The Challenges of a Wind Turbine on Your Home

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I have a turbine on my off-grid property that complements the solar nicely. It cost me very little to install and zero maintenance cost since I did the install myself and perform the almost non existent maintenance once a year myself as well. My turbine is 1800 watts and can outperform the solar during bad weather producing as much as a kilowatt/hour of electricity on those days, witch may not sound like much but when you are off-grid it can make all the difference. The cost of the turbine was less than $1000 plus the cost of the tower and the charge controller/diversion load. The charge controller I use is about $600 and I built the diversion load myself for under $500. I constructed the tower myself and I'm not totally sure on the cost of it, but it was one of the smaller costs. There is also wire and hardware of course. Once constructed the turbine system costs me nothing more than the solar array to maintain, although eventually I will have to replace bearings but I have them on hand and they were cheap. You just need to be willing to do everything yourself. I am planning to do a video on my install this spring to post on my channel.

Having worked in the small wind industry for 12 years, selling ~4000 small wind turbines, having one in my own yard for 14 years now, I would encourage everyone to install solar and forget wind, for the reasons Matt gave here. The 3 small wind manufacturers I worked for are long ago bankrupt and the goofy designs shown in the video won’t produce hardly any energy but will cost a lot. Large, utility wind makes sense because they’re hundreds of feet in the air with massive rotors.

I have a PIKA T701 1.7 kW wind generator from Maine that helps power my off-grid home. It’s been super efficient and reliable for over 5 years. Unfortunately GENERAC generator company bought the PIKA company and discontinued the wind generator line…but continued the battery and inverter line with their name on it. My machine is on the top of a ridge and uses a 30’ tilting tower. I sure hope someone picks up the rights to produce this beautiful-quiet-efficient machine. My system is a “hybrid” solar wind system and is 100% off grid. Winter brings helpful night and daytime wind generation. I’ve been a sustainable energy engineer for over 40 years…and will never be On-Grid. Good review!

20 years ago, solar panels were $4/Watt, and small-wind had a price advantage. Today solar panels are one-tenth their former price: 40 cents/Watt. This ranch property in the Mojave Desert came with a 10 kW grid-tie wind turbine, which pays the electric bill here. You need at least a couple acres, in a high-wind area, with no trees, buildings, or obstacles to block a strong, steady wind. That rules out 99% of homes. Also, even the best wind turbines wear out. There is really only one model, of one brand, that has proven to withstand the test of time at all, and even those have multiple "issues". I had to buy an identical turbine used, so I would have two on hand - one to run, one to rebuild. You need to hire a crane and experienced crew to swap out a turbine or do maintenance. Figure about $3-4 thousand just to pull down a turbine and fix or replace it. This model weighs over half a ton (1000 lbs) on a 120-foot tower. I also build my own small turbines, including the generators. This is an option if you are good with fabricating, are a naturally-talented engineer, and you know what you are doing. Again, that rules out 99.99% of people. The other "goofy" designs in the video are all total non-starters. People who are not in the industry have NO IDEA how bad these "alternative" designs are. They are completely worthless products of ignorance, period. Seriously, no matter how great they look, like that ridge-whatever, don't fall for it. Don't believe any numbers claimed for such toys. You need propellers to make good power. There is a reason all windfarm turbines look nearly identical.

I've been a consultant on wind and solar for ten years. Wind is not practical for 99 pct of homeowners due to the steady high winds needed to make small turbines economic. Wind makes sense at utililty scale, but at homeowner scale it's a niche application, used only in very windy places or as a supplemental source for long winter months with no sun. So basically your video is correct!

I like that the Ridge-Blade can be installed right along the ridge of a roof where you likely wouldn't have any solar panels; it allows both systems to be installed in parallel.

Thanks for another informative video. One alternative option not considered here is community ownership of large scale wind; where as others have pointed out the payback is much better due to the larger rotors and taller base. It’s an option worth exploring in many windier areas, either to compliment Solar and make up any shortfall you may have due to limited roof area for your panels or where there are total restrictions in apartment blocks etc. In these situations clubbing together to build a co-operatively owned wind farm (and or solar farm) are great options. We have a number of regional projects in the UK, where cloudy days are common on our small island but the wind blows a lot. There is also an innovative company called Ripple energy that is using its expertise to help develop new wind farms and offer them to the public for shared ownership through a co-operative model and partnering with energy suppliers to take the costs of the energy generated off those owners bills.

Thanks for the insight on wind power. A huge problem I have is both roofs on the house and garage are covered by big trees. So, I figured while solar panels on the lawn is a pretty limited option, I could supplement with wind power. For now, I am trying to make sure that sunk cost fallacy attitude I worry about is in check. So, the only direction I have taken thus far is building a decorative garden windmill if only to get an idea on how practical wind is for me. As a bonus, I could even repurpose the derrick the windmill comes with to install a proper wind turbine. Even though the derrick is a meager 12 feet tall, I have seen some promising signs to move forward. Getting the entire property off-grid is probably unlikely no matter what wind and/or solar kit I try to install, but if I can get a few power-hungry toys running off this build, that would be stellar.

After watching a few of your videos on renewable power generation, my thought has stayed the same. We're designing buildings to be more efficient in power use, but not power generation. Is there a future where a building is designed in an unconventional way where power generation is more efficient? As in, walls and roofs that collect wind and solar, basements that collect geothermal, floors and doors that collect kinetic, etc.

Dude, i've been fantasising about a roofridge windturbine for years.. awesome to see its in the works.

This makes so much sense. I have experimented with horizontal drum fans for energy generation and found this visually attractive over propeller fans including and the ease of protecting the fan drum with damper blades at high wind velocity's. The idea came to me some years ago from my heating and ventilation back ground.

Thanks! That's the exact video I was looking for, and it simply answered all my questions. At the first glance, a small wind turbine sounds like a perfect solution for a solar-powered house in my region, where it's often cloudy and during the winter solar panels are dead, covered by snow. But the problems and costs that such a turbine brings are making all this so unprofitable, that there is no surprise you don't see individual wind turbines around...

Matt, at 9:05 you didn't account for maintenance costs when calculating payback of wind. If you deduct $75 (1.5% of 5k) per year the payback period increases by over 50% increasing from 22yr to 34yr! That said, it took solar a long time to reach its current economic viability and I look forward to seeing where the winds of advancement take this technology!

2:24 The thing is, the area the blades cover doesn't affect the energy generates linear, but squared. Which means increasing the length of the blade increases the energy generated exponentially. So bigger wind turbines are way more cost effective than what you can put on your home.

As always great info. A friend in a remote cabin needed some power. I built a small solar panel that incorporated small squirrel cage fans on top connected to a generator, munted on tp of the 4 solar panels. Beneath the panels I looped black poly pipe for passive hot water and heating. As small as it was/is it worked. Thanks. Don

Here in west Michigan, during about 3 to 4 months in the winter, we have dark, heavy clouds or snow on the solar panels. However, often when it is overcast, the wind will blow for days. No solar power, but plenty of wind potential... I am convinced that there are areas where having both makes sense.

In 2004 I had NREL visit my Westminster CO home to verify whether or not to mount a wind generator. She taught me a valuable lesson in physics - Rule of thumb : 1) when wind hits an object such as a large tree or a house, then the force of the wind goes up in the air by four times the height of the object and then takes 10 times that distance to get back down to the ground to create the money making force. The good energy in urban neighborhoods is therefore over 100 feet in the air. 2). What wind you feel around your house is full of eddies, constantly changing direction which creates excessive stress and wear on the moving parts of the horizontal-form generator by forcing it to do 180 rotations many times a minute. Vertical generators handle this wind reversal better. I mounted 40 toy wind mills on my fences and corners of the house and yard and it was easy to see the wind changing direction 100s of times a minute. Some of the toys in the most turbulent areas were worn out in a few days, Most city building codes won't allow and mounting pole to exceed the distance of falling into the neighbors yard. Since most yards are small this eliminates the possibility due to code. She summarized that a good money making generator works best when your yard has a long clear unobstructed view toward the prevailing wind direction. Note: Effective professional research has already been done a long time ago

Thank you for coming back to this topic Matt. We live in rural Missouri. There are times when it's cloudy/overcast for days in a row and we're considering supplementing our solar. I was totally unaware of the yearly maintenance. I'm now confounded about how I would do maintenance if our windmill were 65 feet (19.5 m) high! After watching I still feel I'm not ready to take the step to wind power. I'm going to root for the ground based (edit typo: vehicles) vertical systems to become .... Everything we need.

I've been following the development of the archimedes turbine with hope for several years. Imagine every home in the neighborhood with one of those 'flowers' producing electricity. my concerns about solar are post-use pollution from toxic ingredients.