How to Build a Windmill (2012) (opens in new tab)

I sooo want a wind turbine to supplement my solar, but as you say, I just can't make the economics work.

For starters, wind is a lot more mechanical. Meaning moving parts. Meaning maintainence, storm care, and so on.

For another it's more obtrusive, large, high, creates some degree of noise etc.

It's not exactly cheap. My inverter could handle it, but between the mounting and turbine, it's some real cash.

The argument for it just falls apart when I do the math. For less money and waaay less hassle, I could just extend the solar.

So I love the -idea- of wind but the economics of it just don't work at personal-scale (yet?)

Personal Hydro also looks interesting (but alas I have neither the elevation, nor river for that). For a while I researched ocean wave (especially shore wave), but I dont live by the sea.

Ultimately we use what we can get, which for me is solar. I get plenty of wind here, which is why it seems a waste to not use it, but again, economics...

sometimes, it's not about the money.

Note that the original uses (pumping, grinding) of windmills were for high-torque, low-speed applications.

In principle, gearing should make the low-torque, high-speed motors that one can drive via PV their equivalent or better. I'm no MechE; what's the situation in practice?

That was almost as hard as cutting the blades. The tricky part was that the sheetmetal when plasmacut deforms so much and so fast that you have to really move the plasmatorch upwards and out of the way or you'll have a material strike. This required intervention into the guts of the plasmacutter driver to pick up the voltage across the arc which is a good way to gauge proximity. Keep that voltage constant and you're going to be a relatively constant (+- .5 mm) distance away from the material you're cutting. The cutter used was a 12KW Thermal Dynamics unit, it would go through 1/2" like butter, very nice tool.

So what does a textile mill do? Does it grind cloth into fine dust, or does it something else? Is the sawdust produced by a sawmill its primary output product?

The word mill is overloaded. In Dutch, these are two separate words: molen, a singular noun describing a machine using a rotational mechanism for powering some industrial process; and malen, a verb describing the milling of particles into flour. In this case, the article describes a mill of the first kind.