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

Been down this rabbit hole extensively. The short answer is: yes, it works, but with significant caveats that most YouTube tutorials conveniently skip over.

Washing machine motors (particularly the older universal motors from pre-2000 machines) are essentially series-wound DC motors, which sounds ideal until you realise their efficiency curve is completely wrong for wind generation. You want a slow-turning, high-torque alternator — washing machine motors want to spin fast to produce meaningful voltage.

The permanent magnet motors from more modern direct-drive machines (Indesit, Hotpoint drum motors especially) are a completely different story. Strip one of those down and you've actually got something resembling a proper axial flux alternator core. I've seen decent results rewinding these for low-RPM operation.

My setup on the narrowboat uses a proper Superwind 350 now, but before that I experimented with exactly this. Key things I learned:

• Rectification matters enormously — a proper 3-phase bridge rectifier, not a bodged single-phase one
• Blade design is where most people fail, not the motor itself
• Charge controller compatibility is a genuine headache; most MPPT units (even decent Victron ones) don't play nicely with erratic homemade turbine output
• UK wind speeds at typical narrowboat mooring height are often disappointing — manage expectations

The fenlands are actually decent for wind resource, which is why I kept experimenting longer than I probably should have.

Anyone specifically working with permanent magnet drum motors? That's where the interesting DIY potential genuinely lies and I'd rather discuss that than the usual series-motor dead ends.

@FenlandSolar ooh you've got me curious now — what caveats are we talking?

I've been eyeing up an old Hotpoint drum in the skip round the corner for exactly this reason. My shepherds hut setup is crying out for a small wind source to complement the solar through winter.

Main thing putting me off is the rectifier side of things — converting whatever comes out to something my Victron MPPT will actually accept without throwing a tantrum. Seen a few builds where lads have fried controllers doing it wrong.

Also curious about the RPM sweet spot. Washing machine motors tend to need a decent spin before they produce anything useful, which on a calm Fenland day isn't guaranteed 😄

Drop the caveats — that's exactly the bit YouTube skips and where the real learning is.

@FenlandSolar has almost certainly hit the BLDC vs induction motor distinction — this is where most tutorials fall apart spectacularly.

@GazAllen the Hotpoint drum motors are typically induction motors, which are essentially useless for generation without serious modification. You want the brushless permanent magnet motors from front-loaders, particularly anything with an inverter drive (look for the variable-speed models).

Key caveats nobody mentions:

• Cut-in speed is brutal — you'll need decent wind before you see useful voltage
• Rectification — 3-phase AC output needs proper bridge rectification before hitting your batteries
• Cogging torque will murder your efficiency in low winds
• The original stator windings are optimised for consuming power, not generating it — rewinding dramatically improves low-speed performance but it's a weekend of your life you won't get back

I rewound a Bosch front-loader drum motor last autumn. Painful but genuinely worthwhile.

Really glad @FenlandSolar is raising this — it's something I learnt the hard way last year. To add to what @DailySolar is hinting at, even once you've confirmed you've got a BLDC motor, the voltage output at low RPM is often disappointingly small. Wind turbines rarely spin as fast as washing machine drums do in a spin cycle, so you need to think carefully about your rectifier setup and whether you're gearing the thing up mechanically. I used a salvaged Bosch drum and spent weeks puzzling over why I was getting virtually nothing useful below a decent breeze. Turned out my cut-in wind speed was embarrassingly high. Worth checking the motor's pole count before committing too much time to a build — more poles generally means better low-speed performance for this application.

@FenlandSolar @DailySolar are both right on the BLDC point — I found this out after pulling apart a Bosch drum thinking I'd struck gold.

One thing nobody's mentioned yet: rectification. Even with a proper BLDC motor, raw 3-phase AC output is all over the place at variable wind speeds. You'll need a decent bridge rectifier and some capacitor smoothing before it's anywhere near usable.

I'm running a small setup on my boat and ended up putting a Victron SmartShunt on the output just to actually understand what I was getting — genuinely eye-opening how inconsistent it was before I sorted the rectification properly.

Also worth checking the motor's pole count before committing hours to a build. Higher pole count = better output at lower RPM, which matters enormously in the UK's pathetic average wind speeds.