Any more details about installation, cost, upkeep, electricity generated… would be great.
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What is your current power usage per day? What are your local regulations? Any neighborhood covenants? How close are your neighbors? Noise like some wind turbines can create in suburbs are not always appreciated. How high are the trees? Any large buildings close by? What is your budget?
Look at the offerings in the alternative energy section of http://www.northerntool.com They have 2 different styles of systems that might work for you.
Another type of wind plant is vertical axis. One style of VAWT is sold by http://www.wepower.us/
Once you know what your power demand is, you can determine what size of power generation you need to charge your battery bank at the same time you are drawing a moderate load from the system.
The amount of money in your budget once all other things are known might be the determining factor of what system is “best” in your area. One way to help make it work is to do what you can to reduce your current power consumption patterns.
You can also find some useful info here too:
http://www.awea.org/
The key is to understand what you need, and the limitations of any system. Do the research yourself rather than rely on a magazine like homepower. It is “ok” magazine, but it is written more as a compilation of sales brochures.
Save your money, use the web. You can actually find a lot of information about the strong points and weakpoints of various maufacturers by seeing what people have to say on youtube. Those systems that fail get a lot of coverage there. There is also a lot of information on what works well there too.
There is going to periodic maintanence on your batteries, periodic inspection of the wind turbine blades (especially composites). routine inspections of the tower, the wiring between the wind plant and the house, these will vary from every week for batteries to annualy.
A wind plant by itself may not be adequate for power generation depending on your usage patterns, weather, and how much constant wind you get.
Make no assumptions. Your total energy output for a month may not be as great as you thought it would be.
Installation costs vary greatly, and if you have no mechanical aptitude of your own, expect towards the higher end of any cost estimate from any installation contractor.
If you have a high degree of aptitude, you can save yourself some money, the only thing is most of those types of how to’s you have to search out on the web, homepower magazine rarely has any of those, they are few and far between when they do.
Hey Doc, I know just the filling for that cavity. What you need is a periodical that covers home grown energy devices, writes articles on wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and such, and does comparisons on all of these devices from time to time. Home Power Magzine is the one we’ve been reading for over 10 years. We started reading it back then, now our home is completely powered by the wind and sun. Every few months, they take one device related to renewable energy, such as a solar panel, then they list all the commercially available units, all their specs, warranties, and so forth. They did one on wind turbines a couple years ago I think. When we first put up a wind turbine, it had lots of problems. Since then we read comparisons in Home Power, and now we have a Southwest Windpower H-40 on our tower. It has worked quite well the last 9 years. You might be in a different environment, or have different expectations for your wind turbine, so a different one might work better for you. If you subscribe to that magazine, you can use the search engine at their website to look up that article in the archives.
I’ll list a few other sources below as well that you might find interesting. Good luck, and take care, Rudydoo