The Reasons to Build Small Wind Turbine
wind turbines
Small Wind Turbine. Recently, more people have begun to build small wind turbine as an alternative and free source of electricity for their homes. Here are some of the reasons why they do that.
Big Savings
One of the mainly reasons why people are looking into alternative energy sources of electricity to power their buildings is to cut back on the electric bills. The popular way is to tap the energy coming from the sun through the use of solar panels and also utilize this as a secondary source of electricity for home. The unfortunately thing is, solar panels relatively expensive. On the other hand, the amount you would need to build small wind turbines for your home is a lot cheaper.
Protect the Environment
Beside to cut back on the electric bills, the other reason why more people have chosen to build wind turbines in small size as an alternative source of electricity for their homes is ecological. The electricity which is provided by power plants to power the homes and other buildings in the United States are made possible by burning fossil fuels. The result product of burning these fossil fuels are greenhouse gases to be emitted into the environment which further contributes to the global warming. Wind turbines use the natural energy of the wind, thus no hazards products are released to the environment.
Easy Installation
It does not require trained personnel to build small wind turbine for your building. You can actually build the wind turbines by yourself. There are a large number of different articles over the Internet that would help you step by step about how to build small wind turbines in small size.
How Small Wind Turbine Work
Generally, there are two main types of small wind turbines; the Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines or HAWT which is the type commonly installed. In HAWT type, the shaft is parallel to the ground and mechanically simple that requires a small ‘footprint’ to mount the tower of wind turbine on ground. The other type, Vertical Axis Wind Turbines or VAWT has a shaft that is perpendicular to the ground and requires a larger ‘footprint’ to secure the wind turbine tower on ground.
The components of a small wind system are
- Rotor, it consist of shaft and blades;
- The generator/alternator, it produce electricity from the turbine rotor;
- The gearbox which is used to match rotor speed to the alternator/generator;
- The nacelle. This component protect the generator or alternator;
- And the tail vane of Yaw system which is used to align a HAWT with the wind however some yaw systems can be offset from the vertical axis.
Also, the other components usually are packaged as part of small wind turbine, such as
- the protection and control system,
- the wind turbine tower (guyed towers, tilt-up towers, and non-tilt-up or self-supporting towers)
and depending on the application, an additional ‘balance-of-system’ (BOS) are often sold separately and include
- inverter
- batteries,
- alternative source of electricity,
- rectifier,
- battery charger,
- monitoring system and
- circuit breakers, fuses, disconnect switches other safety gadgets
