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.

That is pretty hard to believe! My father has solar panels that cover most of the back roof and he only covers 30% of his electric costs each month (via selling back to the grid). Also, he discovered after Hurricane Ike that when the electricity coming into the house is interrupted, the system does not work. I am not trying to discourage anyone from looking into alternative energy though as I believe that every little bit helps.

Hmm, maybe he was using dramatic hyperbole. Or maybe I remembered wrong and he didn't net a positive outflow, but I do remember more precisely him saying that the usage reader would reverse directions when he was outputting energy at the moment. I don't know if that's how it works, exactly, but I'd sure like to see my electric meter run backwards...

Too bad with your Dad's experience. You'd think that'd be enough panels to really make a bigger difference!

I haven't checked into it myself, but thought that a lot more than an $800 windmill would be needed... more along the lines of a $10K investment.

Otherwise, everybody would be doing it!

Agreed, those small generators are more of a hobby than a home power solution. They are a great idea for running an irrigation pump in a farmers field or other very specific uses.

A larger tower (it's foundations & guy wires) costs a lot more, a usefully sized generator costs significantly more and one must also factor in a very large battery bank & a rectifier to change your batteries DC power into usable AC power. I suspect Mark is not far off from the correct cost but, honestly, I a have not looked into newer, possibly more efficient, technologies.

Well I found a dealer just outside of Waterloo, Ontario. I gave them a call and left a message. I'll keep you posted on any info I get.

http://www.laminarenergy.com/index.aspx

paul

Sounds like your already past the general inquiry stage but for others, here is where I started looking for info a couple of years ago. Some good starting info here.

Small Wind Energy

When I built my house two years ago, I put in an Electric Boiler for heat as I was thinking wind or geothermal but I ran out of budget for the large startup cost for geothermal and wind just technology wasn't quiet ready for me yet. So far, I'd say my heating bills are just very slightly better than oil heat but I am very happy with it's tiny size, quiet running noise (biggest noise is the relay clicking on or off), no oil tank to be inspected risk leaks, no flu to get cleaned and most importantly, it ties in nicely with future plans for wind energy or is I'm set for a simple swap out for geothermal.

A neighbor who is trying to cash in on government incentive funds asked me to be a startup site for a tower so I know I have good wind potential but he was looking for a commercial size tower which was just going to be to big for my 1,&1/3 acre lot and my neighbors would have reallly hated me. for spoiling their water view.

I heard that some of them get pretty loud, too.

Not that you couldn't mask that with an EP-800.

As long as neither of them make the brown note.

Nope.
Just involves wind passing.

Remember Mark, when you go to the doctor That's not what he said when he exclaimed "I want to listen to your heart."

You know, I'm dissapointed in the response to my response.

If I say so myself, it was damn funny.

Ponch would think so.

Murph, your excused from this beratement.

But the "i's didn't have hearts on the top, so I had ignored it.