Has anyone had any experience of buying or looking into getting a windmill for your home, saw a b & q brochire last week advertising them but its hard to get any worthwhile info on them
Somebody mentionned to me that there are in fact of limited use as they can only be plug into a loop that it not connected to the ESB network at all, otherwise you'll start feeding power into the ESB network ????
Has anyone had any experience of buying or looking into getting a windmill for your home, saw a b & q brochire last week advertising them but its hard to get any worthwhile info on them
A relative of mine bought 4 big ones lately and he has them plugged into esb network at a cost of 6m, the ones you get in b&q might boil a kettle on a good day, don't be mislead to their generating ability, A 3 kva petrol genie is under a fair bit of pressure boiling a kettle, seen one for 25k the other day when it was turning in fair wind it was producing 1.5 kilowatts,
Visit www.sei.ie and also www.iwea.com to get more information. You'll also need to check whether your site is suitable wind wise, will you have neighbours complaining. I'm not sure but if you lived in a heritage area or a SCA you might have trouble.
As with everything the more you spend the better your return
plug into a ring main in your home that IS served by the ESB
the electricity is generated at 240v as opposed to 230v by ESB therefore the items in your home use this electricity first and then the esb supply
any over-generated supply feeds back into the national grid
at 5mph wind the system will generate enough lecky (c. 1.5kw) to power your kettle and telly give or take
overnight it powers all the stuff you leave on standby (5 items on standby is equal to the telly on all night)
it will not generate lecky during a power cut because that would feed lecky back into national grid and electrocute the esb guys (small chance I know but there you go)
based on tests and installed ones already in average return is approx 33% of average 3 bedroom 2 adult and 2kids lecky bill
the system is paid for as installed you cannot install it yourself - they have to stress test your wall and do the wiring themselves
Better still would be to not leave things on standby but to switch them off and (optionally - child of the 60s/70s here) plug them out. Why pay for/use power that is not required?
at 5mph wind the system will generate enough lecky (c. 1.5kw) to power your kettle and telly give or take
overnight it powers all the stuff you leave on standby (5 items on standby is equal to the telly on all night)
From the Windsave website The average wind speed across the UK is ~5.6m/sec. at 10m above the ground. The Windsave System is ideal to install at all locations that benefit from good exposure to the wind. Our System will start to generate electricity at 4.0m/s and reach the rated output of 1kW @12.5m/s. When the wind speed exceeds 15.0m/s. the System will self regulate and slow down to avoid damage to the top-works and the electrical components.
I think this means it starts to generate at 9mph and reaches its 1KW maximum at 28mph.
(funny how the Brits can go metric when they don't want you to understand the sums)
The payback figures are all based on the UK where the Clearskies grant system operates.
Here you are looking at a payback of approximately 15 years. The unit has an expected life of ten years.