Clint Frysinger's driveway is just too long.  500 feet is much farther than he wanted to run an extension cord. but then, how do you power the christmas lights on the fence and trees out by the road?

Clint Frysinger, windmill builder, says "There's nothing wrong with the extension cord. It's actually the cheaper way to do it, but I don't get to learn anything by just plugging it into the wall."

And Clint's learning project was to build his own environmentally friendly solution.  A windmill!   It's made with some factory-second parts, an alternator with a coil he wound himself, and hand carved-wooden blades. Clint says, "They're not very good, but they're good enough to get it to spin so that's really all I care about."

When the blades turn, they create electricity that gets pumped into a set of golf cart batteries. They, in turn, pump the juice out to the LED lights.  Frysinger says, "There's enough battery power that it'll run for three or four days with no wind." 

A chip tracks whether the batteries are under or over-charged. when there's too much power, it flips on a pair of headlights to drain off the excess. Say Frysinger, "At nighttime, I can look out, and if the headlights turn on, I know, hey, the batteries are full."

Clint says it's not really a money-saving project. The lights only need about 24 watts anyway. but for a mechanical engineer, it's a great learning hobby. and it's pretty for the folks passing by.