Did you know you can turn a normal fan into a wind turbine? It is very simple and most of the work has already been done for you.
If you hook up a volt meter to a common table fan or box fan motor, then place the fan in the wind, you will get some power output.
But if you put magnets inside your fan motor, you can get some serious power output.
A wind turbine is simply the same thing as any DC motor. When you spin up a DC motor, it will produce electricity. The faster you spin the motor, the more energy it can produce.
An AC motor does not have permanent magnets but there is some residual magnetism inside so when you spin it up, you will get some power from it.
In the first video you can see me holding an AC table fan motor with its blades in the wind. I have a volt meter attached and you can see that some power is being produced.
See the video here:
But if you take apart the table fan and put some magnets inside, it will produce even more power. In the next video I show an old table fan which I modified to produce DC power using some cheap ceramic magnets. That was all I had on hand at the time so I used them for proof of concept.
You can see the video here:
In the article below you can see how I modified this old table fan step by step to convert it into an energy generating wind turbine.
Now I did this back in 2010 with some primitive tools. I would suggest that if you want to make a table fan generator, you use the strongest magnets you can find.
And I would suggest you machine out the rotor so accept the magnets and make sure that the magnets are as long as the rotor. This will give you greatly improved output compared to my proof of concept machine shown here.
The table fan motor in the first video above is a more recent addition to my electronics lab. I hope to machine this out one day soon and put some really powerful magnets in it.
I will then modify the wires to turn it into a DC generator.
When I do this conversion, I will share it with you.
Here is the article showing how I converted my table fan into a wind turbine:
http://www.thedoityourselfworld.com/articles/article.php?id=11499
Please Subscribe & follow my YouTube videos
Read my articles at The Do It Yourself World