You live your life every day fully dependent on energy, mainly gas and electricity. But with the constantly rising costs of these energy sources, you might be wondering how you can cut back on these expenses and make your life a little easier. You likely already know about renewable energy and that it is being used around the world. But how do you take advantage of this without spending a fortune? You might want to consider building a windmill, but do you know how to build a wind generator?

Good question. Here are some tips to guide you:

- First you need to know where you are going to put it. You need an area with at least a 300 to 400 foot radius of open space and a 30 to 40 foot vertical clearance. There are two types of towers you can choose from, a tilt-up or a freestanding design. Tilt-ups are more widely used in residential areas because they are easier to maintain, since you don’t need to climb them to clean them. However, since free standing towers are taller, they help maximize the output of your wind turbine.

- Next up on your list are the materials you are going to use. You can start with a high voltage, low current DC motor that runs at low rpm’s. This is the heart of the unit that will convert the wind into electrical current.

- Then comes the blades of the wind generator, which can be carved from plastic, wood, sheet metal or you could also use PVC pipes. Note that the longer the blades are, the wider its swept area covered, meaning the more power it can extract from the wind.

- Now you need to connect the blades to the motor using a hub. One of the simplest ways is to look for a scrap steel disk that you can drill holes in. Attach this to a shaft that will connect the blades.

- After this, the tail and the pivot are now to be put together to keep the apparatus turned to the wind. This can be done by using a square tubing, pipe nipple, flange for the pivot and a scrap metal sheet for the tail.

- Lastly, you need a place to store the converted energy so it is there even when the winds are calm. You do this with batteries. In order to monitor the charging, you should keep the generator and batteries as close together as possible. Look for low maintenance batteries that are highly efficient.

You need to look for special batteries called “deep cycle”, because they are rated in amp-hours and have indicators of their charge-discharge cycles. They are best for power system applications such as this.

Once you have learned how to build a wind generator, you will need to place a diode between the generator and batteries. This is to prevent the energy from flowing back into the generator and being wasted. A secondary load to act as a depot for excess energy produced would also be a good idea.

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