The wind is already on board.

A gas carrier crossing open water is the most honest wind site there is. Nothing stands between the sea and the rotor: no hill, no tree line, no neighbour’s roof. The wind that reaches a ship’s deck is the wind the weather actually made. That is why the marine trade bought small wind turbines before most homeowners had heard of them, and why the people who work on the water keep coming back for more. This is what the sea has taught us about wind, and what a house on the coast can borrow from a ship.

The wind gets better the closer you get to the water.

Wind slows down over land. Every building, hedge and slope takes a little energy out of it and leaves turbulence behind. Over the sea there is nothing to take, so the wind at deck height is stronger and steadier than the same weather system produces a few kilometres inland. A coast is where those two regimes meet, and a roof within sight of the sea gets most of the marine wind with none of the marine motion.

The reason this matters more than it sounds is the cube law. The power in moving air rises with the cube of its speed, so a modest gain in wind is a large gain in electricity. Twenty per cent more wind is about seventy per cent more power. On our own published Atlas curve the difference is plain to see: 8 m/s gives 290 W, 12 m/s gives 960 W, and 15 m/s gives 1.85 kW. The same machine, on the same day, makes three times as much on an exposed headland as it does in a sheltered valley.

Who has been ordering, and what they ask.

We wrote earlier this month about the armies, and about Maersk, MSC and Petrobras, whose vessels carry our turbines. The marine trade around them is quieter but just as telling. A shipping agency in Greece ordered from us in November 2024 and came back eleven months later for more. A marine company on the Garden Route in South Africa ordered in May 2026. An MSC order left our warehouse in November 2025. None of these buyers is a hobbyist. They run boats, yards and offices where salt is a daily cost and a machine that stops is a machine that gets replaced.

Their questions are also different from a homeowner’s. A homeowner asks what a turbine will make. A marine buyer asks what it is made of, how the body is sealed, what the bearings see, how the blades come off before a storm, and what the machine weighs so two people can carry it up a companionway. Those are the questions we like, because the answers are on our product pages rather than in a brochure: an aluminium body, Class 200 °C windings to IEC 60317-13 GR 2, three blade sets for three wind regimes, and a machine light enough to ship as parcels.

What salt does, and what to do about it.

Salt is patient. Spray lands, dries and leaves a crust that draws moisture back out of the air and holds it against metal. On a ship this happens every hour; on a coastal roof it happens every windy day. The body of the Atlas is aluminium, which forms its own protective oxide and does not rust, and the rotor has no tail and no yaw bearing to load up with salt. What a coastal owner should still do is simple: rinse the machine with fresh water a few times a year, check the fasteners once a season, and take the blades off when a named storm is forecast, exactly as a crew would before heavy weather.

The other lesson from the water is about turbulence. A ship’s deck wind swings with every change of heading. A vertical-axis rotor does not care which way the wind comes from and does not have to turn to face it, which is why the same design that suits a moving vessel also suits a rooftop on a gusty shore, where the wind comes round a headland one minute and down a valley the next.

The sea has been testing wind turbines for us, one crew at a time. A house on the coast gets the results.

Siting a turbine where the land meets the sea.

Three rules carry over from the deck to the roof. First, height beats everything: the rotor should clear the roofline and anything within a few tens of metres, because the smooth marine wind breaks up the moment it hits a building. Second, choose the blade set for the worst wind the site sees, not the average. On an exposed coast that usually means the high-wind set, rated from 5 to 35 m/s, rather than the low-wind set that must come off above 20 m/s. Third, keep the electronics dry and the cable runs short; a ship’s electrician would say the same about anything bolted to a mast.

Do those three things and a coastal house sees what a ship sees: wind on most days, strongest in the months when solar is weakest, from a direction that changes and a machine that does not mind.

The same machine, both sides of the shoreline.

We do not build a marine model and a domestic model. The Atlas that goes to a survey vessel is the Atlas that goes to a bungalow in Kerry or a beach house outside Knysna, in the same carton with the same label. The sea simply asks more of it, sooner, and tells us faster when something is wrong. Every improvement that came back from the water is now on every roof we ship to.

Open water.
Honest wind.
The same machine, on shore.

The power-curve figures, the 15 kW motor rating, the 4.5 kW and 12 kW peak outputs, the 460 W rating of a two-panel Flex carton, the three blade ranges and the Class 200 °C wire grade (IEC 60317-13 GR 2) are our own published product-page specifications and can be read there. The cube-law figures are arithmetic: the energy in the wind scales with the cube of its speed, so 12, 15 and 18 m/s carry 3.4, 6.6 and 11.4 times the energy of 8 m/s. The order dates are from our own order records; the customers are described by trade and region only and are not named, and nothing here is a statement made by or on behalf of them. The naval photograph is a licensed stock image and does not depict a customer vessel. The gas carrier at the top of this page is a licensed Adobe Stock photograph and is not a customer vessel either. The Athens photograph and the pallet photograph are our own.