How We Made our own Wind Turbine from a Washing Machine
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Taken during the very first test. It has evolved since then.
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It catches the sea breeze really well.
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What I’m going to try & do is enter a few notes in here each day of my progress, or lack of it, when attempting to make a wind turbine & generate some electrical power. My goal is to make this for less than 1 months electric bill & to have it making power within 2 weeks & above all to have some fun & learn something new.
Day 1
Spent 4 hours on the internet researching what the hell I’m getting myself into & I really wanted this to be fun.
The project seems to be very involved & has some major stages which are:
1/ Spending even more time on the internet to fully understand what is involved.
2/ Getting the necessary parts locally & at what price.
3/ Source a generator.
4/ Mount the generator & sort out bearings & shaft.
5/ Make some turbine blades
6/ Mount the blades to the generator.
7/ Mount the whole thing on a pole.
8/ Convert AC to DC.
9/ Connect to a battery & test it.
10/ Paint it & generally tart it up.
10/ Get a DC to AC inverter to be able to use normal mains appliances.
11/ Design a power management circuit to divert power to another load when the battery is fully charged.
12/ Get components & build the power management system.
I have some ideas now, I don’t fully understand exactly how I’m going to do each part but I have a good general idea of what needs to be done.
It would seem that a washing machine motor can be used as a generator, specifically a Fisher & Paykel smart drive washing machine so my first job is to get one of those.
The turbine blades can be made from a large PVC pipe so I also need to get one of those.
Spent all day searching for these things, went to our local tip but they weren’t very helpful, spent a few hours on New Zealands TradeMe online auction site which is similar to Ebay, found a few faulty washing machines on that so I'll keep an eye on it.
Forward to Page 2
Day 1
Spent 4 hours on the internet researching what the hell I’m getting myself into & I really wanted this to be fun.
The project seems to be very involved & has some major stages which are:
1/ Spending even more time on the internet to fully understand what is involved.
2/ Getting the necessary parts locally & at what price.
3/ Source a generator.
4/ Mount the generator & sort out bearings & shaft.
5/ Make some turbine blades
6/ Mount the blades to the generator.
7/ Mount the whole thing on a pole.
8/ Convert AC to DC.
9/ Connect to a battery & test it.
10/ Paint it & generally tart it up.
10/ Get a DC to AC inverter to be able to use normal mains appliances.
11/ Design a power management circuit to divert power to another load when the battery is fully charged.
12/ Get components & build the power management system.
I have some ideas now, I don’t fully understand exactly how I’m going to do each part but I have a good general idea of what needs to be done.
It would seem that a washing machine motor can be used as a generator, specifically a Fisher & Paykel smart drive washing machine so my first job is to get one of those.
The turbine blades can be made from a large PVC pipe so I also need to get one of those.
Spent all day searching for these things, went to our local tip but they weren’t very helpful, spent a few hours on New Zealands TradeMe online auction site which is similar to Ebay, found a few faulty washing machines on that so I'll keep an eye on it.
Forward to Page 2
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