Hold The Power For As Long As You Like (Part 3)

The Solution

Like most solutions, start by Googling up the topic. It wasn’t long before I realized that some people had had their hands on this already, and it looked like they all came away with a relative margin of success. But by and large, I learnt that there was no need to reinvent the wheel. They had already drawn up a blueprint of some of the major components to fabricate a wind turbine.

One of the first thing to consider when building a wind turbine is to ascertain how windy the target location is – for those in the west, there is a chart of average wind speed in different areas in the USA and even in the UK – I guess they use this for air navigation data (several private pilots, and wind-sports related enthusiasts) but in Naija where our past presidents insist that Nigeria has no business in space, no such chart exists. In the absence of this data, I used common sense - as a rule of thumb; coastal cities are generally windier than landlocked cities. Rural areas are generally windier than built up locations.

coastal cities are generally windier than landlocked cities. Rural areas are generally windier than built up locations.

This rule clearly put me at a disadvantage, Abuja is land locked, and built up – but I figured that if I put my turbine high up on the roof of a 3 – 4 storey building, I should catch the “Gulf Steam”. (or so I thought)

I started out with a short shopping list of a few items
• Motor Alternator
• Bicycle Speed Meter (wired)
• Hub for the rotor blades
• PVC Pipes
• 5 Core Wire (one roll)
• Mount Pipes and brackets
• Nuts, Screws, Washers and Bolts

The projects I saw on the internet had shopping list of items one could easily find at your local DIY, home improvement shop, but for three reasons I had to look elsewhere – My rules;
1. Here in Nigeria, there were no hobby shops to run to.
2. I was not willing to waste money. I was going to salvage items and make do with whatever I can find that fits the bill.
3. Will only resort to buying new of off-shore items if and only if, I am unable to get one locally

I turned to junk yard to find my parts – finding a junk yard was more difficult than I first thought. Until I learnt that our people had their own name for it. Its called “Panteka” (from the sentence “Pan Taker” – people who collect pans). Hilarious! Finding Pantakas was much easier.

... more tomorrow.