You can get a 600 watt wind turbine for under 500 dollars, but you'll also need some batteries, and the rest of the kit.
And in Canada, I'd worry about heat too.
I suppose if that's not an issue, you could rig up a mechanical generator from scratch, but that will take a fair bit of effort, and you'd probably want batteries to go with it.
Well, that depends on a number of factors. First off, what is the maximum amount of power the laptop, phone(s) and lamp will draw?
I don't know what skills you have, but if you're really diligent, (or have very smart friends), and are quite competent at scrounging up parts, you could build yourself a D.I.Y wind turbine. But that will probably still cost more than $200 once you throw a couple of decent batteries, etc. into the mix.
But it's not impossible (heck, a teenager in Africa built a wind turbine out of bike parts, etc., and is now so famous he won a scholarship to study engineering in the U.S.) His name is William Kamkwamba, which you can look up via Google or go to his blog at
http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/will...
He is one of my younger heroes, btw.
This website will also be a big help: A bunch of highly competent Good Ol' Boys in the South are really into hacking D.I.Y Wind turbines.
http://www.otherpower.com/
It might interest you to know that a 1970's era Lincoln (car) alternator could put out 120 volts. That power was used to defrost the back windows. Ford quickly stopped installing these after some auto mechanics electrocuted themselves. But, armed with foreknowledge and suitable caution, you could use one of those alternators to generate power using a decent home-made wind turbine. 120V x 14 amps = @1680 watts, much more than the 300 or so you actually need.
The trick is to find one of these alternators, then to get it rotating fast enough.
Look online for cheap chipped solar panels and wire them up.Commercially produced panel arrays are made of the same panels you can find online.Just make sure you buy them at the same energy output otherwise the wiring becomes difficult because of the math involved to find you final power output.
solar or wind pwer
I'm looking to make it though a Canadian winter without paying my electric bill.
I only need to be able to power a laptop, my phone, and a lamp.
I'm looking for options under $200.
I've already thought about making a bike powered generator, and I'm also looking into the cost of a thermoelectric generator that runs off wood, but I'm still not sure what the best option might be...
Does anyone have any cheap but effective suggestions?
