Help me /diy/ I want to build an electric generator but have

>>1088043
Who's Nickie? You obviously type the name enough to have it in your autocorrect, so now I'm curious. Could it be a Nicole? Do you have nudes?

>>1088049
Seconded. I want to see nicole

>>1088051
>>1088049
I meant to say no idea
No nudes, never met a Nicole in my life

>>1088043
>I'd like it to be human powered.

Someone post the copy pasta with the math already so the OP can move on with his life.

>>1088043
strap a big DC motor to a bicycle so that the shaft presses into the back tire, then make a frame to hold the tire off the ground, and pedal. this'll give you poorly-regulated DC output. connect it to a battery through a diode (so you have a generator, not a motorcycle) and run an inverter off the battery.

>>1088072
This, pretty much.
Those magnets are useless and retarded.

Alternatively go on ebay and buy a hand-crank USB charger for 3$, disassemble it and pretend to have built it.
:^)

A generator is a motor, merely depends what end does the work. working the mechanical end will generate electricity. working the electrical end will generate spinning. this is not true in all cases.

youtube has a guy who turned a washing machine motor into a hydroelectric generator.

i would suggest reading material that explains how motors/generators work. i would also suggest material explaining how solar panels works.

solar because they explain how to take a unsteady electrical current and turn it into useful electricity in a desired voltage. usually this involves invertors and batteries

>>1088064
Kek. Fucking auto correct.

Anon u got me. Other than gearing an alternator but i hear that sucks.

>>1088484
getting a fundamental grasp on electro magnetics will also serve you well

>>1088486
>Other than gearing an alternator but i hear that sucks.

Humans have very low HP output. You may as well throw a flat belt drive alternator on a belt drive exercycle to get it out of your system. It's natural to be curious about human power generation and alternators are used as loads in some exercise equipment.

Find a cheap used Schwinn Aerodyne, an alternator with integral regulator like a "single wire GM" and mount as you see fit. Then you can do cardio and charge batteries.

Cardio is life and since load build strength that won't be an issue.

I'd get a brushless (outrunner) model aircraft motor. They're really cheap on e-bay, straight from China. Then also get a switching dc-dc voltage converter. Those keep the output voltage quite stable. Simply rectify the three phase output from the motor with a full bridge rectifier. You'll find the schematic on the googles.

Yo OP your way to general in your idea. You need to start by thinking about exactly how many watts minimum you require to power your two most demanding devices. Two cell phone chargers? or two hair dryers? makes a big diff. in the scale of your project. You can use a hand cranking generator for one and a thousand stationary bikes for the other.

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Hey Guys, I'm not OP but my topic is similar so didn't want to open new thread.

I've been reading a lot about wind power and such and I noticed that many wind generators put out decent power but tge volts quickly climb to high levels (pic related). I know a voltage regulator will keep the volts constant but will it not send the extra power to ground? Because that seems to me like a major waste of useful power. Is there a way to keep volts at say 12 but up the amps instead of sending the extra to ground?

>>1092022
>but will it not send the extra power to ground?
nope, it won't

>>1092030
So it'll just up the current to balance the volts?

>>1092022
power doesn't 'go to ground', energy is conserved always.
voltage is a potential difference, voltage can't go to ground otherwise there wouldn't be any voltage.

ok so the output from a wind turbine is regulated, nowadays regulators are like 80-90% efficient, so if you work out the power in by mulktiplying the votlage x current the power output is like 80%, the rest of the energy is lost as heat and sound and shit like that in the process.

there are other ways, some motors rely on an electric field winding rather than fixed magnets so you can muck about with the power in the coil to make use of the different wind force to keep the speed and therefore voltage the same. i guess you could do it with a continuous gearbox too maybe some use them? not sure.

voltage and current are related by resistance, if you can alter the resistance you can change the current and voltage.

the REAL inneficiencies with wind poiwer are the gas and coal power plants that have to be kept running so that they can spin up to capacity at a moments notice to fill the gap when the wind dies down all of a sudden.

thats why nuclear is absolutely brilliant because its absolutely reliable and takes up the baseload, coal and gas are good because you can shovel more fuel on quickly when you need to and why solar and wind are fucking garbage because you can't pull wind out of your asshole (hehe) when you feel like it and the grid is dropping and when its fucking blowing a hoolie outside but its the middle of the night and nobody is using the electric there is practically nowhere to store the excess so the wind farm ACTUALLY PAYS they grid to use the electricity. the reason they pay the grid is because the grid is fucking annoyed that they have to keep the turbines spinning in standby but not being used and all the power station staff get annoyed when their tea break gets interrupted when the winds change.

>>1092038
I absolutely agree annon! Nuclear is the only real "green" future. Solar and wind are just pipe dreams that are too unreliable for mass usage. I'm personally just wondering about wind because with all the new carbon taxes getting loaded on up here in Canada the idea of a wind powered electric heater to lessen the use of the furnace seems like a decent idea.

And thanks for the solid info. That was what I figured the answer was but better safe than stupid.

>>1092056
if you live on a farm or something and you can put up a turbine without neighbors moaning then it makes sense i suppose if you have the cash, charging up a few car batteries with a small turbine to run a few appliances is not overly insane, but scale it up to power a city and you are in for a world of hurt.
I'm no physicist but hopefully fusion will happen soon. said everyone ever for the past forever years.

if i lived on a farm i would probably end up doing something utterly retarded like building a wind...blade....thing...to pump water up to a big tank on stilts, then drain the water out through a water turbine to generate electricity on demand. no need to maintain expensive batteries.
some countries do this with hydro dams, fill them overnight with cheap electricity then sell it back during day peak demand. you might even make a few dollarydoos on the small scale.

>>1092096
That would probably be a solid idea. Definitely more efficient than a modern battery.... Till they get those kickass graphite air batteries in production.

And that would be a neat way to make extra coin but in Alberta most power rates are fixed (way too expensive variable) and the power companies only pay roughly 10% of market to producing consumers. Atco is the devil.

>>1092038
In terms of matching supply to demand, nuclear is only half as bad as renewables.

Renewables have the problem of variable supply not matching variable demand, nuclear has the problem of constant supply not matching variable demand.

But at this point renewables are a good deal cheaper than nuclear, making it much more feasible to just install excess renewable capacity. Single-cycle gas plants can spin up in a matter of minutes for short-term shortfalls, as can hydro. For smoothing at even shorter time scales, batteries are perfectly sufficient.

And in many places where solar is practical (e.g. the southern US), a substantial proportion of electricity consumption is for A/C, which makes solar a good fit (availability of solar power correlates strongly with demand for A/C).

>>1088043
You need a motor which isn't an induction motor (these are fairly common in domestic appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners) or a switched-reluctance motor (e.g. unipolar stepper motors).

Which basically means either a permanent-magnet motor or a universal motor (which is basically a permanent magnet motor where the permanent magnet has been replaced by an electromagnet; automotive starter motors are of this type).

But if you're powering it from a rather variable source of power, most of the complexity is in the inverter, which needs to be able to handle a wide range of voltage, impedance and frequency.

Human powered? Forget it. An elite athlete can manage a few hundred watts for extended periods. You'll never recoup the cost of (or the energy consumed in constructing) the hardware. And small wind turbines aren't any better.

>>1092139
> batteries are sufficient.
> spin up in minutes
Sorry to break it to you buddy but wind doesn't warn you a few minutes in advance how strongly it's going to blow.
It's been a while since I was involved in this kind of thing but I would be utterly surprised if there was any amount of batteries on the grid anywhere. I know there are ke batteries like pumped hydro and such but actual batteries?
These take time to spin up and you can't leave them idling because it just drains all your stored energy!!

>>1092022
A linear regulator will just burn all the excess voltage, but that's really dumb so just use a switching regulator instead.

>>1092142
Oh, "excess" renewable isn't an option is fucking mandatory, you have to install 4 or 5 times at least the plate rated capacity of wind turbines to get anything close when the wind is good.
Too much wind? Shut it down before it explodes! Wind power isn't cheap, plate capacity of a turbine is cheap in theory. In practice its a money pit.

Solar if its feasible its excellent but its a fucking absolute pain in the hoop when all your neighbours get panels installed, the government(I.e. me) fucking pays for it, they don't even pay for themselves before they break because we don't live on the equator and they push the fucking line voltage up and actually out of spec in order to feed back into the grid. Causes no fucking end of bullshit and headaches. But an actual solar farm run by competent people as a profitable non money sucking shithole sounds super.