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Windpower Workshop

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Manufacturer: Centre for Alternative Technologies

List Price: $15.95
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Average Customer Ratings:

As the true costs of fossil fuels are revealed, the ancient art of windpower is making a steady comeback, and many countries are promoting wind energy generation as part of a drive toward a sustainable future. Yet many environmental enthusiasts prefer a more do-it-yourself approach. Windpower Workshop provides all the essential information for the individual wanting to build and maintain a windpower system for their own energy needs.


PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 643
EAN: 9781898049203
ISBN: 1898049203
Label: Centre for Alternative Technologies
Manufacturer: Centre for Alternative Technologies
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: 2001-08-01
Publisher: Centre for Alternative Technologies
Studio: Centre for Alternative Technologies


SIMILAR ITEMS:

• Wind Energy Basics: A Guide to Small and Micro Wind Systems
• Wind Power, Revised Edition: Renewable Energy for Home, Farm, and Business
• The Renewable Energy Handbook: A Guide to Rural Energy Independence, Off-Grid and Sustainable Living
• The Homeowner's Guide to Renewable Energy: Achieving Energy Independence through Solar, Wind, Biomass and Hydropower (Mother Earth News Wiser Living)
• Got Sun? Go Solar: Get Free Renewable Energy to Power Your Grid-Tied Home


CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

Produce energy from wind -
This book is really comprehensive. It covers nearly everything you need to build a small windgenerator from scratch including security measures to protect the wind turbine in harsh weather. It makes a complete and excellent start for anybody who wants to get involved with wind energy.

Specific to build-your-own Windmills -
I bought this book as a back-up to Paul Gipe's extensive "Wind Power, Revised Edition: Renewable Energy for Home, Farm, and Business."

Another engineer in the office became interested in this for when he retires in Guana. He and I looked at the book together and it is interesting for the hands-on appeal. The author shows how to you scrounged equipment to construct a wind machine. Hugh Piggott has a lot of experience with building these machines so this is the place to start if you're on a desert island all alone and want to create your own power.

Paul Gipe's book is an excellent reference for those wishing to be good buyers of wind machines. Hugh Piggott shows you how to build your own.

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Good information, but felt incomplete -
I wanted to like this book. I really did. So many people who are wind power enthusiasts kept telling me how seminal a book this is, but it was a disappointment, albeit a subjective one. I think more accurate thing to say would be that it was not the book I was looking for.

I can say objectively if you want information on how a grid-tied wind turbine system should work, this book has almost no information on the entire grid-tying process, a complicated and expensive process that certainly a lot of people would need help with. I can also say objectively that this book helped me realize that wind power would not be a good choice for my current home.

I think the problem I have with this book is twofold. One, the book is written on a fairly high level. Some formulas for wind power are presented, some general heuristics, and these are important to be sure, but they don't actually help you get your head wrapped around the issues at stake. There are electrical schematics presented in some places. I'm a fairly technical person, and I can read a schematic fairly well. Sometimes I can't tell whether a symbol is a dynamo or an alternator (they don't look the same but they are similar in practice). But of course an electrical schmatic does not a wind generating electrical system make, and this should not reflect badly on the author.

The other thing is Piggott's really heavily invested in presenting a balanced view of the information. Seems like a counter-intuitive criticism but I had a hard time figuring out what his personal opinion about different designs of turbines, towers, furlings, generators, etc. were. I would have preferd that he say. "This is what works for me, and this is why I think it works." Instead of "You can do this. Or you can do this. Or you can do this... etc".

An Absolute Must-Have For Windmill Enthusiasts -
This book contains real practicality, not just empty theory. Talk about "put your money where your mouth is" - Hugh lives on a remote spit of land in Northern Scotland that doesn't even have roads, much less access to the power grid. If necessity is the mother of invention, there's good reason why he was highly motivated to develop the kinds of simple airfoils and low speed alternator combinations that produced real power. This rudimentary experience has taken him all over the world for installations and workshops. I guess having someone like that around makes him a pretty popular guy with his neighbors.

This book covers the theory necessary to understand wind energy basics, and proceeds as a how-to manual on shaping a simple turbine out of wood. It then shows how to build a low speed alternator out of a brake drum. (There is another book by Hugh called "Brake Drum Windmill Handbook" which goes into more detail).

The challenge is building an electrical generating system that operates at the slow rotational speeds of a wind turbine (e.g. 300 - 500 RPM). Everybody wants to hook up an automobile alternator, but even if it is optimized for high output at an idle, it probably will not start producing power until it reaches 1800 RPM. (Typically the engine/alternator pulleys have a ratio of 3 or 3.5 to 1 and the engine idles @ 600 RPM).

A great little book.

Wind Power explained -
I found this book to be very informative. Not all of my questions were answered, but I now feel that I have a basic grasp of how to design and build my own scrapyard wind turbine. If you are interested in this I highly recommend this book for your collection of reference materials.

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