Self Powered
It's electric! do do do, and how ever that song goes on...
So one of my personal goals is to make my house self sufficient when it comes to electricity. I already know that it will require that I focus on more than one renewable source. Thus the main points at hand are solar, wind, water, storage, and cash.
I really don't like a windy day when it's cold out side. If I have a wind generator I'd probably be thinking differently. if you want to know how it works click here. One thing to definitely note is that if you're going to have a wind generator, use a spiral one. The standard wind generator is a big fan with a fin on the back to turn it which ever way the wind is blowing. With the spiral design, it doesn't have to adjust due to how the wind is blowing. Here is a picture one type of spiral design on the left. What also makes it great is that it will generate power even at low wind speeds. I'm not sure why large wind farms don't use these instead, maybe they cost more or can't make as much power at full capacity. If I find out I'll up date this.
Solar is pretty straight forward on how it works. I did find a couple of neat things going on with solar power. One is solar concentrators here are two site that can better tell you on the subject and also note I beleive these are two differnt concepts: one two. Here is another link to check out.
Water power is an old concept as well so I won't bore you with all that info. Here is an interesting youtube video about changing the way we do it:
Creating all of this power is great but what about down times? Storing the power is another issue as well, especially if you're off the grid. There are two options that I know of. The simplest is by making a battery bank, by using car batteries or something similar, and connect them together in a serial form. What that means is you connect them positive to negative which increases the voltage of the battery bank. How long it last would depend on the amps of the batteries and the power usage when the bank is not being charged. Also, if one of them die then you will have no power. Thus it might be a good idea to have a second battery bank or switch to bypass the bank. Another downside could be changing out the batteries when they are no longer good to use. How often would depend the battery you use. An alternative to the battery bank would be water. Yes water, all you got to do is separate the Oxygen from the hydrogen. Basically you have two wires in a container of water, one of the wires is positive and the other is negative, and you have two other containers, one above each wire end, to collect the oxygen and hydrogen. All you really want is the hydrogen. then when you need the power, you put the hydrogen into a generator and you got power. Now I'm not a chemist, but I would guess that you would not get all of the energy back from using the hydrogen storage method. Do be careful though since hydrogen plus oxygen plus energy could or will equal BOOM! If you are wanting to split water up I did run into this: Solar Cells Just scroll down till you see Solar cells. All it is about is using sun light to do the separating for you.
all of this stuff is great but it's not cheap either. I do think that if you do it right, it will be worth the long term investment and you might just make some money too!
