Green Energy

I would advise you to have a look at the "Piggott" wind turbine. These are turbine that you can build and assemble from standard components with a bit skill and few friend or neighbors to rise the pole.

They are also more performant than most commercial small scale wind turbine that you can buy.

Even if you end up buying a commercial turbine I would still advise you to get the book, it gives a lot of information about wind turbines, and it's probably one of the best source of information for small scale turbine available.

One thing really important of course is to have regular strong wind. You can have a have a general idea of the wind in your area using Global wind atlas.

But wind can vary a lot in the same area so before you commit to installing few turbines, if you want to make sure tge investment is worth it, I would definitely advise you to put an anemometer on a pole at 1.5 time the high of the surrounding obstacle close to where you imagine installing the turbines. And wait a few months or ideally a year.

From this data you will know how much energy you can expect from wind turbines.

Maybe form a group with some neighbors and install a big wind turbine near your houses?

There seem to be some promising upcoming vertical wind turbines for small scale use, but AFAIK they didn't make it to the market yet.

IMHO the foremost questions are:

• How much space is available?

• Is it a flat place, or a cluttered place? In a cluttered landscape, wind is turbulent. If wind is turbulent, a turbine spends a lot of time turning into wind, and less time producing. Also, good quality laminar-flowing wind is high up then, typically out of reach for a single household. :(

If the landscape is flat, that favours trying with wind.

A wind turbine's power is determined by the wind speed and the swept area (the square of the radius). Efficiency is determined by flow qualities (laminar is way better than turbulent) and airspeed on the airfoil (long rotor blades are more efficient, but bigger, more dangerous, more difficult to handle, etc).

I second the advise to check out a wind atlas, and see the turbine designs of Hugh Piggot - if not to copy, then to learn what is worth buying. :)

Myself, I rely on vertical solar panels in winter. They do produce a lot less (from November to February, I have to charge my car in town). I have only one experimental wind generator, which is sadly a joke. It's a vertical axis turbine on a 5 meter mast with an e-bike motor at the top. Wind is collected by an array of stainless steel salad bowls. Due to low swept area and low airspeed, it's enough to make a few flashlights work. :D

Allegedly more panels is cheaper than small scale wind. It just does not make a lot of sense to have small scale wind due to scaling and very low spread leading to immense prices. (If bought off the shelf)

You could add solarthermal units in order to assist your heating this may be viable but is very specific to your home. There also might be wierd regulations when it comes to wind power depending on where you life.

Swept area and wind speed increase exponentially with size and height. So a single 5kW wind turbine will almost always be more cost effective than five 1kW wind turbines.

As others have said, without the height of a utility-grade turbine, you'll need to study the wind on your property to find where the wind is strongest and most consistent so you don't put a turbine in a dead spot. If your property is adjacent to an open field, that's probably a good place to start.

If I didn't just talk you out of consumer-grade turbines, I'd suggest checking out these guys: https://windandsolar.com/wind-turbine-generators/

And their Youtube channel, where they explain why their turbines are the way they are: https://m.youtube.com/user/MissouriWindandSolar

And as always, Energy Sage has great advice: https://www.energysage.com/about-clean-energy/wind/small-wind-turbines-overview/

I watched a video or two on Youtube where an engineering dude (maybe a professor) made cooling fin boxes for his solar panels that made them way more efficient. They had fans inside that would switch on when the temp got high enough. The efficiency was improved so much that it more than covered the draw of the fans running.

I've been a bit curious about this recently, a good start would be collecting some anemometer data at the location that the turbine would be going up, for finer details on how much power will be generated. They can be a bit expensive so i might do a project at some point making a home made one with cheap components and an open source API for extracting data. Then looking into what your build would be. Vertical wind turbines might be good for suburbia (likely what i would build) and horisontal for larger land sizes that could go up on higher poles. I still need to do more research and prep work so take everything Ive said with a grain of salt, but Im looking forward to working on this stuff over the next few months.

I looked into this a while back and here are some of the issues:

You need good wind.

You need to get the turbines up really high to get good, consistent wind.

They produce a lot less per $ than solar.

They are loud. Loud enough to disrupt your sleep and the nature of your area.

In short, invest in expanding the solar you’ve got and batteries over wind.