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

Tried this a couple of years back with a drum motor pulled from a knackered Hotpoint. Rewound the stator myself following some guides from a German hobbyist site — took three attempts to get the pole count right and even then the cut-in speed was embarrassingly high. Ended up needing a decent breeze just to light an LED, which wasn't exactly what I had in mind for the static van.

The core issue I kept running into was the air gap. Washing machine motors aren't designed with low-RPM generation in mind, so unless you're rebuilding the rotor with proper neodymium magnets (which starts eating into your "budget" label pretty quickly), you're fighting physics the whole time.

That said, I know people have made it work with axial flux designs using the motor's windings as a starting point rather than running them as-is. Has anyone gone down that route? I'm curious whether the copper salvage alone makes it worthwhile versus just buying a cheap Renogy or similar.

My skepticism isn't about the concept — permanent magnet alternators from scratch are well-proven — it's about whether the washing machine motor specifically gives you any real advantage over starting from raw materials. The frame and bearings are handy, I'll grant that.

What wind speeds are people actually seeing useful output at? And is anyone running these into a Victron MPPT or going direct to battery with a rectifier and some home-made dump load control?

@DucatoProject oh this brings back a painful memory — I tried almost exactly this for the shepherd's hut build, pulled a motor from a Bosch that was sat behind the village tip waiting for collection.

My problem was the cut-in speed. Even after rewinding I couldn't get it generating usefully below about 400rpm, and up on the Welsh borders we get gusty rather than consistent wind — loads of energy in those bursts but the turbine just wasn't happy.

Ended up abandoning it and going Victron + solar instead, which felt like defeat at the time but honestly the hut's been rock solid since.

Still got the motor in the workshop though. Keep meaning to revisit it as a hydro experiment — there's a decent little stream on the boundary. Did you ever crack the cut-in speed issue or just live with it?

Done this with a Bosch drum motor on the motorhome build — rewound stator with 0.85mm magnet wire, 3-phase star configuration, and paired it with a Victron SmartSolar via a bridge rectifier and a home-wound dump load controller (resistive, nothing fancy).

Key things nobody mentions:

• Cogging torque on these motors is brutal at low wind — you'll lose the first 3-4 m/s doing nothing useful
• Skewing the magnets slightly on the rotor helps enormously
• Get your cut-in voltage matched to your battery bank before you bolt it to anything tall

@DucatoProject the German hobbyist sites are decent but their wind profiles aren't UK coastal — we get more turbulent gusts than sustained flow, so your TSR calculations will be off if you follow them blindly.

@DucatoProject @MarineGeoff — worth flagging for anyone attempting this: the rectifier stage is where most DIY builds fall over. Washing machine motors typically put out very uneven 3-phase at low RPM, and a standard bridge rectifier won't cope well. You want a proper 3-phase full-wave rectifier, ideally with a dump load controller to protect your batteries when the wind picks up suddenly.

Also — rotor balance is non-negotiable. Even slight imbalance at speed will destroy the bearings faster than you'd expect. I've seen builds where someone's skimped on this and wrecked the motor inside a season.

What charge controller are you running downstream? A Victron SmartSolar won't play nicely with wind input — you need something wind-specific or a dedicated MPPT that handles the variable input properly.