You’ve finally chose to go green and make your own wind turbine to power your house – once you’ve collected all the parts, how do you assemble everything?
Here’s how you do it in 9 simple steps:
Stage 1: Procure or buy all the components on either eBay or from a hardware shop in your area. You’ll need a DC power motor, metallic sheets, PVC pipe, hub, tower, deep-cycle battery, charge controlling device, dump load, AC inverter and sufficient nuts as well as bolts to connect the three blades to the tower.
Phase 2: To start with, cut the PVC pipe into a 3 ft long piece, and then cut the pipe into four pieces ” 3 will be used for blades, and one shall be a spare. You will have to shape each blade so that one side tapers into a 2 point. The blades should of approximately 6 ft long ” they could be smaller, but surely not smaller than 4 ft in which case they may not spin easily.
Stage 3: Make holes on the other side of the narrow end of the blades so that their positions align with your hub.
Part 4: Weld or bolt a coupling to your hub, and then attach the hub to the 3 blades as well as to the motor shaft using small steel bars (12″ by 2″ should be fine).
Phase 5: Align the blades and the hub by marking each blade with a number and making sure that the same blade does not land at the bottom every time ” if so, then you may have to scrape some metal off your connected metal bars.
Phase 6: Smoothly slide the DC motor shaft into the hole in the middle of your hub (or drill one if it’s not there already). Make sure the hub is securely fastened.
Phase 7: Determine the height of your tail shaft and again make a hole through the top (smaller) part of your tower, above where the upper end of the tail shaft should be.
Stage 8: Then, cut the original tail shaft from your metal, so that it measures around 3 to 4 ft long and then attach it to the tower using a flat bracket.
Part 9: Now, connect your DC motor to the charge controller, connect the charge controller to the battery, connect the battery to the AC inverter, and then connect that to your utility box. The type of wire you need to use depends on the materials you’ve used – question your electrician for help if all else fails.
Like I mentioned above, this is just a tip of the iceberg regarding DIY wind turbines – just enough so that you may know how to build a simple turbine yourself.
The wind turbine described above should generate 300-500 watts of power, assuming that your mean wind velocity is a minimum of 10-20 mph.
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