Anyone else using old washing machine motors for a DIY wind turbine or is that just me?

Tried this about two years ago with a Bosch washing machine motor pulled from a skip — the permanent magnet type, not the brushed universal motors you want to avoid (those are essentially useless for this unless you fancy rewinding, which I did briefly consider and then rapidly decided against).

The PM motors can work as alternators but the output characteristics are all wrong for direct battery charging without serious rectification and some kind of MPPT controller in between. Got mine spinning on a 2-metre timber rotor I'd carved — genuinely produced voltage, peak was maybe 18-19V in a decent gust — but the current was laughable and the cogging torque meant it stalled in anything below a moderate breeze.

What I should have done from the start:

• Purpose-wound axial flux stator (loads of DIY guides online)
• Or just bought a second-hand Rutland 914i and been done with it

Currently the motor is sitting in my shed judging me while my static caravan runs off a Victron SmartSolar and Fogstar Drift batteries like a sensible setup.

That said — I genuinely think washing machine motors have potential if you're willing to rewind the stator for lower RPM and higher pole count. The steel quality in those laminations is actually decent. Anyone here gone further down that rabbit hole than I managed? Particularly interested if anyone's achieved useful charge rates into a 24V bank without the turbine needing gale-force conditions to overcome the cogging.

@VanRhys oh this brings back memories. I spent an entire February half-term convinced I was going to power my shepherd's hut with a Hotpoint drum motor I'd liberated from a neighbour's drive.

The fundamental problem — and I say this as someone who learned it the hard way — is that these motors need to be spinning at washing cycle speeds before they generate anything useful. In a British winter, my "wind resource" was mostly just me standing there feeling foolish.

Key things worth knowing:

• Rectification matters enormously — three-phase AC output needs proper bridge rectifiers
• Low-wind cut-in speed is your enemy
• Rewinding the stator for lower RPM generation is a legitimate rabbit hole

Did yours actually charge anything meaningful, or was it more of an educational experience? Mine was firmly in the second category.

@VanRhys this is exactly the rabbit hole I've been wanting to go down. I'm trying to sort emergency backup for a narrowboat and wondering if this approach could work for a low-wind river/canal environment — presumably you'd need to gear it up significantly compared to a coastal/hilltop setup?

Also, what did you use for the rectifier side? I've got a Victron SmartShunt already in the system so monitoring wouldn't be an issue, just trying to understand whether the output is clean enough not to cause problems.

@CopperWelder curious what killed your half-term project — was it the motor itself or the blade design? I've seen a few YouTube builds where the blades seem almost criminally undersized for the RPM needed.

Any idea what wattage you were realistically pulling from the Bosch unit @VanRhys?

@VanRhys pulled a Candy drum motor out of a skip last spring, wired it up to a Victron SmartShunt to see what it was actually producing — spoiler: enough to charge my ego, not enough to charge my Fogstar cells 😅

@MaxFrost narrowboat backup is literally my use case mate. Running a 400W Rutland windcharger as my "proper" setup but I've got a stripped Zanussi BLDC motor sitting in my engine room that I keep threatening to turn into a second turbine.

Honest take: the rectifier matters more than most people think. Cheap 3-phase bridge rectifiers from Amazon will get warm enough to worry you. Proper heatsinking or go home.

Also @BrookLover curious what RPM you were seeing before useful voltage kicked in — that's the killer with washing machine motors, they need a decent breeze before they stop being a weather vane with pretensions.

The prop design is where most of these projects die tbh. Motor's free, the carved wooden blades that don't snap in a gust are not.