Before you buy a Wind Turbine kit for the roof of your house, there's a few questions that you should ask yourself.
Before you buy a wind turbine kit you might want to ask yourself a couple of questions:
Firstly you need to identify what you would like to power using a small wind turbine. If it's a small project then the Budget Kit is ideal. However, if it's power for lighting and a couple of 3-pin sockets you want then you'd need something like the Deluxe Kit (coming soon).
Your turbine, if land based, should have a good south west perspective to catch the prevailing winds. Buildings cause turbulence so wind turbines should be placed as far away from structures as possible (taking into account the Voltage drop on the power cable). Generally the higher the turbine is the better the performance will be.
The turbine output will vary in voltage as the wind gusts therefore a battery is required so power can be stored and distributed at a constant voltage.
However, that's not all there is to the electrical system. A Charge regulator is a vital peice of equipment in the system as this device will monitor the batteries charge and turn the wind turbine power off when charge is complete. Without this device your battery can overcharge which results in battery temperature rising and, in the case of a wet cell battery, excessive gassing will occur causing the battery cells to dry up permanently damaging your battery!
At this point there is a choice, you may use the DC Voltage straight from the battery to run devices that operate on the same Voltage (for a 12V system you might like to use some 12V bulbs for lighting).
If you would prefer to use the wind power in mains (230Vac) circuitry, then the only way to do that would be to use an inverter. There are many different types of inverter ranging from square wave output (cheap and cheerful) to sine wave inverters which provide power that is often cleaner than the mains it's self.
The standard kit is:
You can either make your own from our list of products available or...as if by magic...we created our own range of kits that have a great balance of equipment and have an eye on cost too!
