Understanding Your Wind Turbine Generator Needs by Calculating your Power Usage

The first thing you have to determine is how many watts you are going to need/want.  Every appliance, DVD player, computer, vacuum etc. has a watt usage rating on it somewhere.  Sometimes an appliance will display the watt usage with a number with the word watts like "30 watts", or sometimes it's simply the letter "W" that represents watts, like "30 W".  What this tells you is how many watts that particular appliance requires when it's plugged in and turned on.  Also find the watt usage of all the lights in and outside of the house, a 100 watt light bulb uses a 100 watts, a 13 watt florescent light uses 13 watts etc.  After you have a list of appliances, lights and their watt usage tally up the watts and that will give you the watt usage of your house if everything was plugged in and running (peak watt usage).  Then figure out to the best of your ability the total watts of things that are always on like refrigerators, VCRs, maybe some night lights etc.  While this isn't the most accurate way to get a total watt usage of your house because many appliances consume power while plugged in even if they aren't turned on, but this will give you ball park.  Don't forget your Central Air/Heating usage.  If you want to be extremely specific you will need to get an electrical usage meter that goes between the appliance and the wall outlet and gives you watt consumption so even if the appliance says "30 watts" a electrical usage meter could tell you that it actually only uses 20 watts or worse the meter could tell you it actually consumes 40 watts.  You can calculate your watt usage on your furnace or any other appliance that isn't always on by figuring out a rough percent of time that it's actually running divided by the watt consumption number listed on the device.  For example I have a night light outside my house that sense when it's dark outside and stay on during the night.  In my region across all seasons the average night is about 12 hours.  To find out what percentage of the day 12 hours is we take 24 and divide it by 12 and it is of course 50%.  Then we take the total watts, which is this case is 100 watts and divide it by 50% so if this 100 watt light bulb was on 50% of the day it would be the same as if it were a 50 watt light bulb on 24 hours a day.  Granted that could take some thought and calculation on your part, but if you are really going to do this, you'll have to take it to that level on each of your intermittently used appliances light hair dryers, toasters, etc.  This will give you a baseline as to what your house consumes in watts at any given time.  Now we know your peak home watt usage, and your average watt usage.  This is huge when you are trying to determine what wind turbine generator system to implement.

Poor Mans Guide to Wind Turbines