Up until a couple of weeks ago, my only electricity source was about 2000 peak watts of PV panels. What's new is a 400 peak watt wind turbine. So far, so good.

The PV array usually supplies all my energy needs. Everything here is electric except the kitchen stove. In almost a year of living here, I have run my backup generator for about eight hours and half of that was just because it is a good idea to start it every couple of months. True that our rainy season wasn't rainy enough but that still shows PV was a good thing.

Wind is an experiment. As I have equipment running 24/7, adding something that reduces battery discharge at night is a good idea. Wind is clearly the easiest of the various options so I decided to try it out with an Air-X generator. Rather than putting up a tower, I used the mounting system which allows you to put a poll on an existing building with enough isolation that you don-t hear any strange noises when you are in the building.

As I don't have separate metering of the wind generator output, there is a bit of guessing here but I think I am averaging around 100 watts from the unit. As the winds here tend to be either relatively high or close to nothing, this doesn't seem out of line. The practical knowledge is going to help us decide if adding a wind farm for the commercial buildings here is going to be practical. I have been looking at some 2500 watt units. My idea was to install three of them. If my current numbers are any indication, that would give us close to 2000 watts average or about 50 kilowatt hours per day.

With my 2000 watts of PV panels, I see around 12 kilowatt hours per day of power. That, of course, is concentrated during daylight hours. That's good for running the coffee maker, water heater and such but contributes nothing during the time you need lighting. As our lighting energy requirements are low (all LED) this is not a big issue but you also have ongoing loads such as communications equipment and refrigerators. So, having night time energy generation is a good thing.

While the Air-X was not a really cost-effective solution, that is no surprise with a small unit. I estimate it cost about $1000 which works out to $10 per average watt. The good news is that the 2500 watt generators offer a much better price per watt point. How much better? My estimate is around $2 per average watt. That's a lot cheaper than solar. These prices, of course, are just generation capacity. There are still the costs of storage and conversion of what you want in terms of voltage such as 120VAC, 60Hz.

The most important thing for me is that I have figured out how to live off-grid without any sacrifices. Today, it just feels like a good accomplishment. In the future it may be a necessity.