Windpower Workshop: Building Your Own Wind Turbine

Excellent book, good information and useful information if you are planning on building a wind turbine.

This book is really comprehensive. It covers nearly everything you need to build a small windgenerator from scratch including security measures to protect the wind turbine in harsh weather. It makes a complete and excellent start for anybody who wants to get involved with wind energy.

I bought this book as a back-up to Paul Gipe's extensive "Wind Power, Revised Edition: Renewable Energy for Home, Farm, and Business." Another engineer in the office became interested in this for when he retires in Guana. He and I looked at the book together and it is interesting for the hands-on appeal. The author shows how to you scrounged equipment to construct a wind machine. Hugh Piggott has a lot of experience with building these machines so this is the place to start if you're on a desert island all alone and want to create your own power. Paul Gipe's book is an excellent reference for those wishing to be good buyers of wind machines. Hugh Piggott shows you how to build your own. If this review was helpful, please add your vote.

This book contains real practicality, not just empty theory. Talk about "put your money where your mouth is" - Hugh lives on a remote spit of land in Northern Scotland that doesn't even have roads, much less access to the power grid. If necessity is the mother of invention, there's good reason why he was highly motivated to develop the kinds of simple airfoils and low speed alternator combinations that produced real power. This rudimentary experience has taken him all over the world for installations and workshops. I guess having someone like that around makes him a pretty popular guy with his neighbors.This book covers the theory necessary to understand wind energy basics, and proceeds as a how-to manual on shaping a simple turbine out of wood. It then shows how to build a low speed alternator out of a brake drum. (There is another book by Hugh called "Brake Drum Windmill Handbook" which goes into more detail). The challenge is building an electrical generating system that operates at the slow rotational speeds of a wind turbine (e.g. 300 - 500 RPM). Everybody wants to hook up an automobile alternator, but even if it is optimized for high output at an idle, it probably will not start producing power until it reaches 1800 RPM. (Typically the engine/alternator pulleys have a ratio of 3 or 3.5 to 1 and the engine idles @ 600 RPM).A great little book.

I found this book to be very informative. Not all of my questions were answered, but I now feel that I have a basic grasp of how to design and build my own scrapyard wind turbine. If you are interested in this I highly recommend this book for your collection of reference materials.