Spinning in the Wind

I spend today working to organise a workshop space in a building in a local town where we are going to start teaching people to build their own wind turbines. We set up workbenches and swept and cleaned in preparation for the workshops which will start on Thursday next.

We are part way through building our own turbine and may take advantage of the workshops to do some work on our turbine of there is time, it would be good to have it up and spinning before the winter gets any darker.

Because we are depending solely on photovoltaic panels for electricity at the moment we would appreciate having a turbine for the deepest part of winter when the days are short. We are not generating as much power as we would like during the shorter days and we are of course using more power for lighting and more computer use in the long evenings.

We use gas for cooking and heating water at the moment and we have noticed a big difference in the price of a barrel of gas over the last few years. During the winter when the stove is lit I often use it to cook on, its great for stews and thick winter soups cooked in my favourite cast iron pot, the one I bought for himself in a second hand shop the first Christmas when we were dating.

Recently we bought an electric steamer so that when we have the turbine up and spinning we can cook using free energy. We plan on having an electric slow cooker in the kitchen when we have finished building our house and also two electric hot plates along with a gas hob.

It makes sense to us when our electricity is free that we should make as much use of it as possible and reduce our dependence on other fuels such as gas. Quite often during the summer we have more power than we can use, it’s a great situation to be in.

Wishing you good energy…