
Energy Ball: Wind turbine for home use - gasull
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/03/energy-ball-by-home-energy/
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Protophore
It would be nice to have the option to buy a small wind turbine for your
house. I wonder if this would help drive residential solar prices down.

Another interesting wind power solution: <http://www.magenn.com/>

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DabAsteroid
_It would be nice to have the option to buy a small wind turbine for your
house._

There are small wind turbines available. One has the option. However, why
would one choose to excercise it?

 _I wonder if this would help drive residential solar prices down._

How could it do that?

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Protophore
How would wind turbines for the home or office drive down solar prices?
Competition in the market place for alternative sources of energy perhaps?

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DabAsteroid
<http://www.wind-works.org/articles/RoofTopMounting.html>

_Mounting wind turbines--of any kind--on a building is a very bad idea. I've
yet to see an application where this has worked or will likely work. In short,
rooftop turbines will not do what their promoters claim and often will cause
their owners no end of grief._

[http://www.wind-
works.org/articles/VentilatorsandSquirrelsin...](http://www.wind-
works.org/articles/VentilatorsandSquirrelsinaCage%20.html)

 _Like ducted turbines, a perennial favorite of hucksters and charlatans is,
for lack of a better word, squirrel cage rotors. Many are nothing more than
roof-top ventilators repackaged as "wind turbines". As ventilators, they work
fine. It's when someone tries to couple them to a generator that they quickly
learn why wind turbines use two or three slender, airfoil-shaped blades. Most
hucksters, however, never progress that far. They never build actual wind
turbines, and perchance that they do, they never measure the "wind turbine's"
performance. Of course, they wildly exaggerate the potential of these
breathtaking new inventions.

Doug Selsam, himself an inventor, has tried to understand why consumers--and
the news media--are so gullible. His explanation: ventilators and squirrel-
cage rotors are easy to understand, modern wind turbines much less so. After
all, a roof-top ventilator with its entire swept area covered with blades
looks like it will capture more wind than a modern wind turbine with only a
few blades, some with--unbelievably--only one.

In a 2002 internet scam, a company peddling ventilators as "wind turbines"
claimed their product would produce nearly five times more electricity than a
conventional wind turbine of the same size. Naturally, for this "superior"
performance they would charge 2-3 times more than for a real wind turbine. The
company asserted that they were "thinking outside the box," a catchphrase of
1990s management gurus. They certainly were. They were not even close to the
box. They were on another planet where the laws of physics don't apply._

