The Basics For How To Build Your Own Wind Turbine

If you want to build your own wind turbine, you need to have at least basic carpentry and technical skills.  With such skills, you can make full use of scrap materials. There’s no need to buy any extra supplies.  You can shop for all the items online or in used supplies stores or even in junk yards.

Potential Risk Factors When You Build Your Own Wind Turbine

When you build your own wind turbine from scratch, you have to take into account the various potential risk factors that you’ll come across:

• Bad weather
• Electrical sparks and other related problems
• Fast moving parts

The best way to avoid getting into danger is to use high-quality materials and taking as much time as you need with each step.

Supplies and Tools

Here’s what you’ll need to build your own wind turbine:

• Treadmill Motor – Look in particular for 260 VDC models and equipped with a 6-inch threaded hub. This wouldn’t necessarily build the largest wind turbine, but it’s good enough to use for your home. In any case, just make sure your treadmill motor can handle 10 AMPs up and returns one volt per 25 RPM at the minimum.
• Blocking diode (1-way, 30 to 50 AMPs)
• Motor bolts
• PVC Pipes (size dependent on the size of your motor)
• Drill and drill bits
• Screwdriver (with flat head)
• Wrenches (pipe and crescent)
• Jigsaw (with metal blades)
• Vise or clamp
• Measurement tools (tape measure and marker, protractor and compass)
• Wire strippers
• Thread tapping set

All items listed above are essential to build your own home wind turbine motor. You’ll need additional materials when you build your turbine’s tail, blades, and mounting.

Understanding Wind Power

It’s very important that you don’t have false expectations on your project. While it’s critical that you learn the technical skills needed to build your own wind turbine, it’s just as important to be aware of how much wind power you can get from your motor.

The formula for this is simple: multiply the cube of wind velocity in your area by the air density.  Multiply the product by the swept area and finally multiply this by .5 or divide the figure into two.  With this formula, you’ll have the available wind power for your turbine.

Priority Your Safety When You Build Your Own Wind Turbine

No doubt you’re excited to start on your project right away. Your mind’s probably buzzing right now with facts and figures and all sorts of ideas that you want to apply immediately to your project.

But before you start, just remember the most important tip of all: your safety is more important than anything else.  So be sure to take the necessary precautions every step of the way as you build your own wind turbine.