Soup Can Savonius

Step 10 Final Thoughts

Now place in windy area or in front of fan and see what you get for a voltage output. You can adjust your height to see if that changes things drastically. To do so, just loosen the nut under the top bearing, loosen the nut under the bottom bearing and slide the whole thing up (remember the few inches above the turbine), adjust the nut on top the bottom bearing to where you want it and then slide it all back in place and tighten it all.

Some final tidbits. If this is going outside, might want to clear coat it with some outside varnish. If your turbine is too heavy, drill some holes in the plywood disks but don’t make it too lopsided. Experiment with different ideas and comment about it so others can learn freely from your challenges. Mine needed some greasing of the bearings. I soaked it with WD-40 (I know it’s not a lubricant) and it seems to work.

“While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior” – Henry C. Link

There are other instructables on Savonius (search “savonius”) wind turbines that have explanations of 3-phase power vs. single phase as well as instructions for larger turbines. There are also various other Vertical Axis Wind Turbine designs out there too including an instructable on the Lenz 2 Turbine and another website for an involute spiral design (http://www.stiltman.com/html/wind_power.html). This is just a starter and a tester. My next savonius turbine will be built out of the water heater skin I just tore apart in my garage. Hopefully you and I have learned some things from constructing this simplified model that we can use to build more complex or at least larger versions. I haven’t hooked the coils up yet to test voltage of the cheap magnets. I figure if the cheap ones don’t work I can always flip the turbine part over and put good magnets on the other side.