Circuits to reuse washing machine motors to drive workshop tools

[jdurand]

Great description you found NortonDommi. Those large diameters would clearly generate better than smaller. Most of the home-size wind units are barely alternator size; the real ground-breaker seems being the Honeywell, essentially magnets carried at tips of propeller, many many additional segments. A stack of smart drive pancake units would be serious potential indeed.

To you and jdurand alike, what is the attraction or features of washer motors sought in powering small machines? Treadmills are obvious being compact and variable by DC. I'd surmise washers to be single speed, varied by transmissions or sheave; is that not the case? Clue I haven't unraveled is the extensive wire harness, apparently more than just timing of cycles.

I think it's like computer power supplies, people see them and figure it's something like I need so I'll just use it. Sometimes it's a reasonable fit, sometimes not. When it's not I've seen people go through a lot of trouble to make it fit.

Here in the US I haven't seen brushed motors on anything bigger than a circular saw, drill, or vacuum cleaner. Washing machines, refrigerators, pumps all have induction motors of some sort on them. So, if the motor is the speed you can use and you have the right circuit to drive it (probably just capacitors but may need a start timer), go for it.

Are brush type motors common in 220V/50Hz land? I could see where they might, induction motors start getting big on 50Hz.

example of getting carried away using the wrong thing:
One of the 3D printers our company had was a big delta printer, what did it use? A PC power supply. The company that made these printers had all sorts of issues (PC power supplies are quasi-regulated, they generally only work right if there's a heavy load on the 5V output). They kept going to better and more expensive PC power supplies. When we got one of the printers I tossed the PC power supply before plugging it in and replaced it with a cheap, industrial 12V power supply. Not the slightest problem from that and I could buy 3 of those industrial supplies for one quality PC power supply. Smaller, too.