1018 Reusing A Washing Machine Motor As A DC Motor Or A Generator

[Music] hi so what i've got here actually is a washing machine motor turns out that washing machine motors are almost universally universal motors which is kind of cool but what is a universal motor well a universal motor is a motor that will work on ac or dc it doesn't really matter if you try to reuse a washing machine motor by plugging it into the ac what will happen is it'll begin to turn and then if you put don't put it under load it will get faster and faster and faster until the bearings wear out and that could be a bit of a challenge the easiest thing to do when reusing these is actually convert it into a straightforward dc motor if you convert it into a dc motor you have much more control over it if you leave it as an ac motor you're gonna need a control circuit all the things just going to run away with you the problem with it of course is this thing it has a connector right there with 10 pins on it and it can be kind of hard to identify which goes to which and which bits you need to wire up to convert this to run on dc so let's have a close-up of it so here it is there's our connector with its 10 pins actually there's nine in this and one missing they vary a little bit but actually they're more or less all the same that one was screwed on there and if we undo that screw we can actually take that off snip off cable clips and we can separate them out a little bit now that bit there is actually a tachometer it's a magnet attached to the shaft there's a coil in there two wires coming out and that's part of the speed control if you're running it on ac we can see the brushes here there and there and each of those brushes has a wire coming from it and then there's the field coils inside there they have wires coming from them and then there's probably a temperature um gauge in there to tell you whether things getting hot or not to start identifying these things all you really need to do is snip these things off so here where it's been held together and have a look at where those wires go to so to get these wires out this usually folds open and in there is a little spring clip you can see it actually just there and if you press that sprint clip down that wire will just slide out so dig a screwdriver in there get that spring clip pressed and you should be able to get that out there it is and just remove them all okay when you get them all snipped apart actually just becomes really obvious because you can see them we can see that that wire is going to the brush the other wire here goes to this other brush so there the rotor here we've got the two wires going to that bit there which is the tachometer and then we've got these five mysterious wires disappearing in the body of this now they could unscrew this and unscrew it but it's riveted so i can't but we have five wires now we have two black ones brown red blue what you do is grab yourself a multimeter set it on the resistance and just measure the resistance between those wires we pick one of the black ones and we go through touching each of those wires then where we've got the temperature controller we should have no an infinite resistance where the temperature controller is when we connect them up we should get another resistance reading so if i connect those two black wires sure enough we get a resistance reading telling us that that's actually a switch it's about an ohm but then when i touched any of these others compared to that black so i take the black touch here here here put that black on take this black touch here here and here then we get no reading whatsoever so we know those two black wires are connected to each other and those two black wires are actually the temperature controller what we do with the remaining three wires which is the brown red and blue you just connect to one end then connect to the other end and you'll get a reading now that reading is going to be in the sort of two to three ohms region something like that because it's connecting the coils now these coils are actually connected like this these are the two field coils and you'll see those as two poles there's a wire going in there's a center tap and then there's another wire going in now if we measure the resistances the greatest resistance will be found on those two here which will be the highest resistance these two here will be near enough the same and we can measure that to find out which ones those are and we do that just by touching those terminals so when we've got connected up two then we've got quite a high resistance if i move that and connect it there that resistance drops down to about two ohms so it's gone from about three ohms to about two ohms so telling us that the red or the black must be the end because they're the greatest resistance and then we can check that just by grabbing that and putting on there and we should get a very similar resistance to connecting the other two so we're looking for this so this is about two ohms then if we connect back up to there and back to there we get about two ohms so we know the ends of the coils are the greatest resistance reading which is right here which is three ohms so the red and the brown are the ends of my coils so we've identified the coils that we're interested in and there are only four wires there are two wires going to the brushes that we're interested in the two ends of the coils which in our case are the brown the red now if i take one end of that and put it onto the negative i take the other end and connect it to one of the brushes and then from the other brush connect it to the positive and we've got a dc power supply here but give it a bit of dc voltage and sure enough the motor spins because we've wound that in what's called a dc series so the armature and the field coils are in series with each other and going to that single power supply and it's giving us a constant rotation now there are other ways we can wire this and there's another way that i really quite like and it's like this so here what i've done is i've taken the two ends of the field field coil and connected them separately to a separate power supply and then i've taken the two ends of the brushes and connected them to another power supply now if i put some power onto the field coils i've got about two volts about 0.6 of an amp going through the field coils what it's doing is creating a an electromagnet it's actually a permanent magnetic field because we're applying a dc current to two field coils now they vary the voltage to these rotor coils to the brushes there we go it will spin yet again now it's spinning just like a dc motor but this section here is acting as an electromagnet but that means that can control the speed and the torque by increasing the fields to here i increase the magnetic strength so i increase the torque by increasing the voltage here to the brushes i can increase the speed and the speed is constant for a constant torque if i want more torque more voltage on the field coils want more speed more voltage to the brushes that i think is really cool because it enables you to create a motor from a washing machine motor that's very controllable okay so with washing machine motors actually it's really quite easy with a resistance meter to find out what those pin outs are most of it you can just see actually it's only the little sort of hidden ones that you need to do a bit of resistance reading on to work them out if you want to use this as an ac motor then you will need the tachometer because they go into a runaway condition really easily when they're under no load so it can be a bit challenging but using them as a straightforward dc motor you can either do series or you can do what i did where we use them separately i like the separate one you don't really need to set up a complicated power supply for it if you're going to run this on batteries just you know put your batteries in series and pull off whatever voltage you want from that series to create your electromagnet or to create the speed that you want through the motor there if we put that back into series incidentally this will actually be a generator so let's have a look at i've reconnected it in series and remember that's one end of the field coils going to one of the brushes one of the brushes going to the meter here and then the other end of the field coil going to the meter here as well you can see that there's the field coil wires there and that's going to the brush wire there's the brush wire going to the meter and there's the other end of the feed coil going to the meter i've got it set up in amps and if i give that a spin by hand i think about 15 or 17 milliamps or something like that so not tremendous but then i'm just using my hand and if we put that back into volts about 140 170 millivolts so pretty cool really and that is how you use a washing machine motor both as a dc motor and as a generator should you want it to be a generator anyway i thought i'd share that with you i hope it was of interest and i hope it made these things a bit clearer and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 19,962

Rating: 4.9596701 out of 5

Keywords: washing, machine, motor, universal, dc, generator, robert, fwg, recycle, upcycle, reuse, murray-smith, energy, power, generation, recycling, repurpose, repurposing, upcycling, engineering, alternative, design, disruptive, technology, dt, stem, steam, science, fair, project, how to, convert, conversion, industrial, arts, applied, mechanics

Id: Kiez7fqro_g

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021