I was wondering if anybody has experience with generating their own electricity via wind, water and\or solar. I'm wanting to get into this. Thinking of starting off small, just powering a few select appliances, but eventually I would like to live completly off the grid. But here's the problem - I have only basic electrical skills and no idea where to start... I could manage a simple generator and 120V converter dealy, but how would one go about powering their entire house??
i haven't looked into it, but there are certain companies around somewhere that convert you house to solar, by attaching solar panels to your roof
How much power do they generate? ...That'd be nice if they could generate enough to power the entire house. It'd be nice if everyone could have them. The we wouldn't need to worry about power plants and all that jazz.
hmmm solar power is relativley simple ive heard, but a little pricey to get started, but all power is. i bet it pays itself off easily in time and in karma. just google it and you can find all sorts of solar products you probably had no idea about. i imagine powering an entire house would be a little more complex and difficult to achieve, but not too hard probably. and yeah power plants suck, oil and coal have staggering effects on the environment and are not sustainable practices at all. you know burning a lamp for a year burns like seventy BARRELLS of oil? now just multiply this by all the people who leave lights on unconsciously at night on their porches and inside their houses, and then street lights, and your talking something that doesnt make much sense at all considering the price per barrell has reached its highest price recently. then you have to factor in all the christmas light displays and the countless other senseless and wasteful things were doing at this point in history, and you got a lot of destructive and fucked up shit going on. and nuclear power is absolutley horrible for this world of ours. especially considering that our nuclear power plants are not monitored at all(so much for homeland security), and totally vulnerable to terrorist attacks or any kind of attack. i think future generations, assuming there are any, are gonna be really pissed off at all the work were creating for them. its sordove fun to fix shit though, things would be boring if we lived in a perfect world. but DAMN, our world is crying out for a lotta change right now.
backwoods home magazine just had an article on how to make your own wind turbine recently. and mother earth news just had on on micro-hydro systems. as far as solar goes..... you need to figure out how many watts your home consumes and buy the appropriate number and type of photovoltaic panels...plus you need an inverter and batteries or a connection to the grid for storing the electricity. more to come..... i'm currently studying renewable energy.
Our home is off grid and powered by solar and wind with a generator backup for the calm, dark winter months. The real trick is to reduce your power requirments. Get rid of the Microwaves, hair driers, big screen TVs, high wattage light bulbs, electric hot water heaters, etc. etc. Go way basic. It costs a fortune to set up to power your average American household with an alternative energy system. Check out www.homepower.com
I do know that any electrical motor works in reverse also. So if you can mechanically turn the motor you will creat current in the wires. This is basically the principle behing wind na dwater generators. So you could probably buy a used electrical motor ad experiment with it in this way to see what you come up with.
