Hello:

I just joined this forum and it looks to be a great resource! I have high hopes it'll help me get my plans finalized.

I'm preparing to get to an architect to have him turn my rough drawings into
something I can build, with the aim of breaking ground when the build season
opens up again in the spring. Since the house is five miles back from the
nearest grid I'm forced to go off-the-grid myself, and that's led me to
researching what will work for me.

So folks know, the house will be an ICF-style shaped rather like a "Y" with the broad end facing south, so it'll be both well-insulated and make maximum use of solar. I intend to heat with propane though if the electrical side looks promising enough I might go with electric heat instead--that's one of the things I'm hoping folks here might help me figure out.

After much research I've pretty much figured that wind power is the way to
go for me; I'm lucky enough that my land is on a Class 6 area (at least according to the Colorado maps). The site itself is 300 feet away from the house site, farther than I'd like but doable (especially at 48V, which is my plan at present). I intend to install a Bergey 7.5kW turbine on a 100 foot SSV (self supporting lattice) tower....the tower needs to be self-supporting because any guy wires would necessarily run over the property line. There are no problems with height for wind in El Paso County (yay!) BUT I will have to get a variance since the preferred location is within 100 feet of the property line (the code
wants a setback in case it falls over, but since there's nothing but gravel
hill below the site I have high hopes I can get a waiver here).

Energy wise I think this will work out well. According to the Bergey
spreadsheets, at that altitude (8000 feet) that particular generator should
average 57.9 kW/day in a Class 5 area (I deliberately derated the area by
one wind class for the purposes of the calculations--as an engineer I firmly
believe in over-engineering). Here at Wyrdhaven (our house in town) I've
been tracking our power use for the last 5 years and we average 29.7 kW/day.
I figure the new house will be larger (more power) but more efficient
overall (less power), so the Wyrdhaven numbers seem good as a base
calculation. Does that seem reasonable to folks?

I'm not sure of how many batteries I might need for storage--I understand
most systems are set up for 2-3 days? I haven't run the numbers on this yet
or considered the type or amperage of the batteries, what inverters might
work best, etc. I confess towards a small leaning towards the gel-type, "no
maintenance" batteries--they just seem smarter to me, but I could be
convinced if the experts here have strong feelings about them.

So...what do folks think? What have I missed?

Wow! It sounds like you've really done your homework.

We've got a collection of resources for home and farm scale turbines on our web site at http://www.windustry.org/your-wind-project/home-and-far...-and-farm-scale-wind.

Good luck with your project!

Marin

Thank you! I'm still going through the site...there's a lot here!

Ferretman

Hi I have a software that can help you to design your own turbine plans. It can be download at
www.partenovcfd.com

Thanks dimitar!