Wind Power For Dummies [Paperback]

Ian Woofenden (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The consumer guide to small-scale wind electricity production!

Maybe you're not T. Boone Pickens, but you can build your own home-sized wind-power empire right in your back yard. Wind Power For Dummies supplies all the guidance you need to install and maintain a sustainable, cost-effective wind generator to power your home for decades to come.

This authoritative, plain-English guide walks you through every step of the process, from assessing your site and available wind sources to deciding whether wind power is the solution for you, from understanding the mechanics of wind power and locating a contractor to install your system to producing your own affordable and sustainable electricity.

• Guides you step by step through process of selecting, installing, and operating a small-scale wind generator to power your home
• Demystifies system configurations, terminology, and wind energy principles to help you speak the language of the pros
• Helps assess and reduce your energy needs and decide whether wind power is right for you
• Explains the mechanics of home-based wind power
• Shows you how to tie into the grid and sell energy back to the power company
• Offers advice on evaluating all of the costs of and financing for your project
• Provides tips on working with contractors and complying with local zoning laws

Yes, you can do it, with a little help from Wind Power For Dummies.

From the Back Cover

Learn about home-scale wind energy without getting blown away!

Are you thinking about exploring ways you can limit yourhome's environmental impact, but you're not sure whethera wind-energy system is right for you? Wind Power For Dummies gives you real-world, easy-to-understand tips and information on each step in the process of acquiring, installing, and maintaining a home-scale wind-energy system. Plus, you'll learn how to assess your current energy use, increase your home's energy efficiency, and determine your site's wind-energy potential.

• Getting a wind primer — determine whether wind energy is right for you, understand the parts of a basic wind-electric system, and discover basic electricity and wind-energy principles

• Assessing your situation — get a realistic understanding of your site's wind-energy potential and check out alternate options to using wind energy

• Assembling your system — find helpful advice on designing your wind-electric system, whether you're doing it yourself or working with experts

• Installing and operating your system — use trusted tips on safely installing, living with, maintaining, and enjoying your wind-electric system

Open the book and find:

• Electricity basics defined in clear English

• Vital wind-energy principles

• Advice on how to conduct a home energy assessment

• Tips on how to increase your home's energy efficiency

• Information on how wind energy will affect your wallet

• The basic requirements for a productive, long-lasting system

• Fundamentals on system sizing and design

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies (October 5, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470496371
• ISBN-13: 978-0470496374
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #53,512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

  #26 in	Books > Science > Technology > Renewable Energy
  #67 in	Books > Home & Garden > How-to & Home Improvements > Home Design > Design & Construction
  #4 in	Books > Outdoors & Nature > Conservation > Energy > Wind

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent., February 27, 2010

By	David Stebbins - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wind Power For Dummies (Paperback)

If you're looking for a resource that covers most everything about residential size wind generators, this book is as good as anything you'll find. It has chapters on how to figure how much wind you have at your site, wind generator types, towers and how to erect them, legal issues, costs and how long it will take for your generator to pay for itself. The use of wind for off-grid and grid tied applications are compared. Maintenance and safety are covered in great detail. In fact, after you read the safety chapter you may decide that wind is not for you. If that's the case, you're in luck, there's a whole chapter on alternatives to wind: photovoltaics, hydro and solar thermal. A chapter on home energy conservation is also included. The amount of information can be overwhelming, but the author does a good job of tying it all together.
The author, Ian Woofendan, has been writing articles on wind and renewable energy for Home Power magazine for many years, and has wind and solar power at his own home. He has a lot of practical, hands-on knowledge that is evident in WPFD.
I've lived with small scale wind over ten years, and I know of only two other books this comprehensive that are oriented towards home-sized systems:
1) Power From the Wind (incidentally co-authored by the author of Wind Power For Dummies), Dan Chiras. This book is excellent, and in many ways equal in scope to WPFD. It runs about 250 pages.
2) Wind Power (Paul Gipe). Very good, but really technical, and includes a lot of information about very large commercial sized generators. 500 pages long!
If I had to get a single book on small scale wind power, Wind Power For Dummies would be my first choice, followed by #1 and then #2.
It also happens to be the cheapest of the three.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wind Power for Dummies A Review by Paul Gipe, April 19, 2010

By	Paul B. Gipe (Bakersfield, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Wind Power For Dummies (Paperback)

April 16, 2010

Wind Power for Dummies by Ian Woofenden is the mass-market, mainstream book on small wind turbines that the industry has long sought as a measure of respectability. Small wind has arrived when the wildly popular Dummies' series takes up the topic. Dummies books, and this one will be no exception, are the kind that one finds shelves of when entering Barnes & Nobles, America's big box book store. Small wind has indeed arrived.

Woofenden, a long-time editor at Home Power Magazine, fortunately doesn't fall for the temptation posed by his entry into big-league publishing and sugar coat the technology. This is a real book by a real author who lives, breathes, and writes about the subject. He doesn't pull any punches.

As an outspoken proponent of safety around wind turbines-of any size-I found Woofenden's Dummy book particularly valuable because of its emphasis on safety. This is a topic that other writers often shy away from. Woofenden tackles the delicate subject head on and with good humor to boot.

Woofenden, a professional arborist, offers sage advice when he recommends that all towers have a full-time, fall-arrest system in place. He says he simply won't climb a tower without one present. That's about as clear a statement as a writer can make. But his statement is more significant than that. Woofenden is stepping out from the norm of his small wind brethren by calling for fall-arrest systems in an industry that has widely ignored these devices in the USA for nearly 30 years.

Disclosure: Woofenden applauds my work in the acknowledgements section of the book--for which I am grateful. A pat on the back is always welcome.

As in other Dummies books and certainly as found in the pages of Home Power Magazine, Woofenden uses homespun aphorism to drive home his point. One such example is his advice about "thinking before you act".

"Wearing a hard had doesn't mean a lot if you don't have much to protect in the first place. Your number one piece of safety gear is on your shoulders. You need brains, determination, knowledge, and experience to be safe."

More sound advice in his recommendation to use "baby talk" when working on a tower. "Before I do something, I say what I'm going to do: 'I'm going to move my lanyard up above these rungs next; I'll need you to lift your right foot'," he explains in another passage.

"Ten Wind-Energy Mistakes," like safety, is another valuable Woofenden contribution to the literature on small wind. Harking back to his mentor Mick Sagrillo, one of Woofenden's top ten mistakes is "Using too Short a Tower".

Woofenden will not endear himself to "inventors," crackpots, and hustlers when he warns readers against using "creative" wind turbine designs. These are the wacky ideas that appear regularly on the Internet and no doubt drive serious editors, such as Woofenden, batty answering each new wave of queries from the true believers.

Wind Power was constrained by the format of the successful Dummies' series. The books, which became famous for deciphering the usage of computer software, use few graphics. Wind energy is a very visible technology and there are a myriad designs and as many different applications that call out for photos or illustrations. The illustrations used are simple, clear, and straightforward-the hallmark of Home Power Magazine. The graphic illustrating the "basic parts of a turbine" is particularly good.

And it's hard to beat the humorous comics that were part of the Dummies' books recipe for success. If anything, the book could have used more of them.

A minor quibble is Wind Power For Dummies' reliance on the English system of measurements-a system that the English themselves don't use. It's understandable in the context. The Dummies books are targeted toward the mass market in the US and that leaves out the Canadians and anyone else who uses the metric system.

With the Dummies' marketing prowess at his back, Woofenden stands a good chance of taking his message of caution and thoroughness in developing a safe, productive, and profitable small wind turbine installation to a bigger market than other small wind books have done before.

For only $22, the book is not only a steal but a welcome addition to the wind power library.

Wind Power for Dummies by Ian Woofenden, John Wiley & Sons, 2009, paper, 384 pages, US $21.99, ISBN: 978-0-470-49637-4.

-End-

3.0 out of 5 stars Wind Power Not 4 Me, July 13, 2010

By	Charles A. Ray "Chuck Ray" (Mesquite, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wind Power For Dummies (Paperback)

Received the book and discovered early into it that the minimum ground clearance was going to be too much for my property, so I quit reading further. Maybe I'll try a dummies guide to Solar Energy, since I live in Texas