Customer Reviews

Windpower Workshop: Building Your Own Wind Turbine

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 wanted to like this book. I really did. So many people who are wind power enthusiasts kept telling me how seminal a book this is, but it was a disappointment, albeit a subjective one. I think more accurate thing to say would be that it was not the book I was looking for.

I can say objectively if you want information on how a grid-tied wind turbine system should work, this book has almost no information on the entire grid-tying process, a complicated and expensive process that certainly a lot of people would need help with. I can also say objectively that this book helped me realize that wind power would not be a good choice for my current home.

I think the problem I have with this book is twofold. One, the book is written on a fairly high level. Some formulas for wind power are presented, some general heuristics, and these are important to be sure, but they don't actually help you get your head wrapped around the issues at stake. There are electrical schematics presented in some places. I'm a fairly technical person, and I can read a schematic fairly well. Sometimes I can't tell whether a symbol is a dynamo or an alternator (they don't look the same but they are similar in practice). But of course an electrical schmatic does not a wind generating electrical system make, and this should not reflect badly on the author.

The other thing is Piggott's really heavily invested in presenting a balanced view of the information. Seems like a counter-intuitive criticism but I had a hard time figuring out what his personal opinion about different designs of turbines, towers, furlings, generators, etc. were. I would have preferd that he say. "This is what works for me, and this is why I think it works." Instead of "You can do this. Or you can do this. Or you can do this... etc".

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.

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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.

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'm not an electrician or engineer, but I consider myself fairly intelligent and didn't mind the challenge of learning something new. Unfortunately this was not the book for me. While Piggot does an admirable job of laying out the basics of how a wind turbine functions and the components involved, this is not a start-to-finish guide to building a wind turbine. For example, there is a chapter dedicated to constructing (or modifying an existing) generator/alternator and a chapter on constructing an appropriate tower, but literally no information on how to mount your generator to the tower. There's information on what you need from the electrical controls to prevent battery damage, but no information on where you could get these controls or how to build them.

If you're interested in getting into wind power and have a solid engineering foundation, I'm sure this book would be helpful. For everyone else, you might want to start elsewhere.

an average book for the enthuiast out there.to me there need to be more drawings, photographs, etc.for such a practical book.... that is my honest opinion.

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