Palermo from above. Count the metres of clear air between one roof and the next — there are barely any. That density is the whole problem in one photograph.

A city behind a 606-metre wall

Monte Pellegrino is an isolated carbonate promontory on the northern edge of Palermo. At 606 metres it is the highest point inside the city boundary, it closes the Gulf of Palermo to the north, and it is visible from essentially everywhere in the city. For our purposes it is something less romantic: a very large windbreak, sitting exactly where the sea breeze would otherwise arrive.

Behind it the old city occupies flat, dense ground, and behind that the land climbs again into the hills. A turbine on a roof in the middle of the old core is standing at the bottom of a bowl, in the wind shadow of every building around it, and roughly nothing on a specification sheet will rescue that site. Move the same machine to the coast, or up onto the slopes where a building stands clear of its neighbours, and it is a different proposition entirely.

The same city drawn as a section. Deliberately schematic and not to scale — the point is shelter and exposure, not metres.

One island, two extremes

It is worth saying that Palermo is only one end of Sicily. At the other, on the east coast some two hundred kilometres away, Etna stands at roughly 3,403 metres — the tallest peak in Italy south of the Alps, and a mountain whose exact height changes when it erupts. Against that, the highest ground inside Palermo's city limits is a 606-metre promontory. The photograph at the top of this page is the eastern end of that range: commercial turbines standing on an exposed Sicilian ridge with Etna smoking behind them.

An island that runs from a 3,400-metre volcano to a sheltered coastal plain does not have one wind climate, it has dozens. That is the real reason we will not quote you a number for “Sicily”. The honest unit here is not the island, or even the city. It is the site.

The wind that ruins the solar day

Then there is the sirocco: a Mediterranean wind that comes off the Sahara and can reach violent speeds by the time it makes landfall. It arrives over Sicily from the south, carrying North African dust with it, and for a solar panel it is straightforwardly bad news. The haze cuts the light, and the dust settles on the glass and stays there until somebody climbs up and washes it off. What is easy to miss is that this is also the strongest wind the island gets.

That is the useful thing about running a panel and a turbine on the same battery in a place like this. They do not fail on the same days. The hazy, dust-laden afternoon that flattens a solar curve is very often a windy one, and the still, glassy August morning that suits the panel perfectly gives the turbine nothing at all.

A panel and a turbine are not twice as reliable. They are unreliable on different days, which is the part that actually matters.

Why Palermo keeps coming up

Palermo is the capital and largest city of Sicily, a 2,700-year-old city on the gulf that carries its name, with something like 1.2 million people in and around it. It is also, quietly, one of the stronger parts of our Italian map — not because we have any romantic attachment to the place, but because that is where the orders come from. Once you know the geography that stops being surprising. A large coastal population, a great many buildings outside the old core that stand on their own, and a season of genuine wind add up to somewhere a turbine can earn its keep.

Cefalù, further along the same coast. Compare it with the first photograph: a town built out onto a headland with open water on both sides is the opposite of a sheltered courtyard, and it is the kind of Sicilian site where a turbine has something to work with.

What we would hold against us, in your position

The sirocco is seasonal and episodic. It is not a resource you can bank on every week, and anyone selling you a turbine on the strength of one dramatic wind is selling you the exception rather than the average. The dust that dirties a panel also finds its way into anything mechanical, and coastal salt air corrodes hardware left outdoors — ours included. Both are maintenance you will genuinely have to do, and we would rather write that down than let you discover it in year three.

And the honest summary of everything above: if your roof is in the middle of the old city, hemmed in on four sides, do not buy a turbine from us. Buy the panel. We would rather sell you half a system that works than a whole one where one half spends its life stationary. If you are on the coast, on the slopes, or on a building that stands clear of what surrounds it — measure the site, and then talk to us.

The section drawing on this page is ours and is schematic rather than surveyed. The three photographs — the turbines below Etna, Palermo from above, and Cefalù — are licensed stock images, not our own, unlike the factory photographs elsewhere on this blog, which are. The figures for Monte Pellegrino and for the city are the published ones, and the sirocco is what the meteorological literature describes: a Mediterranean wind out of the Sahara capable of very high speeds. The turbine figures are our own published specifications and are checkable on the product page.

2.15 million square kilometres, about two thirds of the Arabian Peninsula, with a Red Sea coast on one side and the Gulf on the other.

What the map is actually saying

Two coastlines, a high interior plateau, and distances big enough that the edge of a grid is a real place rather than a figure of speech. A farm outside Al Jouf, a compound an hour from Dammam, a site being cleared somewhere along the Red Sea — these are not places where a power cut is dramatic. They are places where the last kilometre of cable was always going to be the expensive one, and where a machine that makes its own electricity on site stops being a lifestyle choice and starts being arithmetic.

That is the part of Saudi Arabia we find interesting, and it has very little to do with the skyline photographs. The country is diversifying its energy mix as national policy under Vision 2030. We are not in that story — utility-scale wind farms are a different industry from ours. What we sell is the small end: one machine, one roof or one mast, one battery, one household or one workshop.

Why we will not just hand you a panel

A solar panel in Saudi Arabia is an easy sell and a good product. It also stops at sunset, and it produces least on exactly the overcast, dusty, hazy days when a haboob has rolled through and everything is running on stored charge. Wind does not keep the same clock. Coastal air moves in the evening as the land cools; exposed ground and escarpment edges often carry a breeze through the night. Put a turbine and a panel on the same battery and they fill it at different hours. That is the entire argument for a hybrid, and it is a physical argument rather than a marketing one.

A battery does not care which machine filled it. It cares whether something filled it at four in the morning.

Now the honest half. We are not going to tell you Saudi Arabia is windy the way the North Sea is windy, because most of the interior is not. Site matters more here than in almost any market we ship to. A plot near the Gulf coast, the lip of an escarpment, and a rooftop that clears the roofline around it are three good propositions; a sheltered courtyard between four city blocks is not, and no amount of specification sheet will fix it. Measure the site before you buy anything from us — ours or anyone's. If the wind is not there, buy the panel and skip the turbine; we would rather sell you nothing than sell you a machine that spends its life stationary.

Made mainly in Slovakia and London, and in Turkey as well. From Slovakia that is roughly 3,700 km in a straight line to the Eastern Province, from London about 5,100 km, and from Turkey about 2,300 km.

Where to buy, plainly

A Saudi delivery address checks out on our global store, in English and US dollars. Our Arabic-language storefronts currently serve the UAE and Qatar, with local currency and local pricing. If you would rather we had a Saudi storefront with riyal pricing and Arabic checkout, say so — that kind of message is what moves it up the list, and it is a better reason to build one than a spreadsheet forecast.

Both maps on this page were drawn by us from public coordinate data; the distances are straight-line figures from our sites in Slovakia, London and Turkey, not road or freight distances. The photograph at the top is a licensed stock image of the escarpment country near Riyadh, not our own — unlike the factory photographs elsewhere on this blog, which are. The turbine figures are our own published specifications and are checkable on the product page.

Mounting holes going into an aluminium body panel. The bright curls are swarf coming off the flutes; the notched edge at the left is a laser-cut profile from earlier in the same job.

The tolerance is not in the machine

A drill press has no idea where it is. It spins, it comes down, it goes back up. Nothing about it knows the difference between the right place and forty millimetres from the right place. What decides where a hole lands is the jig: a template that sits on the part and puts the bit in the same position on the first panel and on the five hundredth. The tolerance moves out of the operator's eye and into a piece of steel that does not get tired at four in the afternoon.

So when somebody asks whether this is CNC, the answer is no, and it is not the confession it sounds like. A CNC would locate the hole from a program and a datum. A jig locates it from the part itself, which for a panel that has already been cut and formed is not the inferior method — it is the method that references the thing you are actually holding rather than the thing the drawing said you would be holding.

A drill press does not know where it is. The jig does.

What a jig does not fix

Now the part that keeps this honest, because a jig is not a magic word. It is a wearing part. The bushes open up over time, and a hole that starts dead on position drifts as the guide it is drilled through gets wider. That means the jig has to be checked on a schedule, and it means that when a check finds drift, every panel drilled since the last check is a question rather than an answer. Nobody enjoys that conversation. It is still cheaper than the alternative, which is finding out at assembly.

Hand feed has its own limit. Aluminium is soft and it grabs on breakthrough — push too hard as the bit exits thin sheet and it will snatch, climb, and either tear the hole or take the panel with it. That is the whole reason the work is clamped and nobody drills a loose sheet, and it is the part of this job that lives in an operator's hands rather than in any fixture. You can buy a jig. You cannot buy the feel for the last half millimetre.

And the honest ceiling: this does not scale the way the laser does. A laser bed will run a nest of profiles while somebody is doing something else. A bench drill runs at the speed of one person and one panel. At our volumes that trade is fine, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim we spend these posts trying not to make. If we were building ten thousand a month, this photograph would look different, and we would tell you so.

Eight seconds, which is the whole point

The clip below is eight seconds long, and it is eight seconds because that is how long the operation takes. Most of manufacturing looks like this rather than like a factory tour: a short, unglamorous, entirely repeatable movement, done correctly, several hundred times. The interesting question is never whether the machine is impressive. It is whether the hundredth one comes out the same as the first. That is what the turbine you receive is actually made of.

The photograph and the clip are both ours, filmed this week on our own bench, unstaged and uncut. The still is a frame from the same eight seconds. Nothing here has been tidied up for the camera, which is why there is swarf on the panel and a glove in the corner of the shot.

A sheet part-way through a job on our Bodor fibre laser. The long sweeping line across it is a blade profile; the scatter of bright beads is spatter thrown up at each pierce.

What the operator is actually looking at

The yellow lines on that screen are not the blade outlines. They are the path the cutting head will take, which is a different drawing and a more interesting one. Every white dot is a pierce — the moment the beam stops travelling and burns down through the sheet before the cut proper begins. Each of those little curls and hooks where a line joins the profile is a lead-in, a deliberate run-up so the pierce happens beside the part rather than on it.

That matters more for a turbine blade than for most parts. A blade is a long aerofoil strip, and the edge is the working surface. Put a lead-in on the wrong side and the pierce leaves a bead of resolidified metal exactly where the air is supposed to run clean. Nobody sees it in a photograph. It is there for the life of the machine.

Our technician Okan Gumus at the control station. The panel on the right is assist gas, pierce settings and a thin-plate mode — the choices that decide whether an edge comes off clean.

The panel down the right-hand side is where the real decisions live: which assist gas, how the head pierces, whether the job runs in thin-plate mode, whether the machine finds the sheet edge before it starts. Aluminium is unforgiving here. Cut it with the wrong gas or too slowly and you get dross welded to the underside of every edge, which then has to be taken off by hand — or does not get taken off, and ships.

A laser does not cut a good part. A laser cuts exactly the part somebody told it to cut, including the mistakes.

Why we cut our own

There are three Atlas blade sets, and they are not three price points. The low-wind set runs 2–20 m/s for 2 kW peak, the moderate set 4–25 m/s for 3.8 kW, and the high-wind set 5–35 m/s for 4.5 kW in a six-blade arrangement built for exposed coastal sites. Three profiles, cut from the same stock, on the same bed.

Doing that in-house buys us one thing above all: we can change a profile without asking anyone's permission or waiting for anyone's lead time. A subcontracted blade is a purchase order and a six-week conversation. A blade on our own bed is a file, a test cut and an afternoon. When a customer sends us a season of measured wind and it does not match what our profiles assume, that gap is something we can act on rather than merely note.

The other half of cutting our own is stock. We cut in batches, and the batches sit in the rack until an order calls for them, which is why a blade set usually leaves here in days rather than weeks. It also means a profile change does not reach you the moment we make it — the rack has to empty first. That is the honest trade: control over the shape, at the cost of a queue between the decision and the crate on the pallet.

Cut stock in the racking, waiting on orders. The label on the yellow beam is the shelf's load limit, 3,000 kg — the dull number that decides how high a batch is allowed to go.

The building the laser sits in. Not photogenic, and not the point — but it is ours, and the machine inside it is ours.

What a laser does not buy you

Now the part that keeps this honest. A fibre laser is not exotic. Plenty of fabricators have one, and owning it proves nothing on its own about how a turbine performs. The cut is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one: a perfectly cut blade with the wrong camber is a perfectly cut bad blade. What the machine gives us is control over the shape and repeatability between batches. It does not give us aerodynamics, and we would rather say so than let a photograph of an expensive machine do an argument's work.

Nor do we make everything. We do not smelt the aluminium. We do not make the magnets, the bearings or the semiconductors, and anyone who tells you they do at our scale is describing an ambition rather than a factory. What we do here is cut, form, wind, assemble and test. Where a part comes from outside, it comes from outside, and we will tell you which is which if you ask.

The photographs on this page are our own, taken this week and not staged for it. The blade figures are our own published specifications and are checkable on the product page. The screen is the machine's own control software, photographed mid-job — we have not tidied it up, which is why the error pane in the corner is still showing.

What we actually sold, and to whom

On 13 November 2024, Company Importação e Exportação Ltda., of Rua Patrimônio in Vila Velha, Espírito Santo, placed two orders with us. Between them: sixty Atlas turbine bodies and sixty blade sets, invoiced at just under €57,000. That is the part we can vouch for from our own records, and it is the reason this page exists at all.

Vila Velha sits beside Vitória, one of Brazil's major ports and the service base for a great deal of offshore oil work in Espírito Santo. A distributor there taking sixty vertical turbines is not a mystery. What happened to four of them is the interesting part, and that part comes from our distributor rather than from our own instruments: they were fitted to Petrobras vessels.

We are flagging that distinction deliberately. Petrobras is not our customer — they are our distributor's customer. We have no meter readings from those decks and no survey of how the machines were installed. Everything below about ships is engineering reasoning and honest caveat, not a performance claim.

Why a vertical axis suits a moving deck

The wind a turbine feels on a ship is not the wind on the weather chart. It is apparent wind — the vector sum of the true wind and the wind the vessel makes by moving through it. Change course and the apparent wind swings. Change speed and it swings again. A vessel under way alters both all day.

A horizontal-axis turbine has to point into the wind to work, so it needs a yaw mechanism and it needs time to turn. That is a fine trade on open land, where the wind holds a bearing for minutes at a stretch; it is why every utility-scale wind farm is horizontal. On a deck that is changing heading, the machine spends its life turning towards wind that has already moved.

A vertical-axis machine has no bearing to find. It accepts wind from any direction, which is precisely the property you want when direction is the one thing you cannot rely on. It also means there is no yaw drive, no slip rings and no rotating electrical joint — and in salt air, every mechanism you delete is one that cannot seize.

On land you choose a turbine for the wind speed. On a moving vessel you choose it for the wind direction, because direction is what will not sit still.

Everything is in the one sealed housing — generator, IoT charge controller, display, terminals. On a deck, that matters more than it does on a roof.

What a deck asks that a roof does not

The Atlas body is a single sealed aluminium housing holding the generator, the built-in IoT charge controller, the display and every terminal. On a house that is a convenience — no second box to find a wall for. On a working deck it is closer to a requirement, because there is no dry cupboard to put a separate controller in. The body weighs 22.30 kg on our own workshop scale, without blades or mast.

Noise is the other thing that reads differently at sea. The machine runs at 35–40 dB. On a suburban roof that is a question of neighbours. On a vessel, crew sleep in accommodation directly below the deck the equipment is bolted to, and they cannot go anywhere else.

Now the part that argues against a straightforward sale. There are three Atlas blade sets, each laser-cut from 1.2 mm high-strength aluminium and matched to a wind profile rather than to a price tier: low wind runs 2–20 m/s for 2 kW peak, moderate runs 4–25 m/s for 3.8 kW, and high wind runs 5–35 m/s for 4.5 kW in a six-blade configuration built for exposed coastal sites. For a sheltered garden the answer is usually the low-wind set. At sea it is the opposite. Apparent wind on a vessel under way is frequently higher than the true wind, and an exposed deck has nothing upwind of it for a thousand miles. Specifying a marine installation the way you would specify a back garden is the surest way to get it wrong.

A still from our own footage: gusseted pedestals bolted through the deck, cross-braced, with drip loops on the cable runs. All of that is the operator's engineering, not ours.

And two things we will not pretend away. Salt is relentless, and an aluminium housing helps but does not exempt anyone from a maintenance regime. A hull pitches and rolls, which imposes cyclic and gyroscopic loads that a rooftop never sees — loads we have not characterised for this machine. Those blue pedestals in the photograph were fabricated by the operator, and the mounting engineering on a vessel is properly theirs, not ours.

What we are not going to tell you

We are not going to give you a kilowatt-hour figure for these vessels. We have no metered data from them, and inventing one would be worth less than nothing — the first marine engineer to read it would check the arithmetic and stop trusting the rest of the page. Our published annual range for a small Atlas is 180 to 3,500 kWh, and that range exists precisely because output depends on a site we have not measured.

Nor are we going to market the Atlas as certified marine equipment. It is not sold as such. Four of them ended up at sea because a customer looked at an omnidirectional machine in a sealed case and drew a sensible conclusion, and we would rather describe that accurately than dress it up. If you are considering something similar, talk to us before you order, and measure the wind where the machine will actually stand — on a fixed installation, an anemometer settles in one season what a brochure cannot settle at all.

Our thanks to Company Importação e Exportação for the order. The sixty units, the two order dates and the invoice total come from our own sales records. The specifications are our own published figures for the Atlas and are checkable on the product page. The deployment aboard Petrobras vessels is reported to us by our distributor and shown in our own footage; we have not surveyed it ourselves, and we have said so rather than let you assume otherwise.

Wound stators in their housings, before assembly. Copper, laminated steel, three phases.

What “15 kW continuous, 22 kW peak” actually means

Two ratings, two entirely different limits. The 15 kW continuous figure is what the machine will sustain indefinitely without cooking itself, and it is set by heat: Class 200 °C enamelled wire to IEC 60317-13 GR 2, four kilograms of copper acting as a thermal reservoir, parallel-strand bundling that doubles current capacity and spreads the heat across thin conductors, and a housing that cools passively. The 22 kW peak is short-term overload for transients, and it is bounded by physics of a different sort — the demagnetisation threshold of the N42 magnets and saturation of the stator iron.

Here is the part that matters more than either number. A generator rating describes what the machine can absorb without damage. It says nothing about what it will produce. That depends entirely on what you connect to the shaft. Maximum speed is 2,000 rpm, efficiency is about 95% at rated load, and it runs bidirectionally — but a modest rotor turning slowly will draw a small fraction of 15 kW out of it, and no amount of generator headroom changes that.

A rating is a ceiling, not a promise. What turns the shaft decides the number you actually get.

We would rather say that plainly than sell one to somebody expecting fifteen kilowatts from a small rotor in light air. The headroom is still worth paying for — a generator run permanently at its limit is the most reliable way to kill a machine early, and this one at a typical few kilowatts is loafing — but headroom and output are not the same thing.

What is inside it

A 12-pole stator with 36 slots, three-phase distributed winding in a fractional-slot configuration for minimal cogging and a clean sinusoidal output. Ninety wires per slot — two parallel strands of forty-five turns, 0.70 mm enamelled copper, the insulation grade used in industrial servomotors and EV traction motors. Four kilograms of copper in total.

The rotor carries 24 NdFeB N42 magnets, bread-shaped, 60 × 25 × 5 mm and nickel-coated — 180 cm³ of magnet in total. They are mounted skewed, which cuts cogging torque by around 80%: smoother torque, easier starting, longer bearing life. The core is not a casting but a stack of 240 individual 0.5 mm silicon-steel laminations built up to 12 cm, about 16 cm in outside diameter, which is what keeps eddy-current losses down. Machining is held to ±0.05 mm, and the unit is EMC compliant to EN 61000-6-3. All in, it weighs 20 kg.

None of that photographs well and none of it appears on a box. It is, however, the entire difference between a generator that is still turning in ten years and one that is not.

Olympia — state capital, county seat of Thurston County, at the head of South Puget Sound.

Where they are going

Olympia is the capital of Washington and the county seat of Thurston County, a city of 55,605 people at the 2020 census anchoring the South Puget Sound region, about fifty miles south-west of Seattle. Its downtown is partly built on filled tideland from the dredging that created the deep-water port, and its climate is warm-summer Mediterranean — dry Julys, and the rain arriving between November and January.

We do not know what these motors are for, and we are not going to invent a story about it. This model goes into electric vehicles, industrial machinery, marine installations, robotics and off-grid power systems, and a port city is a plausible home for most of those. One thing is worth saying regardless: if the intended use is wind, the head of Puget Sound is a sheltered inland waterway, and it is a considerably weaker wind resource than the Washington coast or the Columbia Gorge. That is not a reason against the motor. It is a reason to measure before sizing anything around it.

What it costs, and what it does not include

The motor is $599 on this store as this is published, on the product page, itemised, with nothing held back for the checkout. That buys the machine on its own: generator, housing, shaft. It does not buy a rotor or blades, a mount or a tower, a rectifier, charge controller, inverter or batteries, the wiring between any of them, or the electrical work and permissions that apply where you are. A component sale is honest about being a component.

If you are building something wind-driven around it, one more purchase comes first: an anemometer at $199. Power in the wind goes with the cube of speed, so a site that is 20% slower than you assumed gives roughly half the energy. A season of real measurements at your own address is worth more than any figure we could publish about ours.

Our thanks to the customer in Olympia for the order. Every specification above comes from our own published data for this model and is checkable on the product page; the price is the one on this store on the day of publication. If you are designing around a generator, hold us to all of it.

Crates on the line in our own factory, each packed to the same list.

Where it is going, for anyone picturing the Aegean

Ilioupoli takes its name from Heliopolis — the sun city. It was settled from 1924 by Greek refugees from Asia Minor, and it is now a dense suburb of about 12.7 km², its built-up area continuous with the suburbs around it, with the forested ridge of Hymettus covering its eastern half. That is a very different place from the postcard. It is not a headland, it is not an island, and it is not the open Aegean.

This matters because the wind that reaches a roof in a continuous built-up area has already been through several kilometres of buildings. It arrives slower, more turbulent, and constantly changing direction — and with a forested mountain immediately to the east, the direction it arrives from depends on the day. The etesians, the meltemia, are real: strong dry north winds that blow across the Aegean from roughly mid-May to mid-September. But they are a sea wind, and a suburban rooftop under a ridge sees a considerably rougher, more broken version of whatever is happening offshore.

A suburb is a harder wind site than a cliff. That is not a reason to skip the turbine — it is a reason to pick the right kind.

One thing that does not matter much here: altitude. Ilioupoli climbs the foot of Hymettus, but at a couple of hundred metres the air is only about 2% thinner than at sea level, and power scales directly with air density. It is a rounding error. We mention it only because we made a great deal of the same correction when we wrote about a customer at 1,600 m in South Africa, where it costs about 15%. Here it does not, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

Why a vertical machine for a site like this

A horizontal turbine has to point into the wind to work. In clean, steady air that is an advantage — it is why every large wind farm is horizontal. On a suburban roof, where the wind changes direction every few seconds, the machine spends a meaningful part of its life turning to face air that has already moved on.

A vertical machine has no direction to find. It takes wind from any bearing, which is exactly the property you want where the flow is broken and shifting. It starts turning at 2 m/s with the low-wind blade set — about a third of the cut-in of a typical horizontal machine — which matters on a site whose average is modest and whose good hours are scattered. And it runs at 35–40 dB, quieter than the conversation you are having beneath it. In a neighbourhood where the houses are continuous with each other, noise is not a specification, it is a relationship with the people next door.

Athens at dusk. Ilioupoli sits six kilometres south-east of the centre, under Hymettus.

There are three blade sets, each laser-cut from 1.2 mm high-strength aluminium and matched to a wind profile rather than to a marketing tier. Low-wind blades run from 2 to 20 m/s for a 2 kW peak. Moderate-wind blades run from 4 to 25 m/s for 3.8 kW. High-wind blades run from 5 to 35 m/s for 4.5 kW, in a six-blade configuration built for exposed coastal sites. Choosing the wrong one is the most common way to be disappointed by a small turbine, and for a sheltered suburban roof the answer is usually the low-wind set — the one with the smallest headline number.

What is actually in the crate

The machine going to Athens is an Atlas, and its body is one sealed aluminium housing containing the generator, the built-in IoT charge controller, the display and every connector. There is no second box to find a wall for and no separate enclosure to weatherproof. Weighed on our own workshop scale it read 22.30 kg — a Teknika TCS-K2+R, 300 kg capacity, 50 gram divisions, which is a workshop instrument and not a certified trade one. That is the body alone, without blades or mast, and it is the number your roof structure has to start from.

Mounting flange, cabling, fixings, tools and the manual, packed around the body.

Inside the housing is the same 15 kW continuous-rated motor we put in the Magnum, which at a typical 1 kW output is running at under 7% of its rating — cold, unstressed, and a long way from the limit. The stator is a 12-pole, 36-slot three-phase distributed winding in Class 200 °C enamelled copper to IEC 60317-13, the insulation grade used in industrial servomotors and EV drivetrains. None of that photographs well. All of it is why the machine is still there in ten years.

What it costs on this store, and what it does not cover

It is $1,299 on this store as this is published, and that price includes the built-in IoT charge controller — there is no separate controller to buy, which is the main reason this bill is shorter than the Magnum one. The blade set is chosen to match your site rather than picked off a shelf, so please talk to us before you order rather than guessing from this page: the right set for a sheltered suburban roof is not the one with the largest number on it.

What the price does not buy: a mast or roof mount, the foundation or fixings into your structure, the cable run down to wherever the power is going, batteries and an inverter if you are storing it, and any electrical work, connection agreement or planning permission that applies where you live. None of that is hidden — it is simply site-specific, and anyone quoting you a single all-in figure for a Greek rooftop has not seen your roof.

Before any of it: measure your wind

Every figure above is worthless without one we cannot supply: the wind at your address. Our own published range is 180 to 3,500 kWh a year, and that span is not vagueness — it is the honest width of the answer once you account for site and blade set. Power goes with the cube of wind speed, so two roofs on the same street can differ by a factor of two in speed and eight in energy. In a dense suburb under a ridge, that variation is the rule rather than the exception.

So measure first. An anemometer costs a fraction of a turbine and settles the question inside a season. Then put your own measurements into the calculator on the product page — your wind, your tariff, your roof. For some of you it will say the numbers work comfortably. For others it will say a turbine is the wrong purchase at your address, and we would far rather it told you that before you bought one than after.

Our thanks to the customer in Ilioupoli for the order. Prices are those on this store on the day of publication and are checkable on the product page at any time. The weight came off our own scale and the wind facts are the ones we would want if we were the ones buying. Measure your site — then hold us to every figure above.

Where this is, for anyone picturing it wrong

Kempton Park sits on the Highveld at around 1,600 metres, beside OR Tambo International, on the road network that carries traffic between Johannesburg and Pretoria. It is about 500 km from the sea. If you had a beach in mind, that is the wrong picture — this is high, dry, open country, and it is windy in the way that open country at altitude usually is.

Sandton, Johannesburg — the same province, about twenty kilometres from Kempton Park.

Altitude matters to a turbine, and not in your favour. Air at 1,600 m is roughly 15% less dense than at sea level, and the power in the wind is directly proportional to air density. The same wind speed on the Highveld therefore carries about 15% less energy than it would on the coast. Any output figure you read anywhere — ours included — is quoted at sea-level density unless it says otherwise. It is a small correction, but it is the sort of thing you would rather hear from us now than work out for yourself later.

Thin air costs you about 15% of the energy in the same wind. Nobody puts that on a spec sheet.

What is actually in a TESUP motor

The generator is the part that decides whether a small turbine lasts. Ours is rated 15 kW continuous — considerably more capacity than the machine is ever asked to deliver, which is deliberate, because headroom is what stops a generator cooking itself on the gusts. Inside it: a 24-magnet rotor running NdFeB N42 magnets, four kilograms of pure copper winding, and a silicon-steel laminated stator core rather than a cheap casting that overheats.

The details that photograph badly are the ones that matter. Skewed magnet mounting cuts cogging torque by around 80%, which is what lets a rotor start in light air instead of standing still. The winding uses Class 200 °C enamelled wire to IEC 60317-13 — the insulation grade used in industrial servomotors and EV drivetrains. Machining is held to ±0.05 mm. All of it comes out of our own European factories, where we make over 270 components in house.

The N1 — the road that carries most of what South Africa moves.

What a complete machine costs here

A generator on its own is not a wind turbine. Here is every line of a working one, at the prices on this store as this is published.

That is roughly $79 for each kilowatt of peak output, or about $249 per kilowatt of the rated figure. What it does not buy is a mast, a foundation, cabling, batteries, an inverter, or the electrical work and permissions that apply where you are. None of that is hidden — it is simply site-specific, and anyone quoting you one all-in number has not seen your site.

Before you buy anything: measure your wind

Sunrise over open country. Two sites a street apart can differ by a factor of two.

Every number above is worthless without one we cannot supply: the wind at your address. Power goes with the cube of wind speed, so a modest difference in site is an enormous difference in output — and on the Highveld you have that 15% density correction sitting on top. An anemometer costs a fraction of a turbine and settles the question inside a season.

Then put your own measurements into the calculator on the Magnum page — your wind, your tariff, your roof or your yard. For some of you it will say the numbers work comfortably. For others it will say a turbine is the wrong purchase at your address, and we would far rather it told you that before you bought one than after.

Our thanks to Africa Truck Stop for the order. Prices are those on this store on the day of publication and are checkable on the product page at any time. If you are weighing this up wherever you are, measure first — and then hold us to every figure above.

What it makes, and the wind it takes

A Magnum can put 10 kWh into your system in a single hour. That is not a figure we are nervous about — it is on our own published curve, and you can read it off the chart at the top of this page. What we would rather you took away is the second half of the sentence: the wind that hour needs.

Nine kilowatts at 20 m/s, twelve at 22. Ten therefore lands around 21 m/s — roughly 76 km/h, a Beaufort 9 gale. That is a storm hour, not a Tuesday afternoon. The everyday numbers sit further down the curve: 3.8 kW at 15 m/s, about 2 kW at 12, and the rotor already earning from 6 m/s. Across a year that works out at somewhere between 2,500 and 9,000 kWh, depending entirely on where you put it.

Why the curve climbs so steeply is not marketing, it is the power equation: available wind power scales with the cube of wind speed. Double the wind and there is eight times the energy in it. That is why a turbine's headline figure tells you almost nothing on its own, and why the full curve tells you nearly everything.

Anyone can quote one number. Ask for the whole curve — that is the document that cannot be dressed up.

Why we think it is the most powerful of its kind

The motor inside a Magnum is rated 15 kW continuous — considerably more capacity than the machine is ever asked to deliver. That is deliberate. Headroom is what stops a generator cooking itself on the gusts, and running a generator permanently at its limit is the single most reliable way to kill a small turbine early. Feeding it is a rotor of 4.34 m² swept area on carbon fibre composite blades, driving a 24-magnet rotor with NdFeB N42 magnets and four kilograms of pure copper winding.

The details that do not photograph well are the ones that decide how long it lasts. Skewed magnet mounting, which cuts cogging torque by around 80% and lets the rotor start in light air instead of sitting stalled. Class 200 °C enamelled wire to IEC 60317-13, the insulation grade used in industrial servomotors and EV drivetrains. A silicon-steel laminated stator core rather than a cheap cast one that overheats. Machining held to ±0.05 mm. Put together, the blade aerodynamics reach a power coefficient of 0.45 in good wind, and with the electrical efficiency of that winding the machine converts around 43% of the energy passing through the rotor into electricity — at the top of what a small horizontal-axis turbine can do.

And very probably the most affordable in its class

A specification like that usually arrives with a price to match. Ours does not, and the reason is unglamorous: we make it ourselves. Over 270 components come out of our own European facilities — generators, electronic cards, carbon fibre blades, silicon-steel stator laminations, mounting hardware. There is no chain of distributors between the factory and your roof. That is the whole trick, and it is not one anybody can copy quickly.

Rather than leave you to guess at what a real machine costs, here is every line of it, at the prices on this store as this is published.

Divide that however you find useful: roughly $79 for each kilowatt of peak output, or about $249 per kilowatt of the rated figure. If you already own a controller, take $199 off. The mast is included with your blade set here, so the figure above is a complete installation kit rather than a turbine you still have to find a pole for.

We are not asking you to take our word for either claim, because we are the ones selling it and every manufacturer says this about their own product. So go and compare — but compare properly. Ask for the whole power curve, not a single headline kilowatt. Ask the price of a complete working machine, not the price of whichever part sounds cheapest. Then put the two side by side. Ours are on the product page, itemised, with nothing held back for the checkout. If you find something that genuinely beats it on both counts, we would like to know — that is the sort of thing that changes what we build next.

What a turbine still needs from you

Being confident about the machine means being honest about everything around it. That $947 buys the turbine. Your site supplies the rest: a mast, a foundation or fixings into your structure, cabling down to wherever the power is going, batteries and an inverter if you are storing it, and whatever electrical work and permissions apply where you live. None of it is hidden — it is simply site-specific, and anyone who quotes you one all-in figure has not seen your site.

The mast deserves a paragraph of its own, because it is where most self-builds go wrong. The push on a rotor rises with the square of wind speed, so the 10 kWh hour is also the hour carrying roughly four and a half times the sideways force of a 10 m/s day. If you are making your own pole, spend on diameter before wall thickness: bending stiffness follows the fourth power of diameter, so widening a 50 mm tube to 60 mm at the same 3 mm wall buys about 78% more stiffness for 21% more steel, while doubling that wall to 6 mm buys 66% more for 87% more steel. Height costs you more than either — stiffness falls with the cube of unsupported length — so buy height with guy wires, not optimism. If a mast hums, the answer is a stiffer mast rather than rubber packing, because the noise is resonance and not roughness. And the one dimension you cannot improvise is the fitting: the Magnum head seats on a 37 mm inner diameter at the top of the pole.

Before any of it: measure your wind

Every figure above is worthless without one number we cannot supply: the wind at your address. Two houses on the same street can differ by a factor of two, and because power goes as the cube of speed, a modest difference in site is an enormous difference in output. An anemometer costs a fraction of a turbine and settles the question inside a season.

Then put your own measurements into the calculator on the Magnum page — your wind, your electricity price, your roof. For some of you it will say the numbers work comfortably. For others it will say a turbine is the wrong purchase at your address, and we would far rather it told you that before you bought one than after.

The most powerful of its kind, and very probably the most affordable. We believe both, and we have published the whole curve and itemised every part so you can decide for yourself instead of taking our word for it. Prices are those on this store on the day of publication and are checkable on the product page at any time. That is the only version of a claim like this worth making.

The Atlas body is the part that does the work. The generator, the smart charge controller, the display and every connector sit inside one sealed aluminium housing built for permanent outdoor life. There is no separate control box to find a wall for, and no second enclosure to weatherproof. That is why the figure is what it is: nearly the whole electrical system of a wind turbine, in a single piece you can lift.

What 22.3 kg does not include

The blades. The pole or the mast. The mounting hardware. The Atlas takes swappable blade sets, and which set you choose changes the total. So please do not size a roof bracket or a mast on 22.3 kg — that is the body alone. Your structure has to carry the whole assembly, plus every load the wind puts through it, on the worst day of the year rather than an average one.

One Atlas body on the workshop scale. The reading is 22.30 kg.

Output figures sell turbines. Weight decides where you are allowed to put one.

Why the weight is the first real constraint

Ask a prospective owner about a turbine and they ask about kilowatts. Ask the person who has to fix it to a building and they ask about kilograms, then about where the load lands, then about wind class. A rated output is a promise about good conditions. A weight is a fact your rafters have to live with in every condition, for years.

This is also why we would rather publish the number than be asked for it. If 22.3 kg plus blades is too much for the structure you had in mind, that is far better discovered now than after delivery.

About the scale, because the number should be checkable

It is a Teknika TCS-K2+R platform scale: 300 kg maximum, with a division of 50 grams. So it resolves to the nearest 0.05 kg, and 22.30 is a clean multiple of that. You can read the panel in the photograph above, including the line that says it is not a certified trade instrument. It is a workshop scale, which is exactly what it looks like.

That is why we write about 22.3 kg rather than implying laboratory precision. It is accurate enough to size a mount and honest about its own limits, which is the most any single measurement can offer.

And measure your wind before you buy anything

Weight is the constraint you can check with a tape measure and a structural opinion. Wind is the one nobody can check for you. Two houses on the same street can differ by a factor of two, so any annual output figure we quote is a guess about your roof — and a guess we have an obvious interest in.

So measure first. An anemometer costs a small fraction of a turbine and will tell you within a season whether your site is worth it. Then put your own numbers into the calculator on the Atlas and Magnum pages — your wind, your electricity price, your roof. It will tell some of you that a turbine will not pay for itself where you live, and we would rather it told you that now.

Twenty-two and a bit kilograms is a small fact. But it is the fact that decides whether an installation is a morning's work or a conversation with a structural engineer — and you should have it before you spend anything, not after the pallet arrives.