One of the first things you should do is find out how windy your potential turbine site really is. We can’t emphasise this enough, because if the wind speed isn’t good enough you’ll be wasting your money - and with the best intentions in the world - a turbine that doesn’t turn is hardly going to help your energy bills (or climate change for that matter).

take wind speed measurements

The only way to know for sure what kind of power your turbine might produce before you invest in one is take some direct wind speed measurements. Definitely worth doing. There are companies around who can come and do a really professional site assessment, but for small machines, this could end up costing as much as the turbine itself!

But you can do it yourself too with a gadget called an anemometer. Ideally, you’ll use it to gather data over several months and seasons to get an accurate average wind speed. Decent anemometers are usually pretty pricey, so we've sorted out a supply of low cost anemometers that you can set up yourself.

Alternatively, there are also ways of roughly estimating your wind speed using modelled wind speed data, but this needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.

comments (0)