this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
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That does neatly explain why I never see small ones
I see them from time to time, usually on sailing boats or coastal beach cabins where I presume they can slowly charge a battery over a long time with probably not much power production.
On sailboats? Huh. I was just looking into converting to electric, a lot of them do regenerative charging through the prop.
Yeah, not sure what it powers. Maybe radio battery and if you are sailing you probably have wind at least.
I mean was it actually a windmill generator? I have windmill-looking things on my boat for measuring wind speed and such (they are small). It's just that using the actual sails to pull your boat along, and then using the speed to turn a water turbine on the hull is way more efficient. Especially since there's no meaningful difference between a motor and a generator, apart from which way the power flows.
Edit: also solar. Been waiting for reliable flexible solar panels for the sole purpose of replacing my sails with solar panels. That would be dope as hell.
Seen similar ones on holiday buildings along others with solar panels too though. Aren't the windspeed ones much smaller? These were probably close to 1m diameter.
Yeah the windspeed ones are like. <5cm.
That's kinda wild. Not too crazy, knowing sailing folk damn near every boat that's over a month old has had some weird homebrew modifications done to it. Just seems like not the best plan.