Vertical Wind Generator From An Old Fan

[Music] okay so I'm something of a a skip magpie my neighbor is throwing away a whole load of heaters and here they are this is a really cheap panel heater here we've got a tower heater these are both resistive heaters here's an oil filled heater so he's got a group of heaters he just put in the bin and I said to him can I have for them and he said yeah sure I think he was a bit bemused but even something like this which are a really quite simple and cheap can be a brilliant source of paths for doing projects and that's what I'm gonna do we're gonna do some projects with these things now when you pull this apart the bits in them actually quite expensive to buy separately I mean I know I've got this broken and so it's not gonna cost me anything but to be honest if you've got one of these new took apart the bits kept the bits it would be less expensive than trying to buy those bits separately to build a project which is crazy if you think about it I guess that's just mass production these guys buy things for next to nothing you in this thing I think it's about 15 or 20 pounds which is like really really cheap anyway we're going to do some projects with these things because they're just too awesome so let's get on with this is obviously a tower heater it's got wire in there and a few electronic controls and bits and pieces like that but what's really interesting about this one is inside he used a squirrel cage rotor and that's what we actually want so taking it apart really it's it's dead simple it's always the same thing just have a look on the case and find the screws when you find the screws sometimes they're special and you need a special adapter for them but you can get one of those from the tools shop for about five pounds or so it's a whole set of them sometimes they're just normal screws just undo every screw you see if one is a little bit difficult to undo persuade it apart with the hammer and chisel or I'm gonna do really is undo all of those screws and lay out the bits Nakao is wrong it's not a heater it's a fan and I must have been really pleased because there's a huge hole of really cool bits in here there's a nice on-off switch there's a selector switch there they found this in it is the timer mechanism is a little bit of clockwork that runs from one hour I mean if we stick a little motor on that I mean I'm talking tiny motor but we could run that for an hour as being a kind of a battery I'm gonna have a look at that in a different project because that's just awesome nice capacitor we've got a synchronous motor here we know we can make those into hand crank generator there's no worries at all here is a squirrel cage motor that was at the bottom of the famine is a fairly common kind of fan motor then low talk fill you find them all the time and here is the actual rotor that we were looking at and this is the bit that I'm interested in so let me take you outside and show you why okay so I've come outside it's a slightly windy day it's a little bit of rain but this is why I'm interested in this so I pop the other bearing on just top that out [Music] just rescuing that from there you've got a sink vertical wind turbine don't you so all we have to do is bolt a motor onto the bottom here get it into the wind and we should be able to make a vertical wind turbine out of that piece of cake that's the plan anyway because I've been asked a number of times to look at that and to be honest I've been waiting for this new as little work as possible with this to turn it into a wind turbine in a vertical wind turbine and it's got some really good attributes to it there would be a challenge for me to do but sinners are all in one piece it's gonna be really easy to adapt there is the bearing for that bit so we're going to use that bit just as it is this bit is the bit of the original motor attached to and I've taken the original motor to pieces it is unfortunately an induction motor so there's no magnets in that so we can't just stick the motor back in and use it as a generator which is a real shame but what I do have is this which is a 775 DC motor and it came with this attachment on it so all I need is something this big to go to something this big and I can basically just bolt the motor straight back on now I'm going to want to have those bearings in line and they originally came in long and when there were the motor so the motor end plates already have the right bearings in the correct alignment with them here is the body of the motor incidentally which is the stator coil so I'm going to take a bit of bar which is this stuff here and this bar is the same more or less diameter as this it's our flat end which will stick in there then I'll turn another end down which will go in there and we'll have our couple and we can basically just bolt this DC motor onto the bottom of this fan and because that's DC with magnets we have our generator so there's the little adapter bar made so that flattened end sticks nicely in the squirrel cage that thin down end sticks nicely in the motor and I've stuck a couple of bearings on it that I extracted out of the old induction motor okay so that's everything we need to do all we need to do now is put a little structure together to hold everything in place okay that's it what a piece of cake this stuff is made of actually is something you've talked about before it's called builder's board it's a you PVC coated foam it's really very rigid very stable easy to cut without massive machine tools you can do this with a carpet knife or a handsaw glues together with super glue or Krazy Glue and the bond between the plastic and the crazy glue is actually stronger than the original plastic so although it looks like a really sort of flimsy plastic structure it's actually really strong for what it is now I've obviously put it on a grip big block of board here because I want to show you something else and I'm going to do that in a minute in the wind but if we were doing this as an actual vertical turbine and this block would you really just be a strip or you might want to attach it to something where you have a couple of little angles coming out here said to the wall and it just attaches to the wall if you're an example of these kind of things attached to a free-standing structure iceland's got them all over the place and that's exactly what they do they just put a clip on the top here fasten it to something like a telegraph pole in vertical orientation obviously that's how it would be just stand like that and you'd fix that thinner piece to a building or maybe to something your swivels around so that's your vertical orientation and let's go off and see if we can generate something from this in a little bit of wind okay so there you go okay the basic idea is grabbing up white fan pull up the squirrel cage glue of motor onto the bottom and you're off now there's a ton of ways of making this better than I made it I'm 100% sure one thing did occur to me actually is we had like a kind of funnel here and we put a jet of air over there that might be really cool especially if we do it in this horizontal position instead of this upright position in this upright position you took one a bit of chunky board behind it you want something nice and thin but that idea glue ammo on to the bottom of squirrel cage rotor makes you a vertical generator and that was just so easy so I hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching and see you again

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 225,593

Keywords: fwg, robert, upcycle, murray-smith, vertical, wind, generator, power, energy, off grid, renewable, alternative, disruptive, technology, electricity, recycle, recycling, upcycling, home, made, make, build, built, project, diy, d-i-y, engineering, how to

Id: r7IFzvAQTMo

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020