DIY Electricity Wind Turbine

Use a home built, DIY wind turbine on your property to create electricity from natural wind power.

By Instructables.com
Published on September 24, 2018
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courtesy of Skyhorse Publishing

Do It Yourself Projects to Get You Off the Grid (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) by Instructables.com is illustrated with dozens of full-color photographs per project accompanying easy-to-follow instructions. This Instructables collection utilizes the best that the online community has to offer, turning a far-reaching group of people into a mammoth database churning out ideas to make life better, easier, and, in this case, greener, as this volume exemplifies. Twenty Instructables illustrate just how simple it can be to make your own backyard chicken coop, or turn a wine barrel into a rainwater collector.

You can purchase this book from the Mother Earth News store: Do It Yourself Projects to Get You Off the Grid.

Several years ago I bought some remote property in Arizona. I am an astronomer and wanted a place to practice my hob­by far away from the terrible light pol­lution found near cities of any real size. I found a great piece of property. The problem is, it’s so remote that there is no electrical service available. That’s not really a problem. No electricity equals no light pollution. However, it would be nice to have at least a little electricity, since so much of life in the twenty-first century is dependent on it.

One thing I noticed right away about my property is that most of the time, the wind is blowing. Almost from the moment I bought it, I had the idea of putting up a wind turbine and making some electricity, and later adding some solar panels. This is the story of how I did it. Not with an expensive, store-bought turbine, but with a home-built one that cost hardly anything. If you have some fabricating skills and some electronic know-how, you can build one too.

Step 1: Acquiring a Generator

I started by Googling for information on home-built wind turbines. There are a lot of them out there in an amazing va­riety of designs and complexities. All of them had five things in common though:

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