Tracts and Articles
Apostacy
Divine Love
Come See My Zeal for the LORD!
Faith
Holiness
Mark of the Beast
Materialism
Danger of Increasing Riches-Wesley
Through the Eye of a Needle- The Doctrine of Nonaccumulation
Practical issues
Enjoyment of the Pleasures of the Present Life- Letter of John Newton
Prayer
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood...
Revival
Salvation
The word "harvest"
conjures up images of combines, golden wheat waving their heads in gentle unison to the soft touches of the breeze, or perhaps a 1-row corn-picker growling its way through the cornfield.
But the harvest which this article plans to detail leaves us with no sounds, except maybe a low creak or the flap of a windmill sail.
Wind harvest has been going on for ages. Ships have harvested the wind to drive them across the seas, and Dutch windmills have been around at least since Don Quijote de la Mancha tried to subjugate one of them mounted atop Rocinante. Unfortunately for the Don, the windmill gained the day.
And the wind keeps blowing. Why not harvest it? Some Ohioans are doing so, but the number is quite low. The most common form of harvesting the wind for our benefit is probably letting your clothes flap on a clothesline. Now I am sure you never thought of drying your clothes on the line as a harvest, but that is the reason for this article: open our minds to other possibilities that are blowing right in front of us.
The first thing folks may think of in wind harvest are the water-pumping windmills still standing like sentinels of another day in Amish homesteads. Next, our minds go to the big "wind farms" like the one that is seen from the Pennsylvania Turnpike. My first impression when seeing them was, "They sure do not turn very fast!" Yet, if your head were only inches from the tip of those massive blades, you would probably think they were a whirlin'! The tips on a large windmill travel at about 200 mph!
But we are not going to look at the big guys, since that is out of reach for most of our pocket books. There are some affordable options, using materials that we may just already have sitting in our house or barn.
First, I want to look at two designs that we usually do not think of as windmill designs. The first has been called a "go-devil". The easiest way for me to explain this is to think of an old paddle-wheel steam boat. Imagine the paddles of that boat, except that instead of pushing water, you take them out of the water and the wind pushes them. The bottom half of the paddles are placed in a box so the wind does not strike them, with the axles sitting on the top edge of the box. The wind blows across the top paddles and "¡listo!", you have power coming off the end of the shaft. Or, if you prefer, think of a Ferris wheel, with the bottom half protected from the wind while the upper half gets pushed by the moving air.
The next option is the same principle, except you turn the whole apparatus on its side. This has been appropriately called the merry-go-round windmill. For another description of this, just imagine that you extend each of the frames on the school merry-go-round with a piece of plywood. Next, you build a small shed over one half of the merry-go-round, so that the wind only hits one side.
These are perhaps rude ways of explaining a simple principle. My in-laws in New York state have built both kinds, using the reel off of a combine for the horizontal-shafted version. Both models worked, but they said that the vertical-shafted version out-performed the horizontal with their models. The vertical-shafted one stood about six feet tall as I remember; the horizontal one was about that wide. Both were hooked up to generate electricity, enough current being produced to charge batteries, power some lights, and such like. It has been a few years since I saw these working, so I do not remember all the details.
And, of course, there are the bladed windmills, with which we are all familiar. Using the stepper motor off of a disk drive or old printer, one can build a 18" windmill for under $10 that will run a LED light or charge AA batteries. The interesting thing of this plan is that it uses a 4" PVC pipe, cut into a neat design, as the propeller. The instructions can be found online at http://www.thebackshed.com/windmill/assemblyMini1.asp
As with some of the other suggestions I have made in this column, it is my desire that some great new ideas will come blowing into your mind, cranking up your imagination. Let'er fly!
Sustainable Living Series
Defining Sustainable LivingWhy Sustain?
Sustainability Politics
Fill the Earth
Tilling the Land
Damaged Dirt
Living Dirt
God's Fertilizer Factories
Sustaining Hard Work
Of Mirrors and Millionaires
No-till + No Spray =???
To Be or Not to Be Organic
The Worst Erosion
Icy Dreams
Biomass Gasifiers
The Ultimate Alternative Energy Source
Pedal Power
The "C" Word
Harvesting the Wind