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RE: Designing, building and installing an off-the-grid photovoltaic system - Let's talk about it
Does Ali Express do wind turbine parts? This is amazing info. I am planning to build my own home (I have been planning this for decades), but in Scotland we have about two months of sunshiny weather in a good year. We do get a lot of wind, although I'm aware that wind turbines have their downsides, including bird deaths.
It does. I didn't research a lot since I don't have a big enough yard to correctly fit a wind turbine: 20 meters from all the surrounding buildings and a 5m tower + rotor diameter.
A wind turbine like that is hard to break down into pieces. Brand new is about 6000$. What you can get on AliExpress would be heavy and big in volume so will cost more to import.
But if you read my power generation on Mars article, you might be able to create a DIY vertical axis:
I will write about it in a future article, just as an exercise in DIY.
You can get a cheap dynamo made in your own country and mount it on a pole, then use plastic, cloth or sail material to weave the arms tied on bearings.
A little more complicated but there are examples of others doing them. I had a friend who managed to break the main pole due to the very high rotation speed :D
If you do want a horizontal axis classic one you need to have access to a big 3D printer to print the rotor wings. Having those wings as light as possible is key to getting high speed rotation.
That sounds vaguely do-able, even for a non techno-minded person like myself! One advantage would be that this kind of thing might be easier to achieve planning permission for, and not too much of an expense if permission wasn't granted.
There are a few "maker's labs" in my town where you can use 3D printers - not sure how big they are though. I'll look out for your article on this.
Here you go!
A version of it: https://www.instructables.com/id/Building-a-Vertical-Axis-Wind-Turbine-VAWT-/
Thanks for this! It never ceases to amaze me what you can find online :)