The Wind Turbine Recipe Book is a 65 page document that takes you through the process of building your own wind turbine for battery charging. Six different sizes are described from 1.2 to 4.2 metres in diameter. Every detail of the construction is tabulated and illustrated, from the wooden blades to the purpose-built permanent magnet alternator. Only basic workshop tools and skills are required. These recipes have evolved from thirty years of living off-grid and building small wind turbines. Over the last ten years I have taught workshop courses worldwide, and these are the notes used in the courses. Groups have sprung up all over the world using these recipes to teach others the process. Many people also use the larger turbines for feeding directly into the grid with grid-tied inverters.
The cost is £12.29(GB pounds) including shipping within UK (first class post). Books are sent off by the next postal collection. The 2013 edition is now available for download as a pdf file. Or use the link further down to find the 2010 edition on Amazon Kindle.
Click the ‘buy now’ button below to order the physical paper Recipe Book using paypal or a credit card. This is the metric edition using mm units and European wire sizes. There is an ‘Inches Edition‘ for American readers that uses AWG wire sizes. If that is what you need there is a button further down this page to order the Inches edition.
The Metric edition of the Recipe Book (2010) is available at low cost as a Kindle eBook from amazon.co.uk (click the image below).
Buy these books direct from me and support what I am doing for small wind enthusiasts arond the world. Thanks. Hugh
Hi Hugh,
I’ve been looking into your design and would like to build something similar using CAD and Solidworks. You don’t happen to have any drawings do you? I’m not particularly experienced in using this software but would like to give it a go before building the turbine for real.
Many thanks
hi Zoe,
I use Turbo CAD (on my mac) for my own design and visualisation purposes. I do not have a great success rate with sharing the 3d files into other applications, even into updated versions of turbo cad. it’s a bit tedious. But if you have a specific design of mine you are interested in or a specific part then I could try to see if I can export a DXF or DWG file for you.
cheers
Hugh
Hi Hugh, great site. I am building a bicycle powered generator system to power a sound system and projector for outdoor shows. I was considering using the Morningstar controller but with something like a 58f Ultracapacitor and an inverter, so the system does not use batteries but produces smoothed power with a small buffer.
What would you recommend?
Regards
Jerry
hi Jerry,
Yes you could use a tristar and a dump load to guard against over-voltage damaging your equipment.
Hugh
It’s a lot easier to simply follow one of my recipes, but you will find a section in the Recipe Book that outlines the design process whereby you can design an alternator to work with some particular magnets that you have chosen. There are many factors including the number and size of magnets, the battery voltage and the rpm. So I can’t give you a simple answer. Everything is interdependent. Best to read the Recipe book. I can also help out with specific enquiries.
Have fun
Hugh
Thank you very much for your quick response. I am off to purchase your book now and may be in touch in the near future.
Kind regards
Dear Hugh
A friend recommended you to me in hope that you maybe able to help me. I am a huge wind turbine fanatic too and have just purchased a selection of neodymium magnets to start building my own turbines and would like to know what gage wire is required for different sized magnets etc. How can I work out the wire gage per magnet, how many coils, how many magnets, how many turns of wire on the coils and how thick the final coils should be?
I plan to build 12v and 24v turbines and the blades are 2ft long each and I will use 3 blades per turbine. 3 phase.
I appreciate any help you can give me or any other info/links or books that can help me to work out what I need.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards
Joseph