Jason
1) How many watts does the average house use?
Wrong question. The average electrical usage of a house in the US won’t mean anything.
You need to know what a similar house near your windmill site uses, or at least what a similar house in Chile uses. You might look at your electric bill for your current house and see if they give you the kilowatt hours used and the number of days in the billing period.
Or, ask your electric company if they can give you the total kWh billed for a year ?
2) How big is the generator?
Depends on the answer to #3.
3) How many watts should the generator produce (is having a few thousand extra a good thing to do)?
Depends on the answer to #1, AND the average annual wind speed of your site.
Most wind turbines are rated at windspeeeds of 28-32 mph. (Somewhere near 14 meters/second.) If your site has an average annual wind speed of 5.5 m/s winds (about 12 mph), a 1 kW turbine might only produce 6.4 kWh a day.
In other words, on average, it will produce about 260 watts an hour, not the 1,000 watts it is rated for. So, you must size the wind turbine according to your expected loads and the wind speed at your site.
Having a real capability greater than your needs, is a real expensive mistake. It will drive up your costs tremendously. As a rough idea, figure the system cost at about $ 8,000 (USD) per kW installed.
You might want to spend some time reading the articles here on wind power and energy systems located under the “How-to” tab at the top of the page.
Also, Paul Gipes site has some real good info.
http://www.wind-works.org/All of his books that I have read, are excellent. I think the store (here) has a couple of them, or you might check your library for them.
Why the Vertical Turbine ?
I think that about 90% of the Turbines in the world are horizontal (HAWT). I know, that in California, 94% are HAWT. I would take a hint from that.
Ken
