Archive for the “tips” Category

Oct 28 2008

Building wind turbine blades versus buying them for a homemade wind turbine

Posted by admin in tips, Wind Turbine, tags: blades, homemade, motor, turbine, wind

As you’re probably aware, one of the trickiest parts to building your own wind generator is building the blades. Most of the do it yourself (DIY) plans for building your own homemade wind turbine or wind generator give instructions for making a very basic set of blades from pvc pipe. It’s relatively easy to do, although it is somewhat time consuming.

If you decide to go this route and build them yourself, it’s a good idea to have some basic power tools, because cutting and forming the blade is very time consuming and difficult with hand tools. Although it is possible, you’ll spend much more time building them with hand tools than with power tools.

The most important, and often overlooked point to consider is the price. To achieve a truly useful homemade blade, most do it yourself plans call for the use of 8 inch to 12 inch diameter pvc or abs pipe to construct an 8 foot diameter blade set – which means you’ll need at least 4 linear feet of pipe. This is for a typical 1000 watt generator. You can use a smaller diameter set of blades if you decrease the wattage of your wind turbine. If you’re not familiar with pvc or abs pipe, let me point out that it’s expensive to purchase in larger diameters. Searching online, the current prices per foot range from $10 dollars for 6 inch pvc to $27 for 12 inch pvc. Multiply that by 4 and add in exorbitant shipping costs and you’ll see that it can get very expensive very quickly. Even though I’m a strong proponent of doing it yourself, I can’t endorse it if it’s not cost effective. If you can acquire the pipe for little to no money, by all means, build the blades yourself. But if you can’t, you should consider buying factory made blades.

As you can see below, the price of some of the blade kits are very cheap. You can often buy them for less than you could buy the pvc pipe to build your own. And, the factory made blades are often made by injection molding using UV resistant resins with carbon fiber. As a bonus, some of these blade kits also come with hub kits. This eliminates the often difficult and time consuming step of fabricating a hub to fit your permanent magnet dc motor. One final point worth noting, is that each of these blades will be identical. There should be no variation in size, and presumably weight. This will produce a much smoother running wind turbine, which helps to eliminate any balancing problems, and indirectly maintenance problems.

So as you can see, buying blades may be the best way to acquire them for your home made wind turbine. When you factor in the cost of materials and the value of your time, you can end up paying a lot more to do it yourself. In addition to saving money in production costs, buying the blades can also enable you to save money by generating power much sooner.