Thinking of adding a small wind turbine to my cabin setup — worth it in Scotland or stick with solar?

I've got a 400W solar array on my cabin roof up near Pitlochry, paired with a 200Ah lithium battery bank and a Victron SmartSolar MPPT controller. Works brilliantly from April through to September, but come winter it's a bit grim — some days I'm barely pulling 20–30Wh out of the panels, and I'm having to be really careful about what I run.

Someone at a local agricultural show mentioned that a small wind turbine could be a decent supplement, especially at this latitude where the wind doesn't really switch off the way the sun does. I've been looking at the Rutland 914i and the Air Breeze Marine, both of which seem to come up a lot in discussions like this. Budget is probably around £600–800 all in for the turbine itself, not counting the tower and cabling.

My main concern is the hassle factor. The cabin is on a hillside with decent exposure, but I've read some horror stories about cheap turbines vibrating, failing in high winds, or just being noisy enough to drive you mad at 2am. Has anyone actually run one of these smaller domestic turbines through a Scottish winter and found it genuinely useful, rather than just a bit of a novelty?

@JimChapman74 slightly different angle from a van conversion perspective, but I've been looking into exactly this for my build and Scotland keeps coming up as one of the few places in the UK where small wind actually makes sense financially.

The question I keep getting stuck on though — what's the wind situation specifically at your site? I've read that even within a few miles you can have massively different average wind speeds depending on elevation and tree cover. Is there a reliable way to check historical wind data for a specific postcode before committing to something like a Rutland 914i or similar?

Also curious whether your Victron MPPT can accept wind input alongside solar, or would you need a separate charge controller for it? That's the bit I can't work out for my own setup.

@JimChapman74 Scotland is genuinely one of the better places in the UK to consider small wind — Pitlochry gets reasonable exposure and crucially your worst solar months (Nov–Feb) correlate almost perfectly with your best wind months. That's the real argument for hybrid rather than just adding more panels.

That said, small turbines are notoriously problematic. The cheap units (Pikasola, generic Amazon stuff) have terrible longevity and dodgy charge controllers. If you're serious, look at Rutland or Superwind — both have decent UK track records. You'd want a proper wind/solar combiner feeding that Victron MPPT, or better yet a separate Victron input.

My honest assessment: budget minimum £800–£1,200 for anything worth mounting. Factor in a solid tower — a low-mounted turbine in turbulent air is almost useless. Get the siting right first, everything else follows.