It seems like yesterday when we decided to take the plunge into off grid living. In fact it's been well over 16 years now. We're a little different from most people who live on renewable energy though in the fact that we did our entire conversion for a very low cost. To start out with we decided that we should probably have a wind generator because it was pretty windy where we lived.

After looking around at some commercially available models our jaws dropped. We couldn't believe that something that has three basic parts could cost us $2500! So we did the first thing that came to our mind... went and searched for plans on the internet. Ugh, what a horrible week that was. We could harldy understand most of the plans we go so we decided to do it on our own and document the process.

It was important to us that our wind generator produce at least 1000 watts of power. This would allow us to power our home and still have leftover power for occasions when the wind wasn't blowing. We started out with the blades as I figured they would be the hardest to build, but was quite shocked when my friend told me that pipe - when cut correctly- has almost the same aerodynamic properties as a regular propeller blade. It's not quite as efficient, but I can always build 10 more for the price it would have taken me to fabricate the blades.

The motor we found on Ebay. It's an ametek motor which produces 24 VDC at 600 RPM's. It's always important that you get a motor that is higher rated than what you actually need because they produce less power when they're turned into a generator.

The tail was built from a piece of plastic and some steel rod I got from the local hardware store.

The tower we got for free... which was a relief as they are VERY pricey. It's actually an old TV tower. Since most people have switched to satellite you can usually ask if you can tote it away and they'll give it to you. We got paid $50 to tote an elderly couples tower away. You should have seen them smile as we removed what they thought was an eyesore.

Putting it all together took the better part of a weekend, and hooking it up to the house took a couple hours. I made a mistake and put a diode in backwards and my battery bank started turning the windmill around. There's a mistake you don't want to make.

In total the wind generator cost me just under $150 to build and needs relatively little maintenance. I oil it up every 4 months and have changed the motor once, but I saved well over $3000 by learning how to build a wind generator.