Making a generator to generate electricity

Saving electricity is one of the most common concerns of many of our contemporaries. In one of our articles, we have already touched on this topic. There we told you about techniques to reduce the amount of energy consumption.

Today, we intend to approach the same issue from a different angle. We are talking about a home-made electric generator, which almost anyone can do. Moreover, this simple generator can easily provide power to several lighting bulbs at once.

You can read an article on ways to save electricity here.

What is needed to make a homemade electric generator

To make a homemade electric generator, you will need:

• 7-blade computer cooler for 12 volts;
• 4 magnets that can be removed from an old hard drive;
• 7 identical metal washers;
• reliable universal adhesive.

How to make a homemade generator that saves electricity

The first thing to do is to fix the washers on the cooler blades. It is very important that all washers are fixed in the same way. This will avoid the occurrence of imbalance and beats during the operation of the future home-made generator.

Then you need to take the magnets removed from the old hard drive. These magnets look like this:

Three magnets should be fixed with glue on the cooler supports. When gluing them, you need to pay attention to the fact that they do not interfere with the rotation of the blades.

The fourth magnet must be divided into two halves. One of these halves must be glued to the fourth support of the cooler. The magnet is not taken whole so that the field created by the magnets is non-uniform. The mounting point of the magnetic half should be chosen so that the cooler blades begin to rotate spontaneously. Since this rotation is spontaneous, the cooler turns into some kind of perpetual motion machine.

The rotating blades cause the cooler motor to rotate, as a result of which it starts to produce an electric current, i.e. turns into a generator.

Electrical circuit assembly

A freshly made homemade generator produces a direct current of about 12 volts. To power electrical appliances powered by alternating current, you will need a converter. As such a converter, you can use an old power supply, which is usually converts 220 volts AC to 9 volts DC, making it work in reverse direction:

• use its 9 volt output as a voltage input from the generator;
• use the input of the power supply as an output supplying an alternating voltage of 220 volts.

There are three conductors in the wire coming out of the cooler. The one with the yellow braid is completely unnecessary. It can simply be cut off. The remaining conductors are connected to the former output of the power supply in compliance with their color.

So that the converter can feed several consumers at once, using, for example, a terminal block, it can be connected to a conventional tee.

Possibilities of a homemade generator

In order to test the capabilities of a home-made generator, the author of the described design connected 3 70 W light bulbs to it at once. They all burst into flames.

It is quite clear that only devices that are not very demanding can be connected to this source of electricity. Various types of electronics, for example, will not be able to work stably due to possible power surges.

So, if you power at least some lighting devices from this home-made generator, then you will be provided with significant electricity savings. The interest of this device lies in the fact that even completely inexperienced people can make it.