Ahh, the first step on a new journey. Before we jump into building a wind generator you'll need to do a little background work first. The most important is to figure out how much energy you want your wind generator to produce. First though, we have to check and make sure that wind energy is right for you.

In order to find out whether wind energy is right for you we'll need to take a look at the average wind speeds in your area. I have wind maps for both the USA and Canada and here are the links. I'll explain what you're looking for after.

http://www.windatlas.ca/en/maps.php?field=EU&height=30&season=ANU

http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/wind_maps.asp

Great, so what am I looking for?

I'm going to break down what you're looking for into Canada and USA. Let's take a look at the USA map. As long as you live in a colored area you can easily have a wind generator. The burnt orange color means that wind speeds are only about 14 - 15MPH, but this is more than enough using the low wind speed design. If you live in a white area you might have a little bit of trouble making a wind generator work, although it's not the end of the world. Your local municipality will know how to get you wind speed records so if you want more information you can contact them. If you need a little help you can always contact me and I'll see what I can do.

Now lets take a look at the Canadian wind map. Since our wind generator starts up at about 7MPH you can't really go lower than ~4m/s. Ideally you are hoping you live in an area with wind speeds of 5 m/s. It's still cost effective to build a 1 kw generator with 12MPH wind speeds.

Again, if you have any questions feel free to contact me and I'll do whatever I can to help.

How Much Power?

This is another question you'll need to answer before we move on. How much power do you want your wind generator to produce?

I'll give you a little help with that. It's fairly cost effective to produce a wind generator that produces 1 kw in 11MPH winds; however, as soon as you cross that barrier the costs seem to skyrocket.

You'll also have to look at how much money you wish to invest in your wind generator. This will limit how big of a wind generator you can build. If you can spare $800 you can build a full 1kw wind generator (11MPH) which will produce up to 3 kw depending on how fast the wind blows.

That doesn't mean that you're stuck though. You can still build a wind generator that produces about 200 watts for around $150.

So, the takeaway from this step is figure out how much you're willing to invest in your wind generator and how much you'd like it to produce. I'll help make it as inexpensive as possible and will help you in any way I can.

If you would like to learn more about building a wind generator just click here