DIY Wind Turbine - Part 1 - Introduction

Jesus Christ (don't take that the wrong way, i am an athiest), had my electricity bill for the month, £78 (WTF)... and most of this must be from the use of my computers and 'Always On' broadband (i have started turning  this off when not in use which will get me in the habbit). There has to be a cheaper way to generate at least a portion of my electricity requirements, even if i offset my computer requirements this would be a large portion of my expenditure and carbon foot print?

I must say that the green issue also plays a lot on my mind but having to fork out thousands of pounds on a commercially available system is not justification enough, especially when you could fabricate your own system for a fraction of the cost and be doubly green by building it from recycled components.

So i started researching wind turbines, as there is always a prevailing wind where i live, our house is located on an exposed valley wall that heads to the sea. I was shocked to find that systems for purchase were very expensive, with basic systems, around £1500, not even having battery storage or quantification of generated electricity so it can be sold back to your energy supplier. With this initial expense and the fact that any generated electricity that is not used would be lost, does not make this a very efficient system that would take years to pay itself back.

Much of the information that i found favoured constructing the wind turbine yourself from high voltage permanent magnet DC motors, and self made turbine blades. The higher the voltage, and the lower the RPM of the motor, the better for this application as you want to generate as high a voltage as possible at a low RPM, this enables your turbine to start generating power at lower wind speeds... so i started looking around for a motor with these characteristics. Athough your home mode system will be a little less efficient than a purpose built system, it will cost next to nothing in comparison to build.

I decided that with the saving in building the system myself i could afford to buy some batteries for storage and a suitable inverter for converting my 12V DC battery into usable 240V AC, this will make it very easy to connect most of my computer equipment.