You live your life every day fully dependent on energy, mainly gas and electricity. But with the constantly rising costs of these energy sources, you might be wondering how you can cut back on these expenses and make your life a little easier. You likely already know about renewable energy and that it is being used around the world. But how do you take advantage of this without spending a fortune? You might want to consider building a windmill, but do you know how to build a wind generator?
Good question. Here are some tips to guide you:
- First, find a suitable place where you can set up a tower. It must be 30 to 40 feet high, and within a 300 to 400 foot radius of open space. With regard to the tower, you can choose between tilt-ups and freestanding designs. Tilt-ups are most common since they are easier to maintain because you don’t have to climb up to clean it, but then free standing towers are taller, which means maximized output for your wind turbine.
- Next up on your list are the materials you are going to use. You can start with a high voltage, low current DC motor that runs at low rpm’s. This is the heart of the unit that will convert the wind into electrical current.
- Then comes the blades of the wind generator, which can be carved from plastic, wood, sheet metal or you could also use PVC pipes. Note that the longer the blades are, the wider its swept area covered, meaning the more power it can extract from the wind.
- Now you need to connect the blades to the motor using a hub. One of the simplest ways is to look for a scrap steel disk that you can drill holes in. Attach this to a shaft that will connect the blades.
- Finally, you need to attach a tail and pivot to your windmill to keep it turned to the wind. You can do this with some square tubing and pipe nipple, a flange for the pivot, and some scrap sheet metal for the tail.
- One last, important step to cover for your wind generator is the battery. The wind doesn’t always blow, so you need a way to store the converted energy. Try to keep the batteries as close to the generator as you can in order to monitor the charging. Try to get batteries that are highly efficient, yet low maintenance.
“Deep cycle” batteries are best used for this type of power system application. They are rated in amp-hours and have indicators of their charge-discharge cycles.
Once you have learned how to build a wind generator, you will need to place a diode between the generator and batteries. This is to prevent the energy from flowing back into the generator and being wasted. A secondary load to act as a depot for excess energy produced would also be a good idea.
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