WHEN Rena Wilson Jones and her husband, Drew, were building a house 10 years ago in a subdivision near the edge of Urbana, Ill., they knew the property was likely to be windy, bordered as it was by open fields to the north and west. But they did not realize how fierce the winds would be until construction of their house was under way. In the decade that followed, the wind drove Ms. Wilson Jones crazy from November through April, she said, whipping across her yard and making it difficult to work in the garden. At times, it was hard to walk outside.

Eventually, the couple decided to capitalize on their affliction. Last summer, they installed a 56-foot wind turbine in their yard to draw electrical power from the wind, which sometimes gets up to 40 miles per hour. They did the work themselves over a weekend, digging a four-foot-deep hole for the foundation and raising the $13,000 turbine with a winch on their Jeep. It was spinning by early September, and their electricity bills dropped sharply, from $90 to $10 for November, one of the windier months.

“Now, the faster the wind goes, the happier I am,” said Ms. Wilson Jones, a director of nursing at Community Blood Services of Illinois.

Until recently, wind turbines were used primarily by those who lived outside the range of local utility lines, or who wanted to live completely off the grid. Now, reductions in their size and cost, along with improvements in their efficiency, are allowing suburban homeowners with no dissident leanings to speak of to install them in growing numbers, with concerns over rising energy costs and global warming driving the demand.