Wind turbine design, what to buy, and what to stay away from, wind generators and wind mills

hey folks good afternoon my name is carrie martin and this is the handyman 406 channel welcome welcome anyways i just want to talk about a few things here uh namely wind generators and what to buy what not to buy some some tips anyways just to get to the point here all right so i got a couple pictures here of wind generators you notice these are the the big commercial type that you often see driving through the countryside and there's kind of like a little scale of how big these things actually are they're pretty dug on gigantic and over the years they have perfected these designs and many many millions of dollars have gone into them into the design features of these of these wind generators and kind of brought them to the apex if you will of of their efficiency one thing i want you to take note several things i want you to take note of here is for one these are horizontal what they call hots h-a-w-t these are horizontal axis wind turbines okay and the other type would be considered a vaut okay so i just pulled up an example of a vaught here vertical asset axis wind turbine here on wikipedia there's not a lot of commercial examples of these but this is uh it's saying here this is the world's tallest vertical axis wind turbine i live nearby bozeman montana we actually have a well down below bozeman there's a town called belgrade and there's a there's a building that has a couple of these vots um right there on on their sign that they're advertising i guess it's a great way to catch somebody's eye but that's about it you know you don't see a lot of commercial examples of these things mainly because they you know they work yeah but there's a lot of limitations to them namely they're you can't get those high up in the air without huge infrastructure and and that's the reason why you know uh these don't these aren't as efficient for the money that being put into them as a horizontal wind turbine so and we'll talk about a little bit more about that in a minute you know but mainly you know the higher up in the airstream that you get a wind generator all right so uh sorry about that had a little interruption thought somebody was knocking on my door so this is why i wouldn't recommend buying a version of this like let's say on ebay or you know various various people have tried to sell these and for whatever reason they look interesting and people seem to go for it but this you know the horizontal wind generator is the one that you want to go for something else i want you to notice is every single one of these commercial examples have three blades all right we'll see a lot of examples let me see if i can pull one up here scroll down to these pictures we'll see a lot of examples of multi-bladed wind generators a generator having more than three blades and the reason why that's not a good idea is because this has one two three four five blades and you know the generator itself might have been designed around this and might work okay but there's some physics behind uh having three blades that actually make sense and uh the reason being each you know intuitive intuitively we want to believe that the more blades you put on there the more wind it's gonna catch and that's just really not the case i just want you to take a look at some of these these are actually one bladed wind generators okay they on this opposite end they have like a counterweight uh which they which they keep close to the main axis uh mainly because they don't want to disturb the the airstream so this blade you can say is 100 percent efficient it doesn't have the airstream of the blade in front of it to actually disrupt it and so it's got a clean airstream as clean as it can get while it's rotating and these tend to spin faster in rpms than the two bladed designs and the three bladed designs now if we scroll down here we'll have a two bladed this happens to be one of my favorite configurations for homemade wind turbines mainly because they're so easy to make and i show in a video uh how you can make one out of a solid piece of wood quickly and within an hour or two it's carved and it's actually quite efficient it works really well and i've used them a lot but here's a big commercial example of a two-bladed here's some larger one-bladed examples this might be like a consumer model and this actually is a downwind model as well that's why you're not seeing the tail vein on it and these uh these have some efficiency problems as well because the pole basically is disrupting the airflow and uh the blade design now i'm not going to pick on these guys right here okay in particular but but maybe i guess i kind of am you know you notice uh these guys actually sell a blade that's made out of metal that's just sheet metal bit and i that's not the most efficient design and i've gone over in some detail why it's not because basically to get an effective transfer of power from the wind to your blade to your generator you need what's called an airfoil and the airfoil actually generates lift there's uh let me see if i can give an example of an airfoil okay so again we're back in wikipedia so i just thought i'd pick up a couple examples of of airfoils here we have you know several different types and and they each have their purpose right you can kind of see how the wind you know bends around this foil it'll create a low pressure area up here on top and that's what actually gives like an airplane the lift and you know the difference between having an airfoil for a wind generator not having one is pretty huge actually you know that you'll know when you get it right when the tower when the wind's really blowing hard the tower is being pushed on disproportionate to what it would even if you had a solid piece of let's say uh plywood the same diameter as your as your wind generator blade significantly more and this is what give helicopters and all that their lift and so this is working on some on some pretty major physics here as you can see i don't understand any of this stuff but i'm sure it's got something to do with the air airfoil uh derivation of thin airfoil theory whatever i just know they work because i've compared the two so going back to the blade you know the how many blades it is important to note that the three blades are the most efficient because every time you add a blade you are capturing a little bit more wind but you're also disrupting the blade that's directly behind it that the airstream of you know of the blade directly behind it and that's why by just simply adding a whole bunch more blades you're not getting the desired effect okay and i realize that somebody somewhere is going to ask hey well what about these uh you know these water pumping windmills well it's uh this is an entirely different principle that's being used here and that principle is called drag as opposed to the principle of a wind generator these operate very slow rpms and and in this and in this instance the the the key objective is to generate as much torque as you possibly can to to actually uh drive the gearbox and then pull the rod up and down to pump the water and these don't need to spin real real fast in effect uh they're using the same principle like like a cell boat would whereas a wind generator is using the principle of let's say an airplane or a helicopter you certainly wouldn't use this principle of of drag um and many many many blades to lift a helicopter off off the ground most of us have observed helicopters and we see you know that they have you know at most maybe four rotors and you know the main reason why they use so many rotors in some of these home build designs is they take a standard alternator and they put a they they put a permanent magnet inside that alternator and that almost always creates a situation where you you have a lot of cogging and and if you were to take your fingers and try to physically turn that shaft um it would be very difficult to actually spin it and and this is the enemy of a well-designed wind generator this is this necessitates the high torque startup which hence the reason for so many blades because you just can't get these things to spin unless you put these big giant blades on there or a whole bunch of smaller blades and then you can generate enough torque to actually get the thing going and here's an example of one of those permanent you know permanent magnet cores and i'm not saying this is a bad idea i'm saying that this is a great idea and you know in all reality because you're taking something that's actually designed as a as a three-phase alternator that's you know can last many many years in a car and and you're just modifying it to work as a wind generator maybe they make a core a slant cord that actually you know eliminates the cogging but i haven't seen one yet and if i'm wrong if you guys know of one please let me know in the comments if if you guys have purchased a slant cord that has no cogging or very very little cog you can get that and i'll promptly purchase one and feature it on my videos no look at there there i am a couple of my videos and and this brings me to another topic the low wind alternator or the low wind uh wind generator now you know it's kind of an oxymoron because wind generators are not really designed to work at peak efficiency in low wind unless that's all you're hoping for is low wind and then you can design something around just capturing low wind and low wind only but bear in mind that the energy is derived by the cube and it's basically taking the kinetic energy of the wind and transferring it through the rotors into the alternator and uh i just pulled up a random site here energy fundamentals physics of wind turbines and hopefully maybe this will kind of describe how everything works i know just from studying the little bit of study that i've done that when you double the size of a rotor let's say this is a let's say this this rotor right here is a three foot rotor and let's double it into a six foot rotor you have just you've not doubled the power of that wind turbine you've you've brought it up to a factor of eight eight times more power can be generated for something that's twice its size and that's how kinetic energy works now every time you double the wind speed you bring up the amount the available power by a factor of four and so you know when you're looking at like a four foot wind generator you know um theoretically you know let's say 27 mile an hour winds or something like that you can only get like 300 watts you know peak out of something like that or expect to anyways and then therefore a six foot rotor at at peak energy output would be somewhere around 900 watts okay and and so on and so forth and if you were to double that again and go to a 12 foot you could expect around 3 600 watts but this is in a perfect world and you never get that much because of all of the losses and realistically for especially for home builds like i built a 10 footer that the design criteria on that one was around a thousand watts 20 some odd mile an hour winds and and that's what you want to design it for you don't want to design it for low winds because you're not going to really get anything out of that i mean if you know in a 12 mile an hour wind if you're making 50 watts what are you gonna make in six mile an hour you know that's half the wind speed it's going to be four times less you know so you take four times less than 50 is what 25 25 watts that's all you're getting i mean buy a solar panel don't go through all the trouble of putting up you know putting out all that money to build a wind generator if you don't have the wind to actually drive it so there's a lot of misconceptions out there as far as and how much power can be you know brought out before you you purchase one i would suggest strongly suggest that you read some of hugh pejo's literature on wind generators and this is his website this is he's somewhat this guy's kind of brilliant actually he he single-handedly powered this entire island here he he he developed this design this axial flux uh wind generator design i mean this is his brainchild and it's it's they're all over the web now you can see all kinds of people building these things and and i actually built a 5k and a 1k uh version of the of the very same thing and they work fantastic they really do and this guy will reading his stuff you can get a realistic expectation of what you know what to look for and and that's really how where you want to start you want to start where someone uh is giving you you know uh the real scoop basically and it looks like he's added quite a bit of stuff to his website here and uh here's a homemade one flying these are all real similar in design uh but you know if if you're not going to build and you're you're just going to purchase this is still a good website to go through and and read all about designs i think they're making this is the painkill i believe washing machine motor parts i just recently bought an ista breeze and i will be doing a video on that here real soon and that was um my choice i chose to buy it because of a video i watched from a fella uh toys for watts you guys might want to check him out um he's he's got he's got a pretty good little setup he he he put like four win generators up that he all that he bought everyone on ebay and one of them's in istanbury's i 1500 and uh he might have five by now i don't know and anyways uh he compares them side by side and you can see as the wind's blowing which one's making power and which one's not it's i mean the guy deserves a lot more views really in my opinion because it's showing you exactly what you need to know and hey i really hope all this helps out and if you know if you got any value out of this uh you know please give it a thumbs up and hit that subscribe button and we'll see you guys on the next one thank you very much

Channel: OffGrid406

Views: 45,381

Keywords: wind generator, wind mill, wind power, wind energy, wind turbine, wind turbine design, wind mill design, wind power design, how to purchase, wind generator design

Id: IUXA5KTQiR0

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021