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How to Build a 17-ft Wind Turbine
agentfive writes "The people over at Treehugger have found an amazing little article on how to build a 17ft - 3kW+ output Wind Turbine. Apparently this is the latest project of OtherPower.com and the site has a variety of other engergy saving/producing projects including a Homebrew Maytag Gas Battery charger."
I'll take 2 please, mounted side by side, in opposite directions, my current window fan just isn't cuttin the mustard...
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
DIY stories so far today:
Homebuilt 19" Mini-ITX Server Rack
The Floating Powerbook
A Practical Guide to DIY LCD Projectors
How to Build a 17-ft Wind Turbine
And it's only 2:45pm EST.
Did Bob Vila donate a large sum of money to Slashdot or something?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
and what use might a windtunnel in my apartment be? It's not like I'm designing fighter-jets or the new Ford here.
:-)
Wind Turbine, not Wind Tunnel. You can stick it on your roof and run a cable to your computer. Poor man's power, as it were.
Don't feel too bad, though. I misread the headline the first time as well.
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Hey, all I want to know is how many birds it'll kill...we have a real starling problem where I live.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I like some of the sites they link to. Some useful stuff. Like how to make a rocket out of a match.
http://www.matchrockets.com/
Before internet, I once payed $2 out of the back of a comic book to learn that.
I've been looking for something like this. Now I just need a death ray to use on my homeowner's association and I'll be good to go.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
... to power their websites.
slashdot effect in... er... effect.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Bad link in the article text. It's here.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I've been following the work of the Otherpower.com folks for a while now. They're damn good DIY engineers. Not only are their wind turbines quite nice, but my interest was also piqued by their use of single-cylinder Lister engines. Coupled with a biodiesel recipe, it looks like they can run their entire shop for 8 hours on a single gallon of carbon-neutral gas.
One of my lifelong goals is to live simply, on a large plot of undeveloped land somewhere. I'm glad there are people like the Otherpower folks who are paving the way as far as alternative energy creation, and being considerate enough to document their work as they go.
May the threads progress competently.
with a more accurate headline.
The website doesnt really show YOU how to build one.
Rather, it shows you photos of the various steps taken by someone else to build one.
Sure, you could probably look at the photos and read the descriptions and use your brain to fill in the missing details and build one yourself, but there would be additional work/calculations needed.
It's still a pretty frickin cool project though.
I've never really gotten an answer to this question:
What are the implications or potential problems from removing energy from Earth's weather systems? Is the energy we're removing negligible enough to be ignored? Could it potentially change weather patterns by blocking/slowing wind?
Do we have any information about changes in weather from other man-made things such as cities? I've heard beltways can cause enough heat to slow/redirect some weather. (I know that birds of prey use updrafts caused by hot highways to help them gain altitude using less energy)
Any reliable sources for this kind of information, or are all sides biased?
~D
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Here
I keep telling myself I need to learn how to weld. I really do
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The only wattage mentioned is "36 watts" from turning it by hand, and using not a WATTMETER, but a voltmeter. Voltmeters are notoriously inaccurate at measuring "wattage", especally of weird waveforms you're likely to get from a homebrew generator. Also if thye were turning it by hand as hard as they could, the output should have been around 250 watts, assuming an average efficiency generator. So if we use these figures, it looks like their homebrew generator is only about 12% efficient.
This is not a great example of good DIY-ing.
I don't know about your part of the world, but the limits in my county are that the tower must be short enough that if it fell it would land inside your property lines. I have 2 acres, the narrow part of which is about 350 ft. so I can have (in theory) a 125 ft. tower (although IIRC the FAA gets to intervene above a certain height -- you know -- the red "don't fly into me lights").
As for noise, I don't know about this homebrew thing, but there is a commercial windmill about 10 miles from my house in minnesota. It is 250 ft high with a rotor span of 150 ft. It produces an annual average of 1.2 million kWhr (enough to power about 200 average homes). You can drive right up to it, which I did the other day. I had to turn of my radio and my carn engine to hear it AT ALL. It made a soft "whoof whoof" sound that was audible when I was right underneath it, but could not be heard from 1 block away.
By the way, here's an idea that I had (it could be completely unrealistic, but I'd be interested in knowing what others thing).
:)
Solar water heating isn't rare, and sometimes home heating with solar-heated water is done. However, any excess heated water during the summer (especially from a home-heated system) simply goes to waste.
Backtrack to the 1600s. A "cold drink" craze swept through major cities in Europe. The method of chilling drinks was quite simple: they added saltpeter to a water bath (an endothermic reaction), and cycled enclosed drinks through the sub-zero degree saltwater. When the saltwater had warmed, they would evaporate out the (at the time, quite valuable) saltpeter in evaporation tanks.
Concept: Use the wasted solar water heat to help evaporate out a warm salt solution by raising it to near boiling. Warm, concentrated saltwater from a heat exchanger inside the home is piped through the solar heating ducts, raising it to boiling/near boiling. From there, it enters a chamber, possibly kept at slightly lower pressure by a low power fan, to encourage salt precipitation. Every few minutes, a scraper runs in the chamber to stir up the salt into the oversaturated solution, making a salt slurry. The evaporated water runs through an outside radiator, condensing and cooling to near ambient outside temperature. Both the condensed water and salt slurry recombine inside the house and run through the heat exchanger again.
The obvious questions are:
* Would it work at all?
* Would the power requirements for circulating the water, running the scraper every few minutes, and potentially running a low power fan to maintain lower pressure be more efficient than running a compressor?
* Would the energy savings, if present, justify the modifications to a conventional solar heating setup?
I really don't know the answer to these.
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