Every company in this industry calls itself a leader. The word costs nothing to type, and there is no referee: nobody publishes audited unit numbers for household wind turbines, so nobody's claim can be checked — including ours. So instead of asking you to take a word on trust, here is the thing about us that is actually unusual, why we think it matters, and the questions we would put to any manufacturer in this business, us included.
We make both halves of the system
Nearly every company in small-scale renewables makes one thing. Wind companies make turbines and, if a customer asks about solar, point at somebody else's panel. Panel companies make panels and have never machined a blade. The two industries share customers and share almost nothing else — different materials, different failure modes, different engineers.
We make both. Household wind turbines and flexible solar panels, designed and sold by the same company, to the same customer, for the same battery. That is the genuinely rare part, and it is not breadth for its own sake. It is what lets us give the advice we actually give.
Read back through this blog and you will find us telling a buyer in Palermo that a roof in the middle of the old city is in the wind shadow of everything around it, and to buy the panel instead. You will find us telling buyers in Saudi Arabia that most of the interior is not windy and to measure before spending anything. A company that only sells turbines cannot afford to say that. We can, because when the honest answer is “not the turbine” we still have something to sell you that will work.
Countries with their own storefront, drawn by us from our own store configuration. Every one is a separate currency, a separate tax setup and a separate set of legal texts.
What “flexible” actually buys you, and what it costs
A conventional panel is silicon under glass in an aluminium frame. It is heavy, it is rigid, it needs a mounting structure, and on a roof that cannot take the load or a surface that is not flat it is simply not an option. A flexible panel puts the cells on a polymer backing instead. It weighs a fraction of the glass version, it bends to a curve, and it bonds down without a frame.
That opens up the surfaces glass cannot have: a van roof, a boat deck, a curved cabin top, an outbuilding whose structure will not carry a rack. It is also why a flexible panel and a small turbine end up on the same vehicles and the same remote sites — they are both answers to “there is no grid here and no room for anything heavy.”
Now the part a brochure leaves out. Per square metre, a flexible panel produces less than good rigid glass. Bonded flat to a surface with no air gap underneath, it runs hotter, and a hot cell is a less efficient cell. The polymer facing does not have the service life of tempered glass. Bonding it down is close to permanent. If you have a strong flat roof that will take the weight, buy rigid glass — it is the better panel. Flexible is the right answer when rigid is not an option at all, which for a boat or a van is most of the time.
Making both products is not a bigger catalogue. It is the only way to be allowed to tell you which one to skip.
Thirty-four storefronts is a workload, not a trophy
We run 38 retail storefronts covering 34 countries plus a rest-of-world store, in 23 languages, alongside a wholesale mirror of every one of them. That number gets quoted as an achievement. From the inside it is mostly a maintenance burden, and it is worth explaining why, because it is the part of “global” nobody photographs.
Each storefront is its own currency and its own pricing, its own VAT or sales-tax treatment, its own shipping rates and carriers, its own consumer-law texts, its own returns terms. A specification change has to reach 76 places or it has reached none of them. A blog post like this one is written once and then exists in 23 languages, and if one of those translations is wrong it is wrong in public until somebody notices.
We do it because the alternative is worse. A German customer reading English prices in dollars, guessing at shipping, and reading Irish returns terms is a customer we have not really served. But it is work, not a laurel, and we would rather describe it accurately than wave the number around.
The claim we will not make, and what to ask instead
There is no independent body ranking household wind turbine manufacturers by volume. No audited registry, no equivalent of the league tables that exist for utility-scale wind. Which means that when any company in this business tells you it is the world's number one, that statement cannot be checked by you, by us, or by anyone else. Treat it accordingly — and treat it that way when it comes from us.
What can be checked is specific and boring, which is exactly what makes it useful. Five questions, and what we think a straight answer looks like:
1. What is the blade made of, and how thick? A manufacturer who cannot answer this in one sentence has not thought about it or is not making it. Ours are laser-cut from 1.2 mm high-strength aluminium, on our own machine, and we have shown you the machine.
2. At what wind speed does it start, and at what speed does it reach its rated output? One number without the other is marketing. Our three blade sets run 2–20, 4–25 and 5–35 m/s, each with its own peak figure, all published on the product page.
3. Where is it actually made? Not “designed in” — made. Ours are made mainly in Slovakia and London, and in Turkey as well, and we will tell you which parts come from outside because plenty of them do.
4. Do you make the other half, or resell it? If a wind company recommends a panel it does not make, ask who chose it and why. If a panel company waves you at a turbine, same question.
5. Will you ever tell me not to buy it? This is the one that sorts the field. Any manufacturer will tell you where their product works. Ask where it does not, and see whether you get a real answer or a change of subject.
We would rather be judged on those five than on an adjective. If a competitor answers them better than we do, they have earned the sale, and you will have learned more from asking than from any ranking either of us could put in a headline.
The map on this page is ours, drawn from our own store configuration; the storefront, language and country counts are what you can verify yourself from the store switcher on this site. The turbine figures are our own published specifications and are checkable on the product page. We have deliberately made no claim about market share or ranking anywhere in this post, because we have no source for one that would survive you checking it.