Home Wind Power

The wind has been used as a power source for centuries all over the world. Over the years this technology has been refined and applied to commercial power generation.

Home wind power systems soon followed and as time passed these alternative energy solutions have gotten more efficient and less expensive every year.

Current wind systems provide a great way for the average homeowner to generate free power for their home from a passing breeze.

Early Windmills

Early wind systems were built to catch the wind with large blades. The earliest versions of these windmills used blades made of reeds to block the wind and turn a central shaft.

Click Here for the Ultimate Guide to Generating Your Own Wind Power

This shaft was then connected to a grinding stone to process grain. As these systems matured this initial design was modified to use cloth and eventually wooden blades to increase the amount of energy these windmills generated.

Modern Wind Turbines

Modern wind turbines are based on these same principles and instead of using the energy they extract from the wind to process grain or pump water, their spinning shaft is connected to a generator to produce electricity.

Early versions of these modern wind turbines were used commercially by power utilities in areas with strong consistent winds to generate power for their customers. These commercial models were huge, with blades spanning 100 feet or more and required massive winds to orient and spin these blades.

Residential Wind Power

Eventually this technology was scaled down slightly and introduced as a residential solution. The challenge with these early residential models of home wind power turbines was that they were based on their larger commercial counterparts.

This meant they needed a strong and consistent wind to spin them and this required them to be mounted on a large tower to get the proper access to this wind. This caused problems in many neighborhoods as these large wind turbines and towers generated many complaints.

Modern versions of home wind power turbines have been completely redesigned and provide a smaller, quieter and much more efficient solution for a residential setting.

These current wind turbines have been built to take advantage of the lower velocity winds typically found in a residential neighborhood and can produce quite a lot of power from these smaller breezes.

Because of their reduced size they no longer require a tower for proper placement and many of them can be mounted directly to the home’s roof.

Residential Wind Power Benefits

All of these changes are a welcome improvement to these home wind power turbines and because of this they have steadily grown in popularity. Even though they typically don’t generate as much power as a larger solar power system, they can operate for longer portions of the day.

Where solar power is really only operating at its peak output for roughly 6 hours of the day, a wind turbine will generate power as long as a breeze is blowing. This allows them to produce a fairly large amount of power over the course of a 24-hour period.

Many homeowners install one of these home wind power solutions in tandem with a solar power system and these two solutions compliment each other very well.

In fact most modern solar power systems are built to accommodate adding a home wind power turbine and can incorporate any power delivered by the system into the power it supplies to your home. This means you won’t have to worry about adding any extra equipment if you decide to install a wind turbine on your home. You can simply connect it to an existing solar power system and enjoy the extra power it generates.