Friday, July 3, 2015

Wind Turbines for your Home - Free Electricity?

I was browsing through an outdoor/sporting goods type of catalog earlier today when I came across an interesting product for home use. It was a Nature Power brand that was selling Wind Turbines for free electricity. Yeah, nothing is free, let me tell ya; ha!

Anyway, they supposed to provide you with "extra juice" for your home or perhaps even meet all of your power requirements if you were a loner that was stuck in a remote area. The first one they were selling wasn't very powerful. The thing was rated at 400 watts with a monthly energy output at 12 mph of only 38 kWh. Well, okay, this must be close to free, right? Nope. Even this little baby wind turbine costs nearly 400 dollars! Wow, this really blows me away!

The second one illustrated in the catalog looked fairly impressive. It boasted about its maintenance-free design that would provide years and years of free service. This one was rated at 2,000 watts with a monthly energy output at 12 mph of 350 kWh. Hey, they said that was about 37% of the average household consumption. Not bad, I'll just buy three of these "free electricity" thingies just to be safe. Oh, they are over $2,000 dollars each and, well, the inverter is sold separately at nearly 200 bucks each.

Okay, so I can buy 3 separate wind turbines for about six thousand and five hundred dollars, plus another 5 or 6 hundred dollars for the inverters. From there, I should have enough free electricity for my home by only spending $7,000 dollars total! LOL! But hey, after 4 or 5 years of using them, the electricity would then become free. That is, if the damn things really did hold up to the test of time. Hmm...

Update (2021): Well, it has been a little over 6 years since I posted this, so I was going to do some price-checking on Amazon to see if anything has got better for this free electricity thing for your home... Okay, I see a 400-Watt Wind Turbine for 270 dollars without the tower tube, so I will need about 15 of these, and that will be a little over $4,000 dollars.  Hey, that sounds better... No, wait a minute... I'm reading the reviews for this product now... Okay, a guy tested it and said that with wind speeds of 8 to 20 mph, it only produces 200 watts. Great news! Now, I will need at least 30 of these for the home, assuming it is constantly windy outside for the rest of my life. Crap, that will be over $8,000 dollars even if the wind never stops blowing! What happened to that free stuff?

Alright, I'll check on a bigger one... Oh, this one is 1200 watts, but it only uses the wind turbine for 400 of those watts and solar power for the rest. The product description:  ECO-WORTHY 1200W 24V Solar Wind Generator System Complete Kit for Off-Grid/Home/Farm/Shed: 8pcs 100W Solar Panels + 400W Wind Turbine + 6pcs 50AH Lithium Batteries + 3500W Off-Grid Inverter for about $3,200 dollars if you count the tax. As for performance, it says that in optimal conditions (high wind and lots of sun), the maximum energy it can produce in one day is 5 kWh or about 150 kWh per month. So, even going by that, the average home would need at least 6 of these. Holy smoke! That would cost nearly $20,000 dollars to install all of those. Something is wrong here... I mean, it already sounded pricey, but when I compared the product that combined solar and wind power together, it really got ridiculous.

I'm definitely not against natural electricity by any means, but it would be nice if the commercial side of this would drop the hype and find a more realistic sales pitch. At any electrical rate, for the ones that are still interested in this, I'm sure there are much better priced products out there, for sure. However, I must say, nothing seems to be close to free at the moment. Ha!
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Image Credit: Pixabay - Free to use & share.

---End of Post "Wind Turbines for your Home - Free Electricity?"

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