Anyone else using old washing machine motors for a DIY wind turbine?

Pulled a Bosch drum motor out of a skip last spring and now it's spinning away on a pole outside my tiny house like a very confused helicopter.

The rewinding is the faff nobody warns you about — took me three attempts and one mildly singed eyebrow to get the star configuration right, but once it clicked the thing was actually chucking out a respectable voltage in a decent breeze.

Few things worth knowing if you're going down this rabbit hole:

• Rectifier quality matters — I bodged the first one with cheap diodes and lost half my output to heat
• Blade balance is everything — vibration will walk your tower bolts loose faster than you'd think
• Pair it with a Victron SmartShunt and you'll actually see how disappointing British weather is in real time
• Fogstar cells as the battery bank made the whole thing feel slightly less agricultural

The main gotcha is cogging — these motors weren't designed to self-start in low wind, so you'll want to either rewind with fewer poles or just accept that anything under Force 4 is purely decorative.

Anyone else found a particular washing machine brand that rewound better than others? I've heard Indesit motors are more cooperative but can't confirm — mine was a mystery skip special with no badge and a suspicious smell of fabric softener.

@CotswoldCruiser genuinely curious about this — I've got a dead Zanussi sat in my van conversion project pile and keep eyeing it up.

Few questions before I crack it open:

• What pole height are you running? Worried about planning/neighbours in my situation
• Did you go star or delta winding when you rewound it?
• What rectifier setup are you using before it hits your battery bank?

I'm running a Victron SmartShunt so I can monitor whatever comes in, but wind is completely new territory for me. Solar's predictable — wind feels like chaos in comparison.

Also wondering if there's a minimum wind speed where these motors actually produce anything useful rather than just trickling milliamps into a 200Ah Fogstar battery and kidding yourself it's doing something.

@CotswoldCruiser the rewinding rabbit hole is real — I went down it researching alternatives for my boat setup before deciding it wasn't worth the grief for my particular situation.

One thing worth flagging for anyone attempting this: the rectifier stage really matters. Washing machine motors tend to produce quite dirty AC output and if you're going straight into a Victron MPPT or similar you'll want a proper 3-phase bridge rectifier rather than bodging something basic. Learned that the hard way reading other people's horror stories on here.

@TorChild a Zanussi permanent magnet motor (check first — some are induction motors which are useless for this) could genuinely work. The winding resistance is your first test. Spin it by hand with a multimeter on AC and see what you get before committing any time to it.

@CotswoldCruiser this is exactly the kind of project I've been eyeing up for my tiny house but haven't had the nerve to start yet. A few questions if you don't mind —

• What pole height are you running it at?
• Are you feeding straight into a Victron MPPT or did you need a rectifier/dump load setup first?
• What kind of cut-in wind speed are you seeing in practice vs what you expected?

The rewinding thing worries me most honestly. Is there a particular winding guide you followed, or did you work it out yourself? I've seen some YouTube tutorials but they vary wildly and I can't tell which ones are actually reliable for UK wind conditions rather than somewhere with proper gusts.

Also curious whether @TorChild's Zanussi motor would behave differently to your Bosch — do the specs vary much between drum motors?

Been running a rewound induction motor on my narrowboat for about 18 months now — the key thing nobody mentions alongside the rewinding faff is the rectifier setup afterwards. A proper three-phase bridge rectifier makes an enormous difference to output smoothness compared to bodging it with single-phase. Worth the few quid.

@ZoeRoss honestly just have a go — worst case you've lost an afternoon and learned something. The blade pitch is where I'd focus your energy first though. Get that wrong and it doesn't matter how tidy your windings are, you'll be underwhelmed.

@TorChild Zanussi motors can be decent but check the bearing condition before committing hours to a rewind — skip machines sometimes walked themselves to death vibrating on an unbalanced drum.

Happy to share my rectifier wiring diagram if anyone wants it.