is where you will learn, step by step, how to build and erect your turbine. Though it’s certainly no small feat, Dan & Dan do a pretty good job of holding your hand along the way.  Each chapter is dedicated to one bite size piece of the turbine.  You get a full list of tools and supplies you’ll need as well as suggestions on where to find any special materials.  Almost every major step of the process is documented with photos and very descriptive text.  Oftentimes, sidebars populate the pages to highlight any tips and tricks you might be interested in using to customize your turbine or to make it even more efficient.

3. Resources for researching your project

If, after careful consideration, you decide that a wind turbine will be a beneficial addition to your renewable energy system, this section is full of tables, charts, and graphs to help you size and place your windmill.  Homebrew Wind Power focuses solely on the construction of a 10 foot wind turbine (wingspan of blades).  This section, while much less robust than the rest of the book, offers help to any reader that decides that another size of turbine is a best fit for them by focusing on what will need to be done in order to scale the system up or down to fit more specific needs.

Is a homebrew wind turbine for me?

The honest answer to this question, unfortunately, is probably not.  Wind turbines are relatively simple machines, but the environment in which they can be successfully implemented is rather specific.

• Does your area have an average wind speed of at least 10 mph?
• Do you have a site on your property where you can feasibly get the machine 30 feet above any obstacle within 300 feet?  If for some reason your tower fails, will it fall entirely on your property?
• Are you already doing everything you can to reduce your energy use?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, then a homebrew wind turbine might be very beneficial to you.  If you can’t, it’s likely any machine you choose to erect will never be able to produce enough power to make a sizable dent in your home’s electricity needs. Most folks fall into the latter category.

One other incredibly important thing to consider when deciding if a wind turbine is for you is that using this windmill at a dwelling that is connected to grid power will add some considerable expense to the overall project.  The authors didn’t do the best job of explaining how much their system would cost to build, but from what I could gather, if you don’t currently have any renewable energy infrastructure at your home currently, you should plan to spend somewhere between $8,000 – $10,000. If you do, your costs will probably be closer to $5,000.  Consider that the average American Household uses around 9oo kwh each month and the turbine you build will only produce around 160 kwh per month at an average wind speed of 10 mph (this number grows exponentially as wind speed increases).

Looking at all this, you’re likely to believe that a homebrew wind turbine is not for you and you are probably right.  However, I will say that, if you like DIY projects and are interested in renewable energy, this book is a really fun read.  The authors are friendly and very honest about who their system will help and how much.  The dog and cat haikus also add a few chuckles along the way.  Even if you can’t utilize the information in the book, I feel good recommending it to anyone with an inquisitive mind interested in sustainable energy.

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