Converting PC Fans To Mini Generators

[Music] hi so if you're anything like me and you muck about with stuff quite a lot you tend to get a massive collection of these things of various sizes and these are PC power supply cooling fans there's a nice one from the laptop the motors actually in there is this really thin little piece there or some things actually they're beautifully made you find tons of them have scrapped with people throwing in the moai and they don't cost that much to replace anyway so of course it begs the question see we have so many of these things what can we do with them there must be something we can do with them and of course there is if you have a look on the net you'll find lots of people making and generators out of these things and I thought I'd give that a go just to try and make a generator so I thought I'd go through that with you so this is a little three wire DC and if you look in here you can see there's a plastic ring and underneath that is a rubber o-ring and in that plastic ring there's a little split so you have to prise that ring off being careful not to damage it and working from the split the same one in here and this larger one has an actual circlip on it holding everything together which you concede there so you can have to remove the circlip so you remove those clips and really it's just about getting a thin piece of screwdriver or some such thing in there and wiggling it about until you get those clips out so that's what I'm gonna do okay so this one just had this little plastic clip and it's like a see I helped that and totaled around at that and it came off really easily this one's bit more complicated it has its plastic clip a washer a ring in a washer and I've laid them out in the same way that they're going to go back again they're quite easy that little plastic circle it was very easy to remove this larger one had a metal circlip which is a bit more difficult to had the price that apart with two thin screwdrivers and it sprang out but I managed to catch it so be careful and then a washer and then a nice bearing in there as well which appears to be magnetically well not surprised really don't once you've got those fiddly clips out the next bits really easy because that fan portion which contains the magnet just lifts and they've got a lovely spindle circular magnet and that's the fan bit that rotates in there we've got the coils and this is a three wire version here we've got a two wire version same thing it just lifts off there we go and four coils on a circuit board in there and then this four wire version that we've got here much larger one same thing lifts off it's just more robust and here is our spindle our magnet and there appears to be a little spring at the bottom there so we'll have to be careful not to lose that and again we've got our four coils in our circuit board now the next thing to do is to remove those coils from that Center spindle and they're quite fast on actually so not too easy to get off so I'm just going to free up the wires and then have a go at that okay so I managed to destroy it one of them before I worked out how to do it but I've got another one here to show you and what I did was get a pair of these things and hold that and then you don't want it so that it's so tight that it actually and crushes the coils there but you do want enough grip on it to be able to twist it now it's about being delicate because these things are just pressed on there we go [Music] yeah so they're just pressed up to that central boss once you get them off then you can work on them and they took all those off in the same way once I broke that one now it doesn't really matter what electronics and this one's obviously got a hell of a lot of electronics on it this one's got nothing a whole latch right there it's about it actually just a whole lot yeah so let's get the whole latch on it right there this one again whole latch next to nothing yeah that's all there is on me this one's got a starter capacitor yep just that and again a whole match now all of these however complicate to the electronics are this yoke is wired the same way and it's wired like this so we don't care about v-0 we're only really interested in identifying v1 and v2 if you're lucky enough then you can actually just find the circuit for it and these three I found the circuit for so I happen to know that on pins two and three of the hole latch go straight to V 1 and 2 respectively V 0 is just kicking around in there joining one and two together and all I need to do is result of the wires from here onto V 1 and V 2 which can identify by tracing the whole lunch and then sniffing off all of the other electronics because you're not going to need it so that electronics we need to snip off or it's desoldering if you want I'm just going to snip them off and then we can sold that there we go these wires and we only need two of them so I'm going to use the black and the red because the other one is the sense and we can solder those two in three don't we sold them - they're in there so I'm going to prep these up and give you a close-up okay so there are the coils and then if we look right there that's the whole latch turn that upside down you can see the pins no it's only two and three we're interested in its stop moving this around for you it's that one and that one we follow those pins around we be able to see where they connect to V 1 V zero so that one's going up there there it is so that's probably V 1 or V Star V 2 sorry does v1 over v2 interested in so that one goes to there this one pins that when that goes down to this or to that one so it's that one and that one the two that were interested in that was V zero so ignore it so you solder one water here and one water there and that's it okay so we've removed the circuit components so that this on taffy 1 and V 0 and now I can put it back together again and that's just method of sliding that back they're making sure doesn't get into the way and press down firmly this one actually I didn't like the circuit board it we've had a ton of components on it so actually I just decided to coil and resold it back on is the circuit board I thought it would take just ages to remove all these components so I just dissolved it instead and now we could put these bits back off okay so this is not a generator but it's an AC generator we really want a DC generator so in order to make it the city general answer obviously what we need is rectification rectifying it isn't a G that difficult you can either use a full wave rectifier or you can make one you can make one really easily some from some diodes and I'm going to use some one end for double O sevens in a rectifier bridge shoulder to this and that will be my DC generator not to make a rectifier bridge I've got a whole bunch of one end for double or sevens here their pennies really I mean I think I paired about two pounds with this entire strip and I need four of them if you look at them you can see the bands at the top so you take two with the bands at the top and twist them together and two with the bands at the top but you twist together this side without the band's give them a twist and solve them separate the mount and now you can have been no band herb and no band and you twist those together so the ones where the bounds are together that's your positive the ones that know bands together that's your dc- and the other two are you racing inputs from your generator so I'm going to solder those together and sold all these ones together and then get back to you okay so I've just connected up a LED and we've got a hairdryer we're gonna use the hairdryer to simulate a little bit of wind and see if we can like that LED there you go so that works [Applause] [Applause] there we go and I'm just liking it so that one just lit it so that's working it's a bit of a challenge to get that one to work though which was interesting since it's such a we have big and beefy thing so all three work so we took a 2 y 3 y 4 wire identified V 0 V 1 V 2 wired up to one and two put it through a bridge rectifier reassembled everything and we've turned those into DC generators from PC fan motors I kind of thought that was really awesome so I thought I'd share it with you and I hope it was of interest thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 77,597

Rating: 4.7975378 out of 5

Keywords: pc fan, wind generator, free energy, robert, fwg, energy, renewable, wind, power, alternative, green, off-grid, murray-smith, generator, fan, pc, comuter, dt, design, technology, project, science, fair, stem, steam, free

Id: TX7zmfKiUEU

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020