 In A Word...Peanuts!
If you have come to the table with little knowledge of how wind power works then you'll have one question on your mind with regard to building a wind turbine. Cost? Building your homemade wind turbine can be seriously cost effective depending on how creative and resourceful you get. The parts which will generally cause you the most expense are the batteries and alternator/generator. However these parts are the sorts of things you may have laying in the shed. Car batteries are easy to come by and alternator/generators can be easily found with a little resourcefulness and if not then on ebay. Get down the local scrap yard and you'll be surprised at the gems you may find.
To give you an idea, a student recently built a homemade wind turbine. Cost entailed...£20 using parts from an old bike frame and wheel bearings, a Ford Fiesta battery, a magneto from a Vespa and some peices of wood. This homemade wind turbine can output 11.3 watts of power which is enough energy to power a radio for 30 hours or lighting for 63 hours.
So you get the idea. A little forward thinking and you can get most of the parts you need for nothing. However we recommend you budget around £50-100 and you should easily be able to complete your project with that.
As for some recommendations for alternator/generators some of the best you can use are made by Ametek. Look on ebay for the following models,
Ametek 30VDC - 30VDC at 325 RPM
Ametek 40VDC - 40VDC at 1050 RPM
Ametek 50VDC - 50VDC at 1200 to 1800 RPM
Ametek 99VDC - 99VDC at 535 RPM
 Treadmill motors often will do the trick as well. You're looking for motors that produce high voltage at low revs per minute, i.e. 30V at 300 RPM.
As for your turbine blades, they can be made cheaply from PVC pipe. Get down the local building merchants or better still building site and see what you can find. Ideally some 6" PVC pipe will do the trick.
So as you can see homemade wind turbines cost nothing if you keep your eyes open and start hoarding useful material. You could easily end up with enough scrap parts to build several wind turbine. Cost?....peanuts! |
