Homemade Vertical Wind Turbine From Barrels and Scooter Parts

hi and welcome back to the save it for parts channel in a previous video i built a diy wind turbine out of some old fan blades and a drill motor now i don't have space for this on my roof at home and i think the neighbors would complain if i had this thing whipping around and possibly falling apart because honestly there's a few weak links in the construction of this and i'm not quite sure how long this thing's gonna last so before i hook this up to a battery charger or actually use it for anything i'm gonna set it up out at sandland and just leave it at the top of the hill where it's the windiest and see how long it actually holds together all right we've got our wind generator in place although it is not spinning yet because there's not really any wind today it is trying to snow just a little bit there might be some more wind later and we are up on top of the hill here at sandland so this area is pretty consistently windy it's fairly exposed up here so hopefully that wind turbine will start working in case you're wondering you can check out some of my other videos that explain what sandland is this is kind of our upper playground area where we're rebuilding the burger king playland that we got from an abandoned burger king and then it's kind of the uh farm or orchard part of sandland as well there's carl's tree house we've got the little orchard in here with some apple trees get this screen porch nice picnic area and then we've got some water collection for the roof over the screen porch area that goes into these surplus barrels and then just random stuff stored lawnmowers rusty tools old ladders that sort of thing here's some more of the burger king playland ready to be installed and we've got the old zoo monorail train parked over there and again you can see all this stuff in other videos about sandland right now this video i'm just focusing on this redneck wind generator for now so we're going to leave this out here and see just how long it holds together without completely flying apart so we're back at sandland it's probably been more than a month since we left that wind generator out here i intended to come back in a week but winter happened i got busy with other stuff and i just haven't been back to check on it it's fairly calm down here but the wind is really whipping up in the trees and i think it's going to be pretty strong wind up on the hilltop where we put that so we're going to walk up there and see if there's even anything left of it definitely some things have fallen off got that aluminum support just hanging loose the motor stayed in place but we've definitely lost the turbine blades somewhere around here i can't find the turbine blades out here in the snow anywhere so we might just have to wait until spring and see if those show up again so what if we try the other kind of wind turbine where instead of having a horizontal windmill you have a vertical egg beater situation with the motor mounted at the top or the bottom now these tend to be less efficient than the traditional windmill style but on the other hand they're much easier to make because your motor just sits again at the top or bottom and even if they're less efficient well i don't need something super efficient if it's just sitting out there all week long charging up a battery now i've been hoarding all these electric motors from go-kart projects and train projects and boats and i bet we can use one of these as our vertical axis generator i also have this 36 volt motor from a mower all right i can get almost three volts out of this lawnmower motor just by cranking it over by hand so this should be a good contender for our wind generator now for this style turbine we need something more like cups than blades so i have to find something i can make into uh curved cups now i do still have quite a few plastic water barrels if i can get them out of here they're pretty frozen in at this point of the year okay i was able to dig out some of these 15 gallon models i could use the full 50s or even 30s but then i think i'd have trouble transporting this rig in my car these used to have soap in them and some of them i think have some frozen soap still in the bottom so once we cut them open we'll have to get that frozen soap out of there and dispose of it [Music] all right so maybe we'll do something like that um i can't quite decide how many fins i want we might have to experiment with that a little now we need some kind of central shaft or support yeah that is not straight enough all right this one looks all right it's not a hundred percent straight but it is already painted so it should last a little longer outside [Music] all right now we need some drive pulleys so i need to dig through one of the more steampunk shelves in the garage so [Music] all right we've got the basics of our wind generator got our artificial wind here all right so it does make power in kind of ideal very artificial wind i'm not convinced this is actually going to spin in real world situations because this motor and this gearing kind of like my last attempt i think i've geared it too much and it takes a lot of effort to actually spin this against that motor so that's going to be even worse once there's any kind of load on that motor such as a light or a charging circuit or anything else again i'm using a 36 volt lawnmower motor it's not getting anywhere near 36 volts in fact i'm lucky if i get above 6 volts all right cut to a new day i've lost some blood i've swapped some things out i've changed from the 36 volt motor to this little 24 volter so it definitely has a lot less rolling resistance it's a little janky because this pulley is not supposed to fit on this thing but i kind of made it work with a hammer so as with a lot of my projects the more i work on this the worse and worse it looks i'm honestly a little ashamed to uh display my lack of craftsmanship here but if i actually felt any shame about all the garbage i built i wouldn't have a youtube channel in the first place all right so let's see how this complete crime against engineering performs compared to the last one once again i'm enlisting my artificial wind all right so it's not completely terrible even at low speed on the leaf blower i'm still able to get about five volts on this which it's not enough to charge a car battery but it's enough to charge a cell phone and yes this belt is a little loose but honestly it seems like it's working just fine i did have this little tensioner arm and i was considering popping that in there with a spring but it doesn't really seem like i need it i'm just going to make a little rain shield for the motor and then i think we're basically done so while this thing is hideous poorly balanced inefficient and probably won't last very long it was all basically free i mean these are just scrap barrels the drive belt the pulleys all that stuff is stuff i salvaged from other devices the motor was from a scooter i found on the side of the road the wood has all been used for something else in the past and is just scrap i think the only things i really paid money for were the zip ties the duct tape maybe this bracket right here and some of the screws so this horrible thing probably cost me about three to four dollars in parts and hey if it'll charge a cell phone a couple times i'd say that's worth it i went through my junk drawer and found this usb cord that's already been cut up and ready to go this is why i don't throw anything away ever alright so now i can charge my phone on the thing all right it is working with the wind i'm not even cheating with the leaf blower yeah my wind at home in the city here is just too inconsistent in between the buildings we need to put it up on that hilltop at sandland where it can get a good speed going so here we are back at sandland we've got our new and possibly improved though probably not really wind turbine setup again it's not very windy up here today but it does get pretty windy on a normal basis in fact we're starting to lose some roofing material from that shed so it gets a little too windy for the structures up here um i'm staring directly into the sun so i'm going to quit uh blinking into the camera and i think i've actually just found one of the blades from wind turbine version one which is actually looking a little damaged right so tune in to my next wind generator installment to see if this thing has survived a couple more weeks or maybe months of winter and uh maybe we'll redo something with this other wind turbine and make a little better but you'll have to stay tuned and see what happens thanks for watching we'll see you next time you

Channel: saveitforparts

Views: 74,806

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Id: ti9FkEg8G_Y

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022