The general ideas in this posting have been spread around in several other postings, some in comments. I’m mostly pulling things together here just to make it easy to find.

I’ve had an interest in Do It Yourself electric power production for, well, many decades. I was always fascinated by electricity and related, and was building radios and motors at about 9 years old. (Those ‘toy motors’ made from a battery, some nails, and a bit of wire). As a natural outgrowth of that comes the notion that a generator and a motor are largely the same thing, just a question of which force is driving whom… Then the ’70s happened. Between the “back to the Earth” folks (yes, I had a subscription to Mother Earth News for a while 😉 and the Arab Oil Embargo encouraging a lot of folks to find “alternatives” and my having an adventure prone…