The Basics of How a Wind Generator Works

As more people are becoming aware of the viability of renewable energy sources in the home, more and more wind generators and solar panels are being installed into homes. Having your own renewable energy source feeding energy into your home can not only help you to save money in the home, but also delivers added security and independence in your power usage.

Instead of spending thousands of dollars on commercial wind generator and solar power options, there is an increasing number f home owners seeking out plans and information on how they can construct and install their own for a fraction of the cost. However, before you go about constructing and installing your own wind generator in your home read this article for a general overview of how a wind generator works and the materials you will need to construct one.

This may seem like a bit of an odd statement, but windpower starts with the sun. As the sun heats up an area of land, the air around also absorbs some of the heat. When the air reaches a certain temperature it begins to rise as hotter air is lighter than the cooler air. When this hotter air raises, cooler air quickly rushes in to fill the gap left by the hot air. The cool air rushing into the gap is what creates wind.

Windpower is thus drawn by positioning a wind generator in the path of wind which will then push it and transfer its own energy to the motion of the wind generator blade. This is, in its simplest form, how a wind generator captures energy from wind to then be created into electricity.

In order to understand how a wind generator converts this captured energy into electricity it is useful to know about the main components of a simple wind generator.

The basic design of a wind generator is made up of three crucial parts:
• Rotor Blades
• Shaft
• Generator

The rotor blades are essentially the energy capturing part of the wind generator. They act as barriers to the wind. This means that when the wind forces the rotor blades to move, some of its energy is thus transferred to the rotor. The wind generator shaft is connected to the centre of the rotor, this is so that as the rotor spins, the shaft will spin also. The energy captured by the rotor blades is then transferred as mechanical rotational energy to the shaft to be fed into an electrical generator at the other end. The generator then uses the properties of electromagnetic induction to produce electrical voltage from this mechanical rotational energy. Voltage is a form of electrical current that moves electricity from one point to another.

The final overview point to consider is design. There are two primary wind generator designs:
• Horizontal axis; and
• Vertical axis

The most commonly used design is the horizontal axis wind generator design, also referred to as HAWT. What may be confusing here is the number of tall wind generators you see that would undoubtedly be a vertical axis design. The use of the terms horizontal and vertical refers to the mounting of the shaft, not the entire wind generator itself, in these tall wind generator designs the shaft is positioned horizontally connected to the rotor hub.

For more information on how a wind generator works and how you can construct and install one for use in your own home go to http://howtobuildawindgeneratorstepbystep.com