We appreciate the link to our eduhosting.org website that Home Power graciously offered us, and suggest you read a few issues of their magazine for some really neat conservation articles and some good ideas on how to modify home equipment for alternative energy.

Yes, you can unplug with wind for about $1000.00 and a bit of elbow grease.

Let's do the math for a second:

• The wind maps and NOAA Wind Data show that obtaining 10 knots of AVERAGE wind is not difficult. This means 10 knots, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The 'average' indicates that some days it will be blasting 40-50 knots and others it will be dead calm, but the average for the entire year, all day long, is 10 knots.

• Now if your wind is better, (i.e. Hawaii has great wind), you can expect to spend even less. A person in any reasonable area of Hawaii could actually unplug from the grid for about $500.00, but let's use the weak wind, 10 knot example here:

• Using this '10 knot average', and the Wind vs Watts calculator little old NASA Jerry gave us for the website, we see that with a 12 foot airfoil, in 10 knots, you make about 179 watts of power.

  '12 feet?!?' you cry. 'I can't trust a home made 12 foot prop!' Sure you can. It all depends on how well you pay attention in our class. The airfoils themselves are rather easy to make (and cheap). The balancing is not brain surgery...quite simple in fact. And the labor, taken 1 generator at a time, spread out over time as you purchase a new gen to match your newly finished prop, is quite affordable...not much more than one month of utility bills for a family of 5.

• That 'Editor' once chided me, saying 'a real system' etc., and I have to remind both you and him, that PAUL GIPE is an internationally recognized wind gen expert and my 'real system' has kept me off the grid for 5 years. I really don't understand why anyone would do it any other way unless their region is completely windless. Actually the Editor sells solar panel ads for a living for Home Power Magazine (don't go there if you want unbiased advice that saves you money), so we understand his inability to do the math and unwillingness to educate his readers. We offered to give him the prop carving class FREE for folks to download, and he refused. Go figure.

• What this means is that a 12 foot diameter prop can, on average 24/7/365 days a year, make 4296 (call it 4300) watts of power per day, or 4.3kwh...it takes an entire day to do it, but it does it just fine.

• Set up FOUR of these and you have 17184 watts PER DAY from these rigs.

• Multiply that by 30 days and you have 515520 (about 500 kwh) per month; plenty for a wasteful family of five people.

• How much are the generators? We have them at our site for about $250-$300.00 - you need 4 of them.

• How much are the airfoils? You make them with the $19.95 class for less than $50.00 each (premium hard wood mohogany) or about half that if you use douglas fir....roughly $100.00 total.

• If you don't want to make your own blades with the $19.95 class, fine; we can make them for you. The price goes up a bit, but our work, our customer feedback and the beauty, quiet performance and power of our airfoils is known worldwide.
  
  
  We make the most beautiful airfoil
  on planet Earth.

  Nothing else compares

  ...actually nobody else really tries
  ...they are a labor of love to be sure.
  
  

• What about cables, batteries, inverters, grid ties? These are required whether you use solar or wind, so I have excluded them here for the moment. We will cover that in a second.

• Let's look at solar PV panels, shall we?

• In order to produce 515,520 KWH of power at 12 volts, would require 42,960 amps (actually amp hours). Divide that by 30 and you get 1432 amp hours per day.

• Assume you live in the desert and it is sunny and bright 365 days a year. Not realistic, but this is the best case for solar.

• Solar is notorious for only putting out for 6 to 8 hours a day. As the sun rises or sets, output drops dramatically. Only when the sun is overhead or nearly so, can you expect any reasonable output.

• So let's assume you have 8 solid hours of great sun, 365 days a year.

• You need to make 1432 amp hours for the day. Divide that by 8 and you get 179 amps worth of solar panel production, hour after hour. Perhaps you bought a 'solar tracker' and wasted even more of your hard earned cash on this expensive rig. But you are getting 8 hours of great output per day for your 365 days in your sunny desert.

• Solar panels cost about $100 per amp; so that is $17,900 worth of gear up there on your roof...about 20 times the cost of the wind generator that did the same job.

• This assumes there are zero cloudy days; unlikely. Which means you will have to add 30% more panels if you expect 30% of your days to have substantial cloud cover to keep up with the wind generator system.

• Now let's add the cables and battery and inverter. No matter which system you choose, you will need these items to get useable AC power into your home.

• The cables; (welding cables are best), are not cheap. Depending on how far you need to run them (usually 50 feet minimum per rig), you can expect to spend $100-$300.

• The batteries; we will assume 2 volt forklift batteries (best battery to use), tied 6 in series, at $100.00 each is $600.00 per battery bank. You probably want at least one of these, perhaps 2 or 3 would be better. Again, whether you choose solar or wind, you need a place to store it.

• The inverters; many people think you need a $3000 inverter...don't make me cry. A $200-$300 inverter making 3000 watts works just fine. Get two or 3 of them and a few small 500-1000 watt inverters as well, for about $50.00 each and you have less than $1000.00 invested in this aspect of your system. They work fine; I have been off the grid for 5 years now with just such a system.

• Ok, the grid-tie: these are not cheap, but you only need this if you intend to sell power back to the utility company. If so, you aren't really investing in your 'energy independence', rather you are investing in your 'I want to be a utility company' business and this expense isn't really fair to add to either the solar or wind system. Just the same, expect to spend $1500.00-$4000.00 for this piece of gear.

• And remember, this is for a light 10 knot wind.

  If you live someplace windy, such as Hawaii, you could do it with 1/4 - 1/3rd the equipment or $300-$500 if you make your own airfoils, or less than $2000.00, batteries, inverter and everything, if you bought the gear in pieces and assembled it yourself. This is very easy to do. Read our testimonials and support feedback - page after page where our students and customers tell the world "...more support than my therapist!"

  THE REALITY Most folks don't have an extra $3000.00 - $6000.00 laying around. So we offer financing which lets you get started with a low down payment. And if you follow our advice and start with 1 tower and gen and get everything connected first, before expanding with more towers you can expand your system within your budget. The reality is IF YOU HAVE BETTER WIND (i.e. Hawaii and the Trades) you can actually do it for much, much less and probably have your entire system, from purchased airfoils and generator (no need to carve them if you don't want to), fat cables, a rather large battery bank and invertor, everything complete for less than $2000.00. Good wind means the payback period is less than a year! Whatever you do, don't go out and buy some weak, noisy hollow metal or carbon fiber airfoil...please...learn what works and what doesn't here before you spend a penny anywhere. Wood has the highest modulus of elasticity of darn near any material known to man. If you take care of it, your props will last longer than any other material and if you know how to make them from scratch, you are set for life! NASA Jerry is not some 'mythical figure'. He is a NASA Ames Physicist, a sailor who flies a 9 foot prop on his boat (huge) and he had 4 decades of wind tunnel testing, working on spy planes and ice, lightning and DNA experiments. The guy knows airfoils like Martha Stewart knows Stocks (ouch) and the lessons we teach you here are those he has taught us...enjoy the link...it is rare and you have a chance to learn a lot. The reality is the more you learn the more you save...it is really that simple. And the reality is, if you carve your own props and hunt for the components the way our class explains it, yes, one prop, one gen at a time, you can go off the grid and unplug permanently, even sell power back to the utility company, for just a hair over $1000.00 for the generator aspect of your rig, plus cables and batteries which are required no matter what kind of system you put together. The reality is that wind power has a much faster payback than solar P/V - up to 20 times faster. And that is the reality of wind power. The reality is humans will do whatever it takes to survive and sadly, the reality is that in this day and age, your education in wind power is required if mankind is going to thrive and our planet is going to survive in the coming decades.

  NOTE: many communities, Counties and even States and Provinces require that you spend enormous amounts of money on 'licensed installers' to set all this up. While I sympathize with you, the solution is really quite simple. 'You, your neighbors, your friends and your enemies, all go down to City Hall with picket signs, go to the County Supervisor Board meetings with video cameras, ask pointed questions, bring a 'friend' who is a licensed electrician and can do the job (it isn't difficult) and explain that under no circumstances are you going to be held hostage by your utility company and foreign oil and the elected officials who have a job because you folks gave it to them.

  It just makes me cry when I think about how easy this really is and how difficult government can make it. Do ya think they have an interest in seeing you buy oil? Naw....it couldn't be that!

• That said, it is a wise idea to have an electrician make sure you don't burn the place down. 500, 5000 or 500,000 watts of power is nothing to sneeze at.

• That's it...granted the batteries and inverters pushed the total to $2000-$3000, but the actual 'generator' side of the equation is still about $1000.00.