Top 5 Homemade Wind Turbine Instructions
July 23, 2008 by Noel
Filed under Green Living
I’ve checked out a lot of sites on DIY homemade wind turbine / wind generator. I’ve narrowed it down to the top 5 based on the completeness of information, and how detailed it is. On top is what I considered the best one because it is composed of 3 videos on how to make your own wind turbine. A video of how to do it is simple the best instructional material for homemade wind turbine.
1. Detailed Video Instruction on how to make your own wind turbine
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
2. Astronomer Michael Davis’ Home made wind turbine
Mike used an old DC motor from those old computer tape drive motors. Not those recent tape drive motors but those old mainframe days that spin those huge reel to reel magnetic tapes. He has made a well documented webpage with lots of picture of each of the parts. It even has a schematic diagram of the charge controller.
3. Homemade Wind Generator from smallwind.co.uk
What’s great about this one is that there are CAD files available for download. The files are in .IGES, also some DFX files are included. I believe you can just send these files to a fabricator and they can load it up to their machine which can fabricate it according to the exact specs and measurement in those files.
4. Homemade Wind Generator from otherpower.com
This one is a bit complicated and required one to make your own magnet rotor. It is pretty detailed though. It has 5 pages worth of very useful instructions complete with photos.
a. page 1 – metal work
b. page 2 – magnet rotors
c. page 3 – stator fabrication
d. page 4 – assembly and blades
e. page 5 – tower and erection
5. Invention Nation Guys
One episode of Discover Science’s Invention Nation, the guys went to a guy who runs his entire house off-grid. They learned about the concept of how a wind turbine generator works and created a homebrew wind generator themselves.
Check it out (see video below)
I have2 questions for all the wind generator guys.
1. Why don’t use 4 blades instead of 3?
2. Why do you choose to loose power by rectifying AC power to DC for batteries and transferring it back to DC? Des anyone run wind power straight to their utility meter to run it backwards? If so how do you do it?
Joe Washington
pilothouse1@comcast.net
I dunno about the second, but the reason why wind turbines have three blades has to do with the amount of area taken up by the blades. More blades means less area for wind to get through and more friction from the blades moving through the wind.
I don’t have the equation on hand, but if you optimize for efficiency, it comes out at 3 blades. You see two sometimes because it’s much more simple to balance. Four blades are just less efficient than three.
also the odd number of blades help keep the blades going because one blade is going in to the lee of the post when the next is going into its power stroke. this gives stedier power out put and also help reduce twist and vidrations