Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Wind Turbine?????

My wife and I have been reviewing our hydro / electrical bill over the last year and realized we could go on a wonderful vacation with the money we have spent. Our bill is in excess of $350 per month.

I live on a 1.1 acre lot with no trees that backs on to a farm field. To say the least, it can get very very windy here.

Has anyone looked into or has a wind turbine(s) to help offset or even eliminate this monthly cost? I have even heard that you can put electricity back into the grid and the hydro company pays you. Does that work in Ontario?

I was looking at Canadian Tire and noticed they had one for around $800, but no installation. It was rated at 400w.

How hard is it to install one of these? What do you need? Do you need to hire an electrician to hook it up? If I were to buy 3 of them would that give me 400w x 3 = 1200w. Is 1200w a lot? Do you need batteries for storage? Does anyone know of any dealers located in the Southern Ontario (London) area?

Sorry for the run on of questions, but I am a real novice here and just want to get informed.

paul

I have nothing to offer except my thanks for considering this green project. I'll stay tuned to see how it goes!

I do recall an interview with the actor Ian McKellen where he talked of his solar panels on his house in England. Usually he gave more power to the grid than he took, so the utility company gave him a check each month. How sweet is that?!

Only thing that I can add for sure is that you definitely will need an electrician to hook it up. Integrating it into your personal grid without feeding it back into the Utilities grid requires more than 'just 'plugging it in'.

It's even a bit more complex than adding a generator but in any case, consider this scenario. There have been cases where people simply 'plugged in' a generator to their electrical system during a power outage. Meanwhile, your friendly utility worker climbs the pole down the street to fix the problem causing the outage. Without taking precautions, you just electrocuted your hydro worker, possibly to death, if he forgot to double check things with his voltage detector.

Sounds like you are far enough in the country that local bylaws won't be an issue but might be worth checking into before purchasing equipment. Some places have added restrictions on heights and wattage and such for personal wind Turbines.

Just a couple of quickies, I'm looking forward to hear from an expert or someone with experience as I've been procrastinating on researching the same. our Government has been flip flopping on the idea of grants but it looks like they have flopped on residential grants in favor of businesses who don't even plan to distribute the resulting power locally. Considering our province has the highest electricity rates in Canada, using provincial dollars to promote businesses that won't benefit us locally, kinda burns me a bit. Green yes, but why not green and beneficial?

It's about a 10A service, not quite enough to run a 15A circuit by itself.

Or to look at it another way, we pay about $0.063 a KWH here, so every hour they would be pushing the maximum, you'd be clawing back $0.06-$0.08 roughly from the electric company.

Bren R.

Paul, I would check on the gov't websites, I recall there was some info on alternative power/grants ect when I had a look at solar panel installs last year.

6 cents!!! We are at 11cents here.

Lotta hydroelectric generators here. We've got running water, you've got dinosaur gas.

And MB Hydro still wants us to conserve, because they get a better price selling it to the US than selling it to us.

Bren R.

ALL YOUR POWER IS BELONG TO US

What gets me is a few years back when Natural Gas peaked in price the companies obviously had to bump up the cost of electricity since we use NG to generate alot of it. Now that NG is at near all time lows, well recent lows anyway, the cost per kwh has stayed the same Have to love letting the 2 main and basically only players in our market go relatively unrestricted.

I know nothing about wind turbine power generation.

But I would venture a guess to say that 400w is a tiny fraction of the amount of power you'd actually need to make it work. I don't know how many kW of power you use a month, but you'd need to figure that out as a starting point. But yes, if you had enough batteries and wind you could potentially be completely off the grid. But I would guess that most folks that do their own wind power have a moderate battery capacity to get them through lulls (or switching on that A1400-8) but stay connected to the grid, either to back-feed it with wind energy or to draw power from it when they need it.

At one point I read a news article about wind power, and it had online tools where you could plug in your electical usage and location (for wind-energy calculations) and it would spit back how many kW worth of wind turbine power you'd need, and estimated costs for installing it. My electrical bill is between $50 and $150/month (our home is heated by natural gas). When I plugged in the calculations on that site, all I remember is that to get the electricity I'd need it would cost about $15,000 for the mills (I think it was two of X capacity) & power equipment.

If/when we ever move out-of-town to an open area, we'd like to build a home and we would seriously consider doing that. Tacked on to the cost of building, it's not that much. And it'd be pretty cool to be able to generate your own power.