How To Hook Up Wind Turbines For The Home

Wind turbines for the home are a terrific way to offset your sky-high electricity costs. You must get the installation right though. It is wise to plan all this carefully before you decide on which turbine to buy.

First, decide how you will use the power you are creating. These are several ways you can handle this.

1. Charge a battery

2. Connect to the grid

3. Power your home directly

Since the energy the wind turbine creates is DC (direct current) and the power in your home and on the grid is AC (alternating current), you will have to make a conversion in order to make the energy usable.

Do you intend to totally rely on wind power or, will you use the electricity grid for your backup? It is always good to have multiple systems in place, due to the lack of reliability or consistency of the wind.

When you connect, here are the equipment items you will need to connect the power you produce to the grid:

1. Wind Generator

2. Power Interface or Controller

3. Power Inverter

4. Battery

In a nutshell, you must take the 3 wires from your turbine along with the ground wire and connect it to the interface. The interface then gets mated with the inverter. The inverter then gets hooked up to the grid.

In connecting the power inversion hardware to the grid, you must involve both your utility and an electrical contractor. Your utility will have a protocol for making the tie-in. While you want to "sell excess energy to the grid" any excess power you make, you don't want unintentionally back-feed power and cause a frequency imbalance for the utility. That is potentially dangerous and also could cause power problems for those who live close by.

Make sure the power interface equipment has plenty of space and ventilation. They can create a lot of heat.

An electronic controller can be used as well to manage the whole system and optimize the energy you can achieve with your wind turbine.

You will also need a battery bank to store power for when the wind isn't blowing. You can't just use any battery though. You have to use deep cycle batteries that don't degrade in performance through many cycles of charging and dissipation.

To take full advantage of wind turbines for the home you must carefully studying your local wind an how you can optimize harvesting its latent electrical energy.


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Roger G. Brown has been an energy engineer for 20 years, having saved countless companies money on their power bills. If you want to learn more about how to slash your utility bill Now, check out Roger's tips on how to save money AND get a Wind Tax Credit