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78. Maker Workshop - Wind Power Generator on MAKE: television
9 months ago
Taking a motor from an old exercise treadmill and some PVC pipe, John Park constructs a wind-powered generator. The electrical power may not be enough to get your home off the grid, but the great thing about the project is how it explains in simple terms the technology involved in turning wind into free electricity.

Download the PDFs for these projects here cachefly.oreilly.com/make/television/wind.pdf

Credits

18 Likes

  • Alex Wiebe 9 months ago
    Very cool. Some details that would be useful to add are:

    How to deal with the wire from the generator getting tangled around the post as the wind changes direction...

    How to balance the blades - careful cutting and positioning can only go so far...

    And finally, set this thing up and monitor it for a month. Let us know what the peak wattage is that was generated and what the total number of watt-hours produced over the month was.

    Thanks!
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  • Simon Simonsen 8 months ago
    Sorry mate, that's not free energy the way you demonstrated. You just used your gasoline to propel the vehicle to drive the wind mill, a very inefficient way of converting petrol to electricity I would assume :) Yeah yeah, a bit pedantic, but still, would be nice to see what kind of gale force would be needed to spin that mill.
  • make magazine plus 3 months ago
    We used it on the truck for testing purposes, not for gaining power.
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  • Leonard Daniels 3 months ago
    Fantastic. Thanks for this. Two questions:

    1) Am I correct in assuming this output could be run into a charge controller to charge a battery bank?

    2) Would such battery bank setup and charge controller need 12 volt output? If so, could a treadmill motor and this setup produce enough rpm to generate?

    Realize this is a lengthy discussion to answer fully. Just a few brief and key points would help, if you are able to answer.

    Thanks!!
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  • Prodeous 16 days ago
    I was wondering about a omnidirectional system. Where the motor is facing upwards, and a set of vertical fins setup in a circle would generate power without having the device to rotate to match wind direction.
  • Noah G 5 days ago
    Check out Faroun's VAWTs - Vertical Axis Wind Turbines

    instructables.com/id/V8_4quot_vawtsavoniusvertical_axiswind_turbin/

    vawt.tk/
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