Let me just start by laying the grounds for my eventual goals for this project.
Here is where you use your imagination. Someday, imagine you are on your back deck sitting your lawn furniture listening to a baseball game on your deck radio. You have your sunglasses on with a lemonade in one hand and a pipe in the other. The radio is powered by your homemade wind generator. I know, I have that exact same fantasy every day.
Well... that is my eventual goal. I'm going to be pretty realistic about this. I'm going to establish a mini list of checkpoints in the development of my wind generator.
Goal 1 : Create some sort of device with magnets and wire that creates a measurable amount of magnetic flux (electrical current).
Goal 2 : Create a device that uses the wires and magnets that creates a measurable amount of flux that is driven by some sort of wind collecting mechanism (a fan, pinwheel, weather station wind speed gauge).
Goal 3 : Have device from goal 1 create enough wattage that it can light a small light bulb, about 10 watts. This wattage doesn't need to be sustained. If I can just spin the shaft quick enough with my fingers or anything that creates about 10 watts.
Goal 4 : Have device from goal 3 use the wind collecting mechanism from goal 2 to create about 1.5 volts at about .2 amps on a mildly windy day. I figure this is about the amount of energy that I will need to get a very small radio to turn on and amplify a radio signal through small speakers .
Goal 5 : T0 have my wind generator hooked to my generator that create enough charge that can power the radio long enough to listen to an entire baseball game while sitting in lawn furniture, sipping lemonade, and having a pipe.
I also plan on trying to keep some sort of records making an estimate of how much this project will cost. I hope that with these numbers I can do some sort of rough calculation that can predict how many KWH my generator would have to product in order to begin paying itself off. I understand already that you can probably buy something for cheaper that I can make that is much more efficient.
Also, keep in mind, in Nebraska the average cost of electricity is about 6.7¢ a KWh. If you run a medium sized window air conditioner for an hour that is rated at 1000W, this would consume 1KWh. If you run a 100W lightbulb for 731 hours, or a month, it would use 73.1KWh, and would cost you $4.90 at 6.7¢ a KWh.