If you are among the growing number of homeowners who are considering adding wind power to their energy equation, you've probably spent more time thinking about the tower than the turbine you intend to mount on top of it. That's because towers are daunting structures that ascend to dizzying heights, and they're worthy of the healthy respect you afford them. Formidable as the idea of erecting a tower may seem, however, the process is as difficult or as easy as you make it. It's all in how you go about it.

When it's time to attach the turbine, the gin pole will be nearly vertical.

A quick tour of towers

There are essentially four types of towers, ranging from refreshingly affordable to intensely expensive. The cheapest, and therefore the most widely used, is the guyed pipe tower, which is nothing more than several lengths of pipe screwed and/or welded together and held erect with guy wires. Next up the price scale is the guyed lattice tower. These towers are three-sided and of uniform dimension from top to bottom. They are popular among amateur radio enthusiasts, and can often be purchased cheap from former ham operators who have since succumbed to the allure of the Internet. Free-standing lattice towers are the next option, though they're seldom used by do-it-yourselfers. They're much pricier than the guyed version, having a broad four-sided base that tapers as the tower ascends into the sky, evoking visions of France's Eiffel Tower, albeit on a much smaller scale. Finally, for the very well-heeled, there is the monopole tower-a sleek, tapered steel affair, much like the giant light poles you see beside Interstate highway exit ramps.

Raising the tower

Once you decide on a tower, you'll need to determine if it's going to be permanently affixed to its concrete base, or if you want it hinged. Our own tower is a 50-foot guyed lattice tower, firmly rooted in three yards of concrete. We didn't bother to install it as a fold-over tower for the simple fact that, on our rocky mountaintop, there was really no practical place to fold it to.

Dan Bartman from OtherPower.com raised a small tower with a battery-powered drill anchored in rock.

For most folks with enough open, reasonably level ground, however, a fold-over tower is the practical way to raise and lower your wind turbine safely and easily. The concept is dirt simple and, with careful planning, the process should proceed without a hitch. The basic idea is to hinge the tower at the base and attach a gin pole to it at a 90-degree angle. The length of the gin pole should be around one-third the height of the tower. Otherwise, as Dan Bartmann, a turbine designer and builder from OtherPower.com points out, "the forces really start to add up." Near the point where the end of the gin pole touches the ground, you'll need a deeply rooted concrete pad with a pulley (or a clevis, depending on how you intend to raise the tower) firmly anchored to it.

When the business end of the tower is lowered and supported a few feet off the ground, as it will be when it comes time to attach the turbine, the gin pole will be nearly vertical. The front-side guy wires (steel cables) should run from several points along the length of the tower to the tip of the gin pole, such that the full length of the tower and the end of the gin pole-all the places where stresses will be most critical during the lifting process-are supported.

Dan and drill.

On lighter towers, a cable running from the top of the gin pole through a ground-mounted pulley is attached to a tractor or pickup locked into low range, with a steady-footed driver at the wheel, but you can just as easily use a bumper-mounted winch. In one setup on a craggy mountainside, I watched Dan Bartmann raise a small 30-foot tower with a 3/8-inch battery-powered drill turning a small winch anchored into solid rock.

On heavier towers, such as Bartmann's 75-foot, 10-inch diameter colossus, a cable attached to the ground runs through a pulley mounted on top of the gin pole, then to a powerful electric winch firmly anchored in three yards of concrete which was poured around an old engine block Dan threw in for extra ballast.

Guy wires

However you raise the tower, it should be guyed to four deeply rooted concrete pads, with the two sets of guys perpendicular to the tower's movement set slightly back from the midpoint. This will allow extra support as the tower reaches the vertical position. The gin pole should also be firmly guyed on either side. These guy wires need to be anchored to the ground, in line with the pivot point of the tower (just as the two ends of a hinge are in line with the middle) or the cables will bind as the tower is raised. Once the tower is in place, remove the gin-pole guy wires so the person who cooks your dinner doesn't trip over one and do a digger into the cold, hard ground.

The homemade hinged base for Don Cordes' 47-foot guyed lattice tower.

To ensure that everything goes smoothly, it's important to determine the length of the guy wires before the tower is raised. Unless you have an uncanny knack for doing hyper-precise scale drawings, I suggest you take the easy route and use the Pythagorean Theorem, A2 + B2 = C2, with A being the distance from the pivot to the point on the tower where the guy will be attached; B as the distance from the pivot to the guy-wire round pad; and C as the diagonal between those points. Thus, a guy wire mounted 30 feet up the tower and 20 feet out would be 302 (900) + 202 (400) = 1,300, the square root of which is 36.05 feet. I am assuming, of course, that the pivot and the ground pad are the same relative elevation. If not, you will have to consult your neighborhood trigonometry whiz and make adjustments accordingly.

Tower hinges

There are any number of ways to hinge a tower. My friend Don Cordes, for instance, welded the three legs of his lattice tower to a 1/4-inch steel plate which is securely hinged along one side with a 1/2-inch homemade pipe hinge and firmly bolted to the concrete foundation [photo 8]. When the tower is in the upright position, the four bolt holes in the plate opposite the hinge (two of which are elongated to ensure that they fit over the bolts closest to the hinge while the tower is being raised and lowered) fit snugly over the four anchor bolts in the pad. The gin pole, in turn, is bolted through a pair of 5/16-inch steel "ears" welded to the main plate.

Adam Richards' pipe tower, by contrast, is welded to a horizontal pipe section that rotates on the outside of a smaller pipe, which is firmly welded to lengths of angle iron at either end (thus forming an "H"), and the angle iron is welded to rebar studs pinned to the exposed bedrock where Adam's tower is situated [photo 9]. The gin pole is welded perpendicular to the tower, and both are angle-braced with smaller pipe sections for added support. Dan Bartmann also used the "H" configuration for his monster tower, with steel I beams replacing the angle iron.

The pivoting base of Adam Richards' tower and gin pole, anchored into solid rock.

Just to make sure everything works as planned, you should raise and lower the tower a few times without the turbine attached-it could save you a lot of anguish in the event you've overlooked something.

When Don Cordes installed a Bergey XL.1, 1000-watt turbine on his acreage in southern Colorado, he first perfected a wooden working model before assembling all the pieces for his 47-foot guyed lattice tower. Seeing it all built to scale helped him appreciate the mechanics involved. By the time the Bergey took its first ride into the sky, Don and his wife, Toni, had raised and lowered the tower a dozen times. "Now it takes about four minutes," Don says, "from time the cable is hooked to the pickup to the time the turbine is upright."

Models, however, do not have to endure the same stresses as the real thing. That's why nothing should ever be left to chance. Specifics such as the size of the tower and the hinge, and the placement and size of the guy wires and guy-wire anchors are just a few of the things that require at least some degree of engineering. Admittedly, most of us do our own project engineering, and most of time we do a good job of it. But sometimes we get in over our heads. Happens to me all time. And then I have to admit I've run head-on into my own limitations. I just try to make sure it doesn't happen when I've got a ton or two of steel looming 60 feet over my head.

Rex Ewing is the author of several renewable energy books, including "Power With Nature, Got Sun? Go Solar, and Hydrogen: Hot Stuff-Cool Science." He lives with his wife, LaVonne, in a handcrafted log home powered solely by the sun and wind in the foothills of Colorado. His books can be purchased at the Countryside Bookstore