subject: Residential Wind Power: Why You Might Not Want It [print this page] Residential wind power can be a great answer to all of your home energy needs, but you need to carefully assess what it will mean for you and for your family. Many people are looking into this as a solution nowadays because the price of energy at home has ramped up so much when we have to purchase it from a local utility. The local utilities are totally bound to purchasing raw materials to run their generation facilities from whoever has the fuel available. So, if the Middle East is the primary area and they are in a state of turmoil, these utility companies must purchase from them in order to stay in business.
These are the reasons it may not work for you...
Your wind is weak - Having weak wind on your property is one the main reasons residential wind projects fail. This can be rather easily determined however. All you need is a little anemometer to do some data collection. These devices can be found at Amazon dot com for well under $100 in most cases. All you have to do is mount the device in a place it in an area where you might seriously look at putting the turbine up. Watch your collected data and you can analyze it for patterns like average, frequency, and time of day when the wind blows.
You don't have a great place to mount it - This can be a problem in large cities especially. In big cities you typically don't have a lot of real estate that is obvious for placing a wind turbine kit. So, this is an element of the project that you need to really be honest about and assess from the very beginning. If you do not have a lot of real estate to choose from, you had better make sure that the real estate that you do have this conducive to wind turbine energy generation before you begin and go forward and spend a whole lot of money on the project. You really haven't checked out what the neighbors think about it - The neighbors can have a profound impact on a project like this. There are community standards that rule whether or not you can install a wind turbine or a residential wind turbine on your property. You need to check out what those thoughts are before you go forward and do anything more detailed like pricing the unit.
In summary, residential wind can be a salvation for your home energy costs or it can be a hassle that you want to get rid of from day one.
