Homebrew and scrap heap wind power ideas

[Marianne]

What ideas have you had or heard about DIY projects with wind? Maybe this could be the place that you could post all your weird, whacky, will-it-work ideas. Anything goes here, and the simplier, the better.

Hubby threw out this idea earlier when I was on the solar thread - it's for charging a battery for later use:

What if -- you lived in a windy area, could you hook up a big wind turbine type roof vent or squirrel cage fan to use as a trickle charger? Weld a rod to it, put a coupler on the end of the alternator shaft (to the rod of the roof vent). Then hook up the alternator to the battery? Then you'd have a wind powered trickle charger. In theory. Might have to play around with a pulley system so it'd be easier to get the speed up on the alternator - like a larger pulley on the 'wind turbine' and a smaller one on the alternator. I think you need about 750 RPM (?) on the alternator to get it to act like a trickle charger.

Could you use it to power LED lights in your shop or outbuilding? Power the heated dog water dish? You know, simple things at first, and maybe build from there.

 

[Wifezilla]

I saw a story on a design made for urban areas. It was shaped like a double helix, but was horizontal. I always thought something like that would work well on my roof, but have no idea to to make it work. I will see if I can find a picture.

 

[k0xxx]

As wind hits the roof and moves upward and over it, it picks up velocity. So a roof peak wind generator would certainly have faster air to work with. I'd like to see a long turbine (with the generator at one end) that ran along the peak and was perhaps capped with a smaller roof so that it blended into rest of the roof.

One of the problems that I see is the inability to take advantage of changing wind directions. Forgive the crappy attempt of illustration below. :/

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[Wifezilla]

The helix shape is supposed to make up for the shifting wind. Still looking for that article, but there are some cool ideas here...
http://www.instructables.com/pages/...m6t&cof=FORID:11&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=wind+turbine

 

[Marianne]

Cool beans! (hey, more wind!)

I like the simplier, although less efficient VAWTS. No tall towers to install, can be caged to keep birds and other critters from harms way. The way I look at it, any watt I can create myself is one less that I have to buy.

I can't find the link I had for one using bicycle wheels for the starting framework to put the PVC blades on. And I better keep searching as I scrounged up three bicycles just for those wheels and my husband is tired of looking at them!

Thanks for the link Wifezilla, lots to look at there.
And k0xxx, I agree. It'd be ideal if you could make something that looked good, too. At this point, I couldn't add anything to our roof. I think that stuff has to be factored in while building, or beefed up accordingly.

And as my husband keeps telling me whenever I bring up some 'idea', he has bigger fish to fry right now. True, the rest of the drywall up would be a good thing...