How To Build a Wind Generator
If your family is anything like ours you will want to learn how to build a wind generator because it is just so expensive to buy one! The 1000 watt wind generator we needed for living off the grid costs in excess of $2,500. For this family, and probably yours too, that is a lot of money. A lot of money! We knew we could find a better solution. We finally decided to build our own. Check out this video of a homebuilt wind turbine in action.
The Search for an answer...
After an exhausting search we finally found the best plans for building our own home wind generator with materials that are easily found. Yes, the plans cost us a nominal $20, but we figured it was well worth the price, compared to the cost of buying a new wind generator in the thousands!
The story of how we built our own wind generator follows. This project has proven to be a great addition to our renewable energy system. Send along the photos to us when you build your wind generator.
Compared to the $2,500 price tag of buying a new 1000 watt wind generator, the $20 we paid for the plans we used was very reasonable, and we had fun building it.
<< Take a moment to sign up for our free newsletter and receive a free copy of our Energy Savings Guide
Get started building your wind generator here
What about buying a Used Wind Generator?
After careful checking around on E-bay, and other online sources, and scouring newspapers and magazines we couldn’t find a single wind generator that fit our budget.
There were lots of small 100 to 400 watt generators out there, but not one that was large enough to run our home.
We looked for weeks and finally stumbled on to the answer for us. I happened to be looking through some old Mother Earth News magazines when I found it. In there was a story about how this family had ‘built’ their own wind generator instead of buying an expensive new model.
I was excited about the prospects of building one ourselves. Our son Andre’ loves to tinker and both Jane and I thought it would be a good project for him to tackle with us.
Upon further investigation the plans from the magazine turned out to be old and outdated calling for parts from old cars that I had never heard of… but the idea of building a wind generator was again brand new.
We looked on the Mother Earth News website for updated plans and found some at a cost of $20. The price was right but the date of the plans was 1975. Yikes, again old and outdated plans.
What Andre’ and I needed were some up to date plans… and it would be nice if they came in at that same $20 price tag too, compared to the thousands it would cost for a new wind generator.
Get started building your wind generator here
The search continues….
We continued our search for new plans and finally found a couple websites that offered plans for sale. The first one we found , ‘Wind Turbine- Guide to Building One’ was priced at $49. We were excited to get started on our project so we bought the book.
What a mistake! The plans turned out to be so complicated that space engineers would have been hard pressed to figure them out- Airfoils, Auto-furl? What the….??
So, we continued our search for plans that didn’t have complicated instructions or use big words just to show us how much ‘they’ knew about wind generators.
We were now out the $49 and had not figured out how to build a wind generator yet. We were a little wiser though!
Not too wise I guess, as we ended up doing the same thing 3 more times! The plans were either all so complicated or obscure, or they called for special tools and materials we could not purchase.
Weren’t there any plans out there for wind generators that could be built by people with no experience?
Get started building your wind generator here
Back to the search…
Now down $147 and no Wind Generator yet. We needed to get it right this time. We really wanted the price to be in that $20 range since we had spent so much already.
Andre’ and I were nearly ready to give up when our good friend Bill told us that he had found the plans on how to build a wind generator that we were looking for. … and what’s more he sent us pictures of the one he had just built!
We were very excited as Bill is a weekend project kind of guy, and if he could figure it out… well we were sure we could build a wind generator too.
Andre’ and I now had plans to go on, and we knew by Bill’s success that they worked. We were especially excited about the price of $20 too.
Finally…
We bought the book with high hopes and started in at making our own wind generator. Bill was right, the plans were easy to follow and thankfully step-by-step.
Our son, Andre’ who is 12 had no trouble following the plans. The parts were readily available and in a lot of cases we were able to use material we already had at home. The body of the wind generator was built out of metal that was once our washing machine. The tail assembly was made from the same stock.
The blades, which we thought would be the most difficult to build (find the right pitch, attaching it to the generator assembly?) turned out to be not that difficult at all. The book showed us exactly what to do and how to do it.
We even found a great solution to the expensive tower problem. Old TV towers are everywhere these days and we found a 40 foot model that the owner actually ‘paid’ us to take down. “Oh! Keep that thing will you” he said. We smiled and said, “yes sir”, knowing that our wind generator now had found a place to call home.
Up and Running !
Our newly built wind generator now sits on top of the rebuilt TV tower spinning away producing power for our home. Andre’ thinks it’s a lot nicer than Bill’s wind generator too.Well, Bill did a nice job, it's the picture at the right. Why not build one nicer than ours?
Send us the photos of your completed project and we will put them on the website!
We had a lot of fun learning how to build a wind generator. All it took was finding the right plans to set us on the right path.
We could have spent thousands on a new wind generator but why? At the small cost of $20 we had the challenge of building our own.
Included in the book was also a source of free batteries that we had not considered. We looked into it and sure enough 'Free Batteries!'
Since Batteries are at the heart of every renewable energy system we were very happy to find this advice along with our plans on how to make a wind generator. This advice alone saved us hundreds of dollars, all that for $20!