Car alternator wind turbine
- Thread starter Tengu
- Start date
No........(I had to add all the dots 'cos my original answer was 5 characters short of a legitimate reply)...Now its longer than I intended...
Check out Hugh Piggot's site - wind your own alternator!
His homebrew turbine booklet is a recommended buy.
His homebrew turbine booklet is a recommended buy.
I weshe looking into this but car altenatores spin at high speeds and need a lot of wind to produce anything. Look for induction motor modifications.
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Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk
Er, it's a turbine.
You can buy blades and even complete turbine kits here.
Forget car alternators if you're serious about efficiency.
As a guide, if you have electricity from the grid then a wind power installation (tower, generator, cabling, charge controller, batteries, inverter) probably won't pay for itself unless the generator lives somewhere really windy. If you have no electricity supply then things are different -- you'll also need a backup generator.
Er, it's a turbine.
You can buy blades and even complete turbine kits here.
Forget car alternators if you're serious about efficiency.
As a guide, if you have electricity from the grid then a wind power installation (tower, generator, cabling, charge controller, batteries, inverter) probably won't pay for itself unless the generator lives somewhere really windy. If you have no electricity supply then things are different -- you'll also need a backup generator.
Mankind has survived for about 200 thousand years without electricity. I grew up on Knoydart without electricity, although I had a car battery to run my Hornby trainset
It's amazing what you can do without - especially if you budget your energy usage carefully. Do not be dissuaded.
Also check the Navitron Forum
Navitron used to sell blades, but I can't find them now on their online shop. The forum is a wealth of advice though. Navitron is a commercial supplier of renewable energy solutions, however forum members openly criticise Navitron products and promote competing technologies - and that seems to be ok.
Played with one many years ago driven by a Honda 50 engine to power 12 volt lights at the stables.
As mentioned an alterator needs to spin fast and you need a voltage regulator (from a car) to make it work correctly.
You'd be better with a DC motor.
Richard
As mentioned an alterator needs to spin fast and you need a voltage regulator (from a car) to make it work correctly.
You'd be better with a DC motor.
Richard
Agreed we've managed without electricity for long enough, and agreed we can sort of still do it in isolated situations. But we need to be realistic, and I'm trying to prevent false hopes.
Firstly in the days when we had no electricity we also had a life expectancy of about 30 years, and as a result the population in the UK was about five percent of what it is now. (Good thing, some might say.
) Of course there's a lot more to it than just electricity but a modern hospital could not run without it for example, and as a case in point, of course the Internet could not exist either...Secondly we benefit enormously from economies of scale nowadays, and the cost in labour and materials of generating electricity on the massive scales at which the utility companies work is much less than we can hope to achieve with home setups and, er, current technology. On a reasonably good site, a small wind setup rated to generate a kilowatt will typically give you about one hundred watts average and will cost at least a couple of thousand pounds to set up. The generator alone on the link I posted costs nearly that, and it's almost in kit form. At ten pence per kilowatt-hour you have to run your electricity generation installation for one penny per hour to make economic sense. Put another way, a couple of thousand pounds would pay for a hundred watts for a couple of hundred thousand hours -- almost 23 years, and far longer than the life of the batteries in your generator setup, even if it needs no other maintenance which would be a completely unrealistic hope.
