Otherpower.com's large homebrew wind turbine on a breezy day

A bit of video of otherpower.coms home made 20' diameter wind turbine on a breezy day. During this video you can just see it starting to furl - it's generating between 2 - 3KW most of the time. This is the machine that powers our off-grid home and shop. We also run a smaller 17' wind turbine and we have about 500 Watts of PV solar (although we did run for almost a whole year with just the wind turbine and often times it's more power than we can use). The system charges a 48V battery bank which we feed an inverter with. The inverter converts the 48VDC from the batteries into 120VAC to run our shop and home. Details about the construction of this machine are here: http://www.otherpower.com/20page1.html

Home brew wind generators are great fun - check out our website and our discussion forum at www.fieldlines.com for more!

Category:

Howto & Style

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• otherpower
• wind
• generator
• turbine
• solar
• power
• otherpower.com

[desertblbuesman]

Nice work. Not many can home built them to last, or I should say, many have built them that did not last. How long has it been running for you now?

[otherpower]

The machine has been up/running now for about 2 and a half years.

[otherpower]

Now it's pushing 5 years old and still doing well... definitely more than meeting my needs for energy most of the time.

[SmallWindGuy]

I like you, your mission, and your gear / books. Keep up the good work!

[HaikuAutomation]

Dan, glad to see you still using this old design with success. I'm hoping you have retired now by all the travel, shows, and talks you have done. I'm assuming you two have put together that book now? Really wonderful to see you doing so well. Brillian solution to some very important problems we have, energy dependency (or in your case energy freedom). More people need to use your knowledge.

[LostInMadness220]

@otherpower why does the tail move to its liking?

[lloyd21964]

I have a surplus of very heavy copper wire. It is 4mm in diameter and I hate to not use it. I acquired this when copper prices just started going up and ran an ad to buy scrap aluminum and copper. Since this would carry more amps than voltage from the coil, could I use this and say use a neo 2" x 1" x .5" on both wides of the stator coil? I would like to use this instead of buying magnetic coil winding wire retail. The wire is very long weighing from 15 to 25 #'s per roll. I have several rolls.

[dogmountainband]

This turbine is the real thing, and has NOTHING to do with GreenEnergyToday or Earth4Energy.

Earth4Energy is a scam! For 50 bucks they tell you to buy a little surplus tape drive motor, stick an 8 foot diameter PVC pipe rotor on it, and have a dangerous machine that will blow into tiny pieces during the first high winds. It doesn't even furl to protect itself, like this one does.

Shame on you GreenEnergyToday -- you are a scammer. Learn how to build a real wind turbine instead,

[otherpower]

GreenEnergyToday: We did not follow your advice. Our design is our own, and very much inspired by Hugh Piggott. I see you promote earth4energy, which is not in any way similar to what we do here. In my opinion, earth4energy is a scam, misleading, lacking necessary information, telling folks what they want to hear and not reality. Its an expensive ebook with very little content! What we do here actually works ~ it's not however easy, or cheap.