http://www.WindEnergyGuide.net – 100% Homemade Electricity Producing Wind Turbine Several years ago I bought some remote property in Arizona. I am an astronomer and wanted a place to practice my leisure activity far away from the sky-wrecking light pollution found near cities of any real size. I found a fantastic piece of property. The problem is, it’s so remote that there is no electric service available. That’s not really a problem. No electricity equals no light pollution. But, it would be nice to have at least a small electricity, since so much of life in the 21st century is dependant on it.
One thing I noticed straight away about my property is that most of the time, the wind is blowing. Nearly from the moment I bought it, I had the thought of putting up a wind turbine and making some electricity, and later adding some solar panels. This is the tale of how I did it. Not with an expensive, store-bought turbine, but with a home-built one that cost hardly anything. If you have some fabricating skills and some electronic know-how, you can build one too.
Let me state up front that I probably won’t be able to help you out much if you choose to build your own wind turbine. This web site has become insanely well loved, often taxing the bandwidth limits of the server. I get dozens of requests for help each day. I simply don’t have time to answer the majority of them. Simple questions which only require a quick and simple answer may get answers if time permits. But, there is no way I can help you out with complex issues, teach you electronics theory, help you locate parts, build a charge controller for you, or custom design a system for you. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Sorry.
I started by Googling for information on home-built wind turbines. There are a lot of them out there in an incredible variety of designs and complexities. All of them had five things in common though: 1. A generator
2. Blades
3. A mounting that keeps it turned into the wind
4. A tower to get it up into the wind
5. Batteries and an electronic control system
I reduced the project to just five small systems. If attacked one at a time, the project didn’t seem too terribly hard. I chose to start with the generator. My online research showed that a lot of people were building their own generators. That seemed a bit too complicated, at least for a first effort. Others were using surplus permanent magnet DC motors as generators in their projects. This looked like a simpler way to go. So I started looking into what motors were best for the job.
A lot of people seemed to like to use ancient computer tape drive motors (surplus relics from the days when computers had huge reel to reel tape drives). The best apparently are a couple of models of motor made by Ametek. The best motor made by Ametek is a 99 volt DC motor that works fantastic as a generator. Unfortunately, they are nearly impossible to locate these days. There are a lot of other Ametek motors around though. A couple of their other models make decent generators and can still be found on places like Ebay . This web site talks about the virtues and vices of various Ametek motors when used as generators.
http://www.WindEnergyGuide.net
There are probably lots of other brands and models of permanent magnet DC motors available that will work well as generators. Permanent magnet DC motors work as generators, but they weren’t designed to be generators. So they aren’t fantastic generators. Some types of motor are a lot worse than others. When used as generators, motors generally have to be driven far quicker than their rated speed to produce anything near their rated voltage. So what you are looking for is a motor that is rated for high DC voltage, low rpms and high current. Steer away from low voltage and/or high rpm motors. You want a motor that will place out over 12 Volts at a honestly low rpm, and a useful level of current. So a motor rated for say 325 rpm at 30 Volts when used as a generator, could be expected to produce 12+ volts at some reasonably low rpm. On the other hand, a motor rated at 7200 rpm at 24 volts probably won’t produce 12+ volts as a generator until it is spinning many thousands of rpm, which is way too quick for a wind turbine. So shop for motors accordingly.
100% Homemade Electricity Producing Wind Turbine
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