The 1 kW domestic wind turbine we have is available for about £1,500, including installation by an approved installer. There is a Government grant of about £500 available, provided you do the paperwork correctly and do things in the right sequence!

Before you order your turbine you will want to establish what you wind conditions actually are. You can buy a survey for your area, but we found that the results are too general to be of much value, unless you already know that you live in an area with good wind, in which case why buy the survey!

We have discovered that the wind varies from one part of the garden to another, and over a matter of a few yards. It is also very difficult to judge by the feel on your face, or by looking at trees. We frequently have good wind at the turbine, while one of our trees will do very little and another will be quite busy!

We found that the best answer was to mount a small anemometer on a light pole as close as possible to the position where we intend to have the turbine and, if possible, at a similar height. Details of the anemometer are here.

The Met Office web site now provides a local forecast for your postcode, with predicted wind conditions - steady and gusts - throughout the next few days. The same site also gives actual readings for the nearest local reference point - in our case an RAF station a few miles away.

We build a spreadsheet of our daily anemometer readings against the Met Office predictions, so that we are learning the relationship between the forecast and the actuals at our site.