Building your own blades for your home windmill

71

By greanearth83

For a horizontal wind turbine the blades are fairly simple to construct. A lot of overly enthusiastic people will construct their own blades out of wood. This seems to me like a waste of time and energy. You can easily make your own blades from a piece of PVC pipe found at the local hardware store.

For the radius of the pipe you use is a bit of common scene. You should chose a pipe that is about 5x the radius that your blades are going to be wide.

Black PVC cut in half with a finished blade below it
See all 2 photos
Black PVC cut in half with a finished blade below it

Once you have your pipe you will first cut it in half through the radius. Don’t cut the length of your pipe in half or you will have a pinwheel instead of a wind mill. Then cut those halves into half and you will have 4 pieces of pipe that will become the blades of your windmill.

Finished Turbine Blades.
Finished Turbine Blades.

Once you have the pipe cut.  Cut a square from the corner of each one.  The cut will be about
5cm. This cut out will leave a place in your blade to attach it to the mount for your generator.      (The blade mount will be discussed shortly.)

Next, on the side diagonal of where you just cut you want to measure the same distance from the corner and mark a line. Starting here, you want to draw a line from your marked diagonal line connecting to the outside edge of the corner that you just cut out. This will be the completed outline for your blade.

Then, you can remove everything that is not a part of the blade.  Use a skill saw or whatever you deem fit to accomplish the job. Once you have the blades cut they can be painted to make them more attractive if you choose. 

After you have your blades finished, it’s time to connect them to your generator.

You will need a disk of aluminum or copper or any other metal that you have around, as long as it is strong and will not rust.

Once you have your disk, you need to drill a hole into its center. This will provide a center to your windmill and will fit firmly over your generator shaft. Once you have that, drill holes into where you want to mount your blades. Drill two holes; this will insure the blades will stay in a fixed position. Put a bolt through and mount your 4 blades to your disk. Then mount the disk on your generator. This will almost complete your generator head.


If this sounds like something you can manage YOU need to visit Greenlivings.biz to Learn How To Build a Small Wind Turbine for your home.

Comments

renewable sources 12 months ago

Windmill electricity is the answer to both our energy crisis and global warming. It's completely infinite and renewable, so there is never the fear of repeating our mistake of creating a dependency on a finite fuel source.

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