Your Questions About Wind Generators Home Use
Donna asks…
Making a DC motor powered wind generator?
this is for a project i have for my Energy and powers class, i need information on how to make a wind generator but it has to be able to work on a DC motor. The thing is what makes this hard for me is that it can only be 28 inches tall. Please help, I forgot about it and it’s due this week!
it would help to if there was a diagram for it too.
admin answers:
I own and install smaller wind generators.
I assume this is a model?
A small, 360 or 540 can electric motor from any hobby shop will be a good size to use, and only a few dollars.
The same hobby shop if it is at all useful will have various pulleys and propellors that can be fixed to the shaft. If you mount a very large (say 14 or 16″) diameter coarse pitch (8″ or more would be good) prop the motor will not require a lot of air flow in order to over come the ‘camming’ effect of a permanent magnet motor and start to turn it, it won’t go fast but if you set a finer pitch prop on it it will take heaps of wind just to get it turning, or might not produce any useful power at all.
The problem with the standard air screw is that it will have to be used backwards, but if you only have a few days left you can’t be choosy.
If you get a piece of wood about 14″ long, about 2″ x 2″ you could screw it standing up vertically to a large piece of ply, and having cut a 1/2″ groove across the top 2×2 face you can secure the motor to this by putting a nail or screw each side down about an inch and stretching a few ruber band across the motor, as many as needed – it will be rock solid if done right.
Then you can solder or plug on the two wires to the terminals of the motor and lead them to your multimeter and load (bulb, little motor whatever) and go and find some wind.
If the point of the project is to make a wind generator, i.e. Blow wind then the same thing will work, just apply a small current (say 6v one or two amps) to the motor and off it will go. You would be better off in that case by fitting a smaller prop, say 7×4 and see how that goes – it will rev so watch your fingers.
Again the hobby shop should have all you need.
Just type in wind generator to google and you will get about three years of info and reading. There is some really dodgy stuff out there – at the moment there are lots of scams from the look of it that even claim people are making 200 watt solar panels at home from scrap and a few dollars worth of stuff – yeah right………..
Good luck. 🙂
Start here:-http://www.otherpower.com/toymill.html
http://www.hydro.com.au/education/discovery/model/wtmodel.htm
Joseph asks…
How do places with wind and solar energy sustain their power?
Some places rely on solar and wind energy right? To power their homes and such. How do they use energy in the night or when there is no wind? Do they have something that stores the energy like a big battery or something?
I have to “make” a green city and it will use renewable energy source including solar and wind energy. How would I make the wind and solar energy sustainable and not have shortages of power?
admin answers:
Small places, like a remote house or an island, might have batteries. A large place, like a city, would be connected to a “Grid”, or electrical energy transmission system. If the wind stopped blowing, deep in the night, they would pull energy off the grid, from a nuclear plant, or coal-burning generation station, or hydroelectric project many miles away. A town on an island might have a large diesel generator.
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