7 Foot Axial Flux Wind Turbine

Step 15 Tower and Electrical Work

For the type of tower I have, I decided it would be best to assemble it all on the ground and use a bucket truck to lift it up. Having a few friends around to help is a very good idea and during the tower installation it helped a lot. We had 4 people working on preparing the tower. We all worked on different pieces, a couple of us put together the tower, I bolted it together. We ran conduit and wire and attached one end of the guy wires to the tower while it was still on the ground. This saved a lot of time and gave us a lot of eyes for when the tower was in the air.

We had to be careful to leave enough wire at the top of the tower to allow the turbine to yaw back and forth. I've read that wind turbines rarely will do a 360 degree turn, but it's a good idea to allow enough slack just in case. All of this installation was performed to electrical code because we had the electrician on hand to help us.

We attached the guy wires to the tower before it was raised and set the generator on top. Since the generator just sits on top of the tower, the tower needs to be up at an angle while it's on the ground or it will slide off (hence the saw horses). I used some lithium grease we picked up at the hardware store to grease the yaw bearing and the tail bearing.

The third picture shows the top of the tower all rigged to the bucket truck (which you can't see) and ready to be lifted up.