Anyone have a wind turbine in a residential area, how well does it work?

[Red Squirrel]

My main train of thought is that for most of the year we get maybe 6-8 hours of daylight here, so solar alone will not produce enough unless you have a LARGE array and LARGE battery bank, ex: a battery bank you can charge fully in the summer months, then have enough capacity for the whole year, and simply trickle charge it a tad in the day which would simply slow down the overall discharge rate, but never fully charge it.  The days are simply too short and nights are too long.  Sun is down by 5pm and comes back up around 8am.

But yeah it sounds like wind is not really viable at small scale so I'll forget that.   I think my dream of going off grid simply won't work where I am as I would need a bigger property for an alternate source to top up batteries half way through the night.  So I'll probably concentrate on doing a small setup that will selectively power certain loads but not the whole house.  I'm thinking I would just have various outlets throughout the house that go to a separate electrical panel that is powered by the inverter.  Could plug all the phantom and occasional use loads in it.  TV, lights, that kind of stuff.  Maybe a few computers.  Would also act as a backup source of power so if power goes out I still have basic power. 

[fourtytwo42]

My main train of thought is that for most of the year we get maybe 6-8 hours of daylight here, so solar alone will not produce enough unless you have a LARGE array and LARGE battery bank, ex: a battery bank you can charge fully in the summer months, then have enough capacity for the whole year, and simply trickle charge it a tad in the day which would simply slow down the overall discharge rate, but never fully charge it.  The days are simply too short and nights are too long.  Sun is down by 5pm and comes back up around 8am.

But yeah it sounds like wind is not really viable at small scale so I'll forget that.   I think my dream of going off grid simply won't work where I am as I would need a bigger property for an alternate source to top up batteries half way through the night.  So I'll probably concentrate on doing a small setup that will selectively power certain loads but not the whole house.  I'm thinking I would just have various outlets throughout the house that go to a separate electrical panel that is powered by the inverter.  Could plug all the phantom and occasional use loads in it.  TV, lights, that kind of stuff.  Maybe a few computers.  Would also act as a backup source of power so if power goes out I still have basic power.

I think you have it in a nutshell there, even I live in a small rural village I cannot go offgrid due to poor wind turbine performance (not enough land) and being 52degN (Alberta is 56deg right ?). Instead my solar makes a contribution (heating water presently) as does the house insulation, CCFL lamps etc. It depends what you are aiming for, economics or save the planet! For me it's the former so I would never buy batteries as the payback is very very poor, I use the grid as my battery except I don't charge it As for separate wiring it,s not very practicable (ruined decorations, angry wife etc) compared to installing a GTI that allows the existing wiring to be shared. I must admit however that doesn't cover for grid failure but despite gloomy predictions about future power shortages here we just get a few failures a year from trees falling over lines and they get fixed in a couple of hours max. So again I wouldn't invest in batteries to cover that, but that's my personal choice, just my reasoning

[IanMacdonald]

Not sure if it's been mentioned but one of the key issues with an urban turbine is that it will get blamed for any and all TV reception problems, even if it's not the actual culprit. Noise is perhaps not as serious an issue as some claim, but sun strobing is if it falls on a neighbour's windows. In any event the return from small turbines is poor compared to larger units on high towers, because there tends to be a 'wind gradient' at 300ft or so. Thus, the big industrial units are actually a better economic proposition, through being in a stronger airflow.

Solar, that depends lot on your latitude and cloud cover. In the UK you will get very little output during December and January. Which means you need some way to cover quite a long period with no solar charge, otherwise your batteries are going to suffer. Not to mention having little power at the time of year you most need it.