Attic vent turbines for power?

[Bigrock]

  I have noticed that the vent turbines on my roof almost NEVER stop turning. There must be a way to harness that constant movement cheaply for home use. Any ideas?

[zap]

Sorry but it's very doubtful.
As an experiment... assuming you can get on and off the roof without killing yourself, you can try and stop the turbine by putting your thumb or finger on the very top of the turbine on the axle.  Chances are it will only take a slight pressure to stop the turbines rotation.

If it takes more than a little pressure and it starts to burn your finger... then you have a chance at harvesting some of the power.

If you live in a climate that requires heat during some part of the year then you'll collect way more usable energy if you can pump the heat coming out of the attic back inside your house.

[Bigrock]

 I was thinking, instead of trying to save the heat, what about the turbine hooked to some sort of alternator to charge batteries?

[thirteen]

if there is enough heat being generated then pipe it down thru pipes and make a vault then put the piping inside and fille it with rocks and you could draw warm air from the rocks into you house. The rocks will store heat from the vent during the day. As for a alt. on a vent I don't think it will work for there is alot of power needed to operate one at a high enough speed to produce power. Also the vent would not be very constant in its power output because of the heating of the attic. Just an idea 13

[DamonHD]

What zap is telling you is that there is probably almost no power in that airflow for you to extract, I believe.

So little that you may not even be able to turn an alt, never mind extract any useful electricity.

And it's probably better that your roof is correctly ventilated.

Rgds

Damon

[JW]

As Flux once said, "just because its turning dosent necessarily mean its making any power"


JW

[fabricator]

Not to mention the fact that as far as power extraction from the wind those things are about as far from efficient as it gets, instead of messing around and spending money on those spend it on solar panels.

[Frank S]

One of my shops in Texas I had 4 of the 30" diameter turbine vents on the roof they spun just fine but did little to actually draw heat out of the building unless the wind was really cooking so I mounted a pulley with an over running sprag  to the center shaft  so it could spin by the wind when the power was off or spin by the motor when there was very little wind. then salvaged some old dryer motors