Your Questions About Wind Turbine Generators For Home Use

Carol asks…

How can I make a homemade electric generator to power my house?

I was thinking about buying used car batteries from the junk yard and connecting them with jumper cables then testing the connected batteries with a battery tester to see how many volts it has. I havent tried this yet so I dont know if it will work do you guys have any idea on how to make a generator so I wont have to pay for power

admin answers:

To make an electrical generator, you need to have a length of wound copper wire rotating inside a magnetic field (refer to elementary physics).

Gasoline/diesel/etc. Generators run basically like your car’s engine, but instead of turning wheels, it uses the motion to rotate the wire inside the magnetic field, producing electricity. Remember, energy can’t be created or destroyed. The chemical potential energy in your combustible fuel is being converted to kinetic energy, which is being converted into electrical energy.

A wind turbine is more “free” in that you don’t have to go out and buy drums of oil to make your electricity. But it works on the same principle, but in this case, it’s the turbine blades catching the wind that spins the copper loop, creating electricity.

As far as your batteries go, you may be able to store it there, but to charge any battery, from AA to car, you need the correct circuit and voltage, or nothing will happen. So you probably can’t use your batteries. But if you can, all that you an do is store the potential energy there, and use it at a later time.

But if you just want to play with making a generator, try this:

First, you need to choose the energy source that you want to convert into electricity. You can use a stationary bicycle, a water wheel, wind turbine, a bored child willing to do some menial work on a set of gears, or virtually anything else with a rotating axle. You do have to choose the source, because as I said – you can’t get energy from nothing.

Take that copper wire that I talked about, and make that loop that I also talked about, but leave two ends free (you need that to form the electric circuit). The larger the number of turns in the loop, the more electricity you can generate for the same amount of rotation. Kind of like an electric pulley system, to use a bad analogy.

Take your loop, and connect it to your energy source. You need to be able to rotate the loop end-over-end, without twisting the two connecting wires about each other, because if they do, you’ll get a short circuit, and boom, it’s done. One way to successfully accomplish this is to connect one wire to the rotating axle and the other wire to a conducting “brush” that maintains contact with a second conductor.

Make sure that you’ve sufficiently supported the loop so that it’s out of the way of any moving parts of the energy source (such as your legs and the pedals if you pay a seven year old to ride a bicycle that never goes anywhere – give them one of those hand-held video games, they’ll never notice). To make sure that you get this right, you may need to reinforce your loop with plastic or another light (but sturdy) material.

Grab some magnets (permanent magnets), and arrange them around the loop so that the loop can rotate freely between them. Take care to ensure that you arrange the magnets to maximize the field strength. One good and simple method is to make the south end of one magnet face the north end of another.

Stick the two conductors on your energy source to a battery, circuit, chainsaw, whatever it is that you want to drive. Again, you need to keep your wires separate to avoid a short circuit, so you’ll need to use some kind of brush mechanism again, or whatever more clever thing that you can come up with that I haven’t considered.

Poke the kid and get him to start peddling, or release your turbine to the wind, whatever you want. The amount of energy that you get from your turbine will depend on the efficiency of its construction, materials used, and how much mechanical energy us put in to drive it and spin the turbine itself (a faster peddling kid will give you more electricity than a slower one).

Run with it. A home-built turbine is unlikely to provide your house with any really useful power, unless you’ve really taken some time, money, and thought into it (which is possible). But you might run some simple things from your standard knock-off generator, such as perhaps basement lighting, that kind of thing.

Maria asks…

a book which would give basic information about manufacturing of small solar power generators for my home.?

wanted also book of wind generators for the same purpose.
please give the link if possible.

admin answers:

You will not be able to manufacture solar power cells in your own home.

See this link for solar cells.

Http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLR_enGB241GB243&q=solar+cells

That is like trying to manufacture a CPU in your own home, you cannot make the semi conductors.
You need a clean factory and millions of pounds worth of equipment for that.

See this link for do it yourself wind turbine.

Http://www.scoraigwind.com/axialplans/index.htm

and this might help

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLR_enGB241GB243&q=wind+generatore%2e

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