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You can scavenge car's alternators and use a water wheel or windmill to turn it. Alternators can work for a decade with minimum maintenance. Just have five or s
by Anarch157a 6y ago
You can scavenge car's alternators and use a water wheel or windmill to turn it. Alternators can work for a decade with minimum maintenance. Just have five or six stashed, just in case. They can supply 40A at 12V, or using a transformer to up the voltage, 4A at 120V.
- emteycz 6y agoAlternators are also trivial to build by hand.
- mauvehaus 6y agoSure. If you have the input materials. If you're at the point of having to build an alternator by hand rather than just taking one off a car, I'd like to know where you're getting magnet wire, the machined shaft, the various rotor and stator parts, the end-bells, and the ball bearings.
- emteycz 6y agoConsider that you're not necessarily building from raw materials, you will be repurposing things you find around. Finding an alternator probably won't be a problem in the populated areas of USA but might be elsewhere - thankfully building it is still sufficiently simple.
- throwaway316943 6y agoHave you successfully run any modern hardware off of the irregular current coming out of something like that? You could charge batteries off of an alternator with a voltage regulator but I doubt any modern electronics are going to work well on current supplied by a jerry rigged water wheel and step up transformer. You’d be reliant on a lot of ICs to do it properly at a small scale.
- cturner 6y agoWould it be viable to use a rig of leyden jars to smooth out power coming from a scrappy alternator/commutator, and to implement cut-outs?