See your turbine’s day

Numbers tell you what your turbine did. The turbine camera lets you see it.

Through the day, the camera takes regular pictures of your turbine and the sky. On the Camera page in My Wekraft, you can play a whole day back as a short time-lapse.

Each picture comes with the wind speed and power at the moment it was taken. You can watch the weather change and see how your turbine responded.

How it works

A small weatherproof camera fits into the turbine’s electronics: into the body of the Wekraft vertical wind turbine, where it looks out through the front panel, into the charge controller of the Wekraft horizontal wind turbine, and into the Wekraft Wizard. It joins the wind and sun sensors on the same sensor cable through a short Y-cable, so the board and the existing sensors stay as they are. There is nothing else to install.

Your Wekraft controller takes a picture every 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes. You can choose daylight only, and it adds extra pictures when the wind is strong.

In the My Wekraft app, a camera icon at the top of the home screen opens a separate Camera page. There you can:

• play back a day as a short time-lapse, with the wind speed and power for each picture
• go back day by day
• tap “Take a photo now”; the picture arrives within about two minutes

You’re in control

The turbine camera is off until you turn it on and agree in the app. You can turn it off at any time.

You decide how often it takes a picture and whether it works in daylight only. You also choose how long your turbine camera images are kept: 7, 14, 30 or 90 days.

If you want a clean slate sooner, you can delete them all with one tap.

Your privacy

Only you and the people you share your turbine with can see the turbine camera images.

Wekraft support can’t see them either, unless you allow it in the app. That access lasts 7 days. You can stop it at any time, and you can see each time support looked.

These are images from the camera on your turbine. My Wekraft never looks at the photos on your phone.

One request from us: please point the camera at the sky and your turbine, not at people or their homes.

Coming soon

The turbine camera is in testing now, starting with the vertical wind turbine. It will be an option on the Wekraft vertical wind turbine, on the charge controller of the Wekraft horizontal wind turbine and on the Wekraft Wizard. We don’t have a date or a price yet.

Whether you already own a Wekraft vertical or horizontal wind turbine or are thinking about buying one, we’d love to hear from you. Contact Wekraft to register your interest.

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.

Two new customers on the grid.

For thirty years, outside crises, electricity demand in the rich world grew slowly or not at all. That has ended. The International Energy Agency now expects global electricity demand to grow by about 3.6% a year to 2030, roughly half again as fast as the previous decade, and for the first time in a generation it is growing faster than the economy. The agency’s own phrase for it is the age of electricity.

Data centres used about 415 TWh in 2024 and are on course for around 945 TWh by 2030, more than Japan uses today, with AI the main reason. Cooling is the other new customer. Air conditioners and fans already take nearly a fifth of the electricity used in buildings worldwide, and the IEA expects cooling demand to more than triple by 2050 as the number of air conditioners goes from 1.6 billion to 5.6 billion. In hot countries the share of peak demand that is cooling could go from a tenth to nearly half.

Neither of these customers is going away, and both of them arrive at the worst moment: the data centre all day, every day, and the air conditioner on the hottest afternoon of the year, when every other air conditioner on the street is also running.

The supply side takes a decade.

The answers on the supply side are large, slow and contested. A nuclear plant is a ten-to-fifteen-year project and a public argument for every one of those years. A gas plant is faster and dirtier. A new transmission line crosses somebody’s land, and takes years of planning before the first pylon. All of them will be built, some of them should be, and none of them will help a household this winter or next summer. This is not an argument against the grid. It is a timeline.

In the meantime the bill for the new demand lands where it always lands. Prices rise when supply is tight, and the grid is at its tightest exactly when a house needs it most: the heat of a summer afternoon, the dark of a winter evening.

What a house can do in a month.

A household cannot build a power station. It can put a 15 kW continuous-rated motor on a roof or a mast, an Atlas vertical turbine or a Magnum horizontal one, and a set of semi-flexible Flex panels beside it, and start making its own kilowatts before the planning inquiry for the nearest new plant has finished its first hearing. The honest scale matters here: a household turbine does not power a data centre. It powers a house. But a house that powers itself is a house the grid no longer has to, and a million of them is a power station nobody had to build.

We publish what the machine does rather than what we would like it to do. The Atlas reaches 4.5 kW peak with the High-Wind blade set; its curve is 290 W at 8 m/s, 960 W at 12 m/s and 1.85 kW at 15 m/s, quoted at standard air density. The Magnum reaches 12 kW peak. The Flex panel is 460 W. Every figure is on the product page beside a calculator that takes your own wind and sun and tells you what to expect, and when to expect less.

Where the wind is when the heat is.

The two new loads have a shape, and so do the two sources. Cooling peaks on summer afternoons, when the sun is strongest and a panel is at its best. Heating, lighting and the long evenings peak in winter, when the sun is weakest and the wind is strongest. The data centre runs flat, all day and all night, which is exactly the load that neither source alone can cover and that both together, through a battery, can.

This is why we build both halves. The sun sets every day, everywhere, without exception. The wind keeps different hours. A household system that owns both is awake for the whole day and the whole year, and it is the only kind we recommend to anybody who asks us for independence rather than a discount.

What independence buys.

Three things, in order of how often customers mention them. Price insulation: every kilowatt-hour you make is one you do not buy at the price the grid sets on its worst afternoon. Outage insurance: a battery that a turbine keeps topped up is a house that keeps its lights, its fridge and its router through the evening the substation could not. And the quiet one, which people mention last and mean most: every kilowatt-hour made on the roof is one that was not made by burning something, or by splitting something, on your behalf.

Energy independence used to be an ideology. Three years of price shocks and a warming calendar have turned it into arithmetic, and arithmetic is the only argument we have ever made.

The grid is about to get busier. Your roof does not have to wait for it.

The part most companies leave out.

Measure the site first. If your roof sits deep in a dense old city, walled in on four sides, do not buy a turbine from us; buy the panel. If you are inland with no real wind, put an anemometer up for a month before you put a machine up for twenty years. If you have a strong flat roof, rigid glass may serve you better than semi-flexible, and we will say so. A turbine on the wrong site is a slow way to learn about wind, and we would rather lose the order than teach the lesson.

Independence is worth having only if it is real. The calculator on the product page is there so that yours is.

The grid takes a decade.
A roof takes a month.
Both halves of the day, and the whole of the year.

The electricity-demand, data-centre and cooling figures are from the International Energy Agency: the Electricity 2026 report (demand growth of about 3.6% a year to 2030), the Energy and AI report of April 2025 (data centres at about 415 TWh in 2024 and around 945 TWh in 2030), and The Future of Cooling and the IEA’s space-cooling analysis (cooling as nearly 20% of building electricity, demand more than tripling by 2050, air conditioners from 1.6 billion to 5.6 billion). The turbine and panel ratings, the power-curve figures and the blade ranges are our own published product-page specifications. The statements about nuclear, gas and transmission timelines are general observations about infrastructure planning, not claims about any specific project. The photographs, including the rooftop at the top of this page, are our own, taken at our own factories, warehouses and installations.

Fifty years of large machines, then a small one.

The company is young. The engineering is not. Wekraft was established in London in 2018, but the expertise runs back to 1974, through hydroelectric, wind and solar power plants totalling more than 1,000 MW of installed capacity. Utility scale, national scale, the kind of project where a bearing that fails early is a headline rather than a warranty claim.

Most companies in small wind began with a small turbine and worked outward. We spent half a century building the large ones and then brought that discipline down to something that fits on a roof. The scale changed. The standards did not. A 15 kW continuous-rated motor running a household turbine at under 7% of its rating is not an accident of sizing; it is what happens when people who used to specify megawatts are asked to specify a kilowatt.

Decision one: build both halves of the day.

Almost every company in small-scale renewables makes one thing. Wind companies make turbines and point at somebody else’s panel. Panel companies make panels and have never machined a blade. Two industries, one customer, nothing shared. We decided early that a household does not buy a turbine or a panel; it buys a battery that stays charged, and the sun and the wind keep different hours. The sun sets every day, everywhere, without exception. The wind blows hardest in the months the sun is weakest. Build only one half and you have built half a day.

So we build both: the Atlas vertical turbine and the Magnum horizontal turbine on one side, and the semi-flexible Flex panel on the other. It bends to the surface, carries no frame and weighs a fraction of glass, which is why it goes on the roofs, boats, vans and cabins where a rigid panel cannot. Building both halves is also why we can tell a customer which one they actually need, and sometimes that the honest answer is the panel alone, or rigid glass from somebody else.

Decision two: cut it ourselves.

Blade sets are laser-cut in our own building, from 1.2 mm high-strength aluminium, on our own fibre laser. Three profiles come off the same stock on the same bed: 2 to 20 m/s, 4 to 25 m/s, and a six-blade set for 5 to 35 m/s built for exposed coastal sites. Owning the machine means owning the shape. 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 somebody else cuts your parts you pay for four things: the part, their margin, the freight and the wait, and you accept their minimum order, which is how a company ends up carrying four hundred of something on a shelf. Cutting in-house removes the margin, removes the freight, removes the minimum and shortens the wait from weeks to that afternoon. It is not a strategy. It is arithmetic, and it is most of the reason a household turbine from us costs what it does. Manufacturing runs mainly in Slovakia and London, with Turkey as well, and it is the reason we could hold our prices this year while aluminium climbed on the London Metal Exchange.

Decision three: go to every country properly, or not at all.

Global is not a word you earn by shipping abroad. We run 38 retail storefronts in 34 countries plus a rest-of-world store, in 23 languages, each with its own currency, its own tax treatment, its own shipping and its own terms, and every one mirrored again for wholesale. A customer in Osaka, in Rio, in Riyadh and in Trégunc each opens a page written for them and priced for them, and none of them can tell which one we built first.

The shipping side is less romantic and matters more. Since 2018 more than 100,000 orders have left us, from a single blade set to a full turbine, and in the last two and a half years alone they have gone to 75 countries, carried by DHL and UPS to the customer’s door, every carton labelled individually rather than by the pallet so that a single unit can be traced after it has been split off a delivery. Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States are the largest markets; Turkey, Spain, Italy and Portugal follow. It is the largest household wind turbine installation footprint in the world, and it is why we use the word leader.

The part most companies leave out.

Leading a market is not the same as selling to everyone in it. If your roof sits deep in a dense old city, walled in on four sides, do not buy a turbine from us; buy the panel. If you are inland with no real wind, measure first, then decide. If you have a strong flat roof that will carry the weight, buy rigid glass instead of semi-flexible, because for that job it is the better panel. We can say all of that because we build both halves and because a customer who was told the truth comes back.

It is the same reason we print the air density beside the power curve, publish a 2 m/s start-up speed and then say it is a fair-weather number, and tell you that a photograph of ten finished units is ten finished units and not a promise about your delivery date. Number one is a position you keep by being the company people can check.

Fifty years of engineering. Both halves of the day. Cut in our own building. Sent to 75 countries. That is the whole method.

What comes next.

A machine that runs is an asset. In a year the laser will be an unremarkable thing in the corner of a workshop, covered in swarf, with somebody’s coffee on the control cabinet, and the only trace of it will be a price that did not go up. That is what growth looks like from inside a factory: not a launch, but a bill of materials that gets a little shorter every quarter, and a map of deliveries that gets a little denser.

The mission has not changed since London: to be the world’s leading provider of household clean energy products, at the best possible price, for everyone. We are number one because we started there and kept checking our own claims. We intend to stay that way the same way.

Anyone can sell you a machine.
Only a company that builds both halves can tell you which one you need.
That is how you become number one, and how you stay it.

The founding dates, the 1974 lineage and the 1,000 MW figure are our own company history as published on our corporate page. The storefront, country and language counts are drawn from our own store configuration and can be checked against the store switcher at the top of this page. The order figure is our own company record since 2018 and includes small parts and accessories as well as turbines and panels; the countries-shipped figure is a count from our order records from February 2024 to September 2026. The product ratings, blade ranges and per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications. “Number one” and “largest installation footprint” are our own assessment of the household wind turbine market and are not a statement by any independent body. The photographs are our own, taken in our own factories and warehouses.

Where the wind comes from.

Niigata faces north-west, across the Sea of Japan towards the continent. In winter the pressure pattern over Asia sends cold, dry air out of Siberia and across that water. The sea is warmer than the air, so the air fills with moisture; then it meets the mountains that run down the spine of Honshu, is forced upward, and lets go. The Niigata side of those mountains gets the snow. The Tokyo side, a short train ride away, gets the sunshine.

The same pattern is why the wind here is a winter wind. The north-westerly comes in off the sea steadily and hard from December to February, exactly when the days are shortest and a solar panel under half a metre of snow is producing nothing at all. A house in Niigata that wants to make its own electricity through the winter needs something that works in the dark and in the cold. That is the whole case for putting a turbine next to the panels rather than instead of them.

What cold air is worth.

A wind turbine does not make power from wind speed alone. It makes it from the mass of air passing through the rotor, and cold air is heavier. Our published power curve is quoted at the standard air density of 1.225 kg/m³, which is sea level at 15 °C. Niigata’s coast in January sits close to sea level and close to freezing. At 0 °C the same wind carries about 5% more mass than the curve assumes; at −5 °C, about 7% more. A winter gust that would read 960 W on the curve at 12 m/s is worth a little over 1 kW in Niigata air.

That is a small bonus, and we would rather state it precisely than let it grow in the retelling. The larger point is that the wind is there at all, in the months when it is needed, on a coast where the sea keeps the air moving.

What snow does to a machine.

Snow country earns its name. Towns in the Niigata hills routinely measure their winter snow in metres, not centimetres, and the houses are built for it: steep roofs, raised entrances, heated pavements in the town centres. A turbine going there has to be built for it too.

The Atlas is a vertical-axis machine. It does not have to turn to face a wind that swings round the compass in a storm, and it has no tail to be loaded up with ice. Its windings carry Class 200 °C insulation (IEC 60317-13 GR 2), which is a thermal margin the machine will never use in Niigata but which says something about how it is made. The body is aluminium, which does not care about salt from the sea or meltwater from the roof.

The honest caveat is start-up. We publish a 2 m/s start-up speed and it is a fair-weather number. Bearing grease stiffens as it cools, and a still, freezing morning wants more than 2 m/s to break the rotor away from standstill. In Niigata that hardly matters, because a still morning on that coast in January is the exception, but we would rather say it than have an owner discover it.

The mountain takes the snow. The sea sends the wind. A house in between can use both.

The blade set decides the winter.

An Atlas is ordered as a body and a blade set, and the set is the decision that matters. Low-wind blades run from 2 to 20 m/s and must come off before sustained winds above 20 m/s. Moderate-wind blades run 4 to 25 m/s. High-wind blades run 5 to 35 m/s on six blades with a smaller swept area, and that is the set the 4.5 kW peak belongs to.

On a coast that sees winter gales off the sea, the choice is between the blades that flatter the average and the blades that survive the storm. We say the same thing to every customer: choose the set for the worst wind your site sees, not the mean, and let the quiet days take care of themselves.

Rice, snow and a pallet from Europe.

Niigata grows more rice than any other prefecture in Japan, and the terraces in the photograph at the top of this page are the reason it can: the same snow that buries the villages in January melts into the paddies in April. It is a landscape that has always run on what the weather delivers for free. A small turbine on a house there is not a novelty. It is the same idea, with copper in it.

The Atlas and its blades are being packed at our factory in Europe now, each carton labelled individually, and will cross a good deal of sea of their own on the way. When they arrive, the winter wind will already be waiting.

Snow country.
Winter wind.
Atlas, on its way.

The power-curve figures, the 2 m/s start-up speed, the three blade ranges, the 4.5 kW peak system output, the Class 200 °C wire grade (IEC 60317-13 GR 2) and the per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications and can be read there. The cold-air figures are the ideal gas law applied at constant pressure: air at 0 °C is about 5.5% denser than at 15 °C, and at −5 °C about 7.5% denser. The description of Niigata’s winter climate, snowfall and rice production is general geographic knowledge. The order is described only by prefecture and product; no customer, address or installation is named or shown. Photographs: Hoshitoge rice terraces, Tokamachi, by Fumihiko Ueno via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, cropped; Sasagawa Nagare coast, Yuzawa ski slope and Minamiuonuma morning licensed via Adobe Stock; the Atlas photograph is our own.

Why a ship wants a wind turbine at all.

A ship at anchor still has a hotel load: lighting, navigation electronics, communications, pumps, battery banks that must not go flat. That load is normally carried by a diesel generator idling for hours at a fraction of its rating, which is the least efficient thing a diesel can do. A small wind turbine feeding the battery bank takes hours off the generator, and every hour off the generator is fuel not burned and maintenance not booked.

Under way, the physics get better, not worse. The rotor does not see the true wind; it sees the apparent wind, which is the true wind plus the ship’s own motion. A vessel making 12 knots into a 10-knot headwind puts roughly 22 knots — about 11 m/s — across the rotor. On our published curve that is close to the 960 W we quote at 12 m/s, from a breeze that on land would barely turn a flag.

That is why the same machine we sell for a farmhouse roof ends up on a supply vessel, a patrol boat, a survey ship or a platform tender. The load is the same shape — a battery bank that must stay up — and the wind is more reliable at sea than almost anywhere on land.

What the sea does to a machine.

Salt is the first enemy. Spray reaches every surface, dries, and leaves a conductive crust that finds its way into anything that is not sealed. The second is vibration: a ship’s structure hums at the engine’s frequency for weeks at a time, and a fastener that would hold for twenty years on a chimney will walk loose in a season on a mast. The third is motion itself. The turbine is never level, the wind never comes from one direction for long, and the rotor is asked to start, stop and yaw thousands of times more often than it would on land.

A turbine that goes to sea therefore needs a body that does not corrode, fasteners that do not loosen, a generator that is sealed rather than merely covered, an electrical brake that can hold the rotor in a gale, and a blade set chosen for the worst wind rather than the average one. Our High-Wind blade set runs 5–35 m/s on six blades with a smaller swept area, and that is the set we recommend for anything that lives on the water.

None of that is exotic. It is the ordinary discipline of building for the wrong conditions on purpose, and it is the same discipline that keeps a rooftop machine alive through a coastal winter.

What a fleet asks before it buys.

A homeowner asks what a turbine does. A shipping line, an oil major or a navy asks how you know. Every figure has to arrive attached to a standard, a test or a document with a number on it, and a fleet engineer is not going to take our word for a power curve. The useful thing about being asked is that it forces a supplier to separate what it can evidence from what it merely believes.

Each line is a published specification with a source, not an adjective. That is the only kind of claim a fleet buyer can act on, and the only kind we are willing to make.

The curve, and what it assumes.

The Atlas reaches 4.5 kW peak system output with the High-Wind blade set. The published curve is 290 W at 8 m/s, 960 W at 12 m/s, 1.85 kW at 15 m/s, 2.15 kW at 18 m/s, 3.8 kW at 25 m/s and 4.5 kW at 35 m/s. It is quoted at the standard air density of 1.225 kg/m³, sea level and 15 °C — which, for once, is exactly where a ship lives. A cold sea will beat the figure slightly, because cold air is denser. A tropical one will fall a little short.

The published 2 m/s start-up speed is a fair-weather number. Bearing grease stiffens as it cools, and a still, freezing morning on deck will want more than that to break the rotor away from standstill. We say so because a fleet engineer will find out anyway, and we would rather be the ones who told them.

A rooftop asks a turbine to work. A ship asks it to survive. We build for the second, and sell it to both.

What this page is not.

It is not a statement by anybody but us. The customers named above are our own account of our commercial relationships; none of them has reviewed this page, approved it, or endorsed Wekraft, and armed forces do not endorse commercial products as a matter of policy. No vessel, unit, order, installation or contract is named or described here, and we have not reproduced anyone’s seal or insignia.

The ship photographs at the top of this page are licensed stock images. The photograph of warships within the article is a public-domain image released by the US Navy; its appearance does not imply or constitute endorsement by the US Navy, the US government or any armed service. None of the photographs depicts any customer installation, vessel under contract, or personnel of ours.

A homeowner asks what it does.
A fleet asks how you know.
Every figure on this page has a source, and the source is our own product page.

The 15 kW continuous motor rating, the 4.5 kW peak system output, the power-curve figures, the 2 m/s start-up speed, the three blade ranges, the Class 200 °C wire grade (IEC 60317-13 GR 2), the CE and UL certification, the European manufacture and the per-unit labelling are our own published product-page specifications and can be read there. The apparent-wind example is arithmetic: 12 knots of ship speed plus 10 knots of headwind is 22 knots, or about 11.3 m/s. The air-density figures are from the International Standard Atmosphere. The customers named in the opening line are our own account of our commercial relationships and not a statement made by, or on behalf of, those companies or any armed service. Header photographs: licensed via Adobe Stock. Warship photograph within the article: US Navy, public domain (070318-N-HX866-077).

What a schedule actually is.

A blackout schedule is not a blackout. It is a timetable. Households are put into groups, and each group is told which hours it will have electricity and which hours it will not. When the grid is holding, the timetable is followed and you can plan around it — cook when the power is on, charge everything, fill containers with water. When the grid is hit, the timetable stops meaning anything and the outage becomes an emergency one, which is the kind you cannot plan around at all.

In December 2025 the UN’s human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine reported that most regions were facing scheduled rolling cuts of up to sixteen hours a day, and that after one series of strikes, emergency outages in some areas ran past thirty-six hours. This summer has been easier: in June, the head of Ukraine’s grid operator said the country could expect emergency cuts of up to about five hours a day through July and August. Both of those are real numbers from named sources, and neither of them is a forecast for the coming winter, which nobody can give honestly.

Each of the three figures with its source and its date attached, because presenting the winter numbers as current would be the easiest mistake in the whole piece.

What a small turbine will not do.

This section comes before the other one deliberately. A roof-mounted turbine is a few hundred watts to a few kilowatts in good wind. That is not a generator, and treating it as one gets people hurt.

It will not heat a home. Electric heating is measured in kilowatts held for hours, and no small wind turbine on a domestic roof will carry that in winter. It will not run an electric cooker, an immersion heater or a washing machine at will. It is not a substitute for a hospital, clinic or shelter generator, and anyone specifying power for those should be talking to a diesel supplier, not to us. It also cannot be relied on to produce on any particular day: wind is not a schedule either, and there are calm weeks in winter.

And there is a practical limit that has nothing to do with electricity. Most people living under a schedule live in apartment blocks, where the roof is not theirs, the mounting is not theirs to decide, and a mast on a residential building is a structural and legal question before it is an energy one. This is realistically a thing for houses, not for flats.

A second source does not fix a grid. It changes what a household can still do while the grid is down.

What it will do.

The useful shape is not turbine-to-appliance. It is turbine-to-battery, and battery-to-the-few-things-that-matter. A small wind turbine trickling into a battery bank over a long windy night is doing something a solar panel cannot do at that hour: it is refilling the store while everyone is asleep and the grid is off.

What that store then runs is the modest list: lights, phones and a router, a water pump, a fridge cycling on and off, a laptop, and the charger for whatever else the household depends on. None of that is impressive on a specification sheet. All of it is the difference between an evening that works and an evening that does not.

The wiring is the whole argument. The same turbine is a disappointment on the top row and quietly useful on the bottom one.

Why wind, specifically, in winter.

This is the one argument that genuinely transfers, and it is worth stating precisely rather than generously. Solar has a season; wind mostly does not. In a typical year at Kyiv the December sun delivers about eight per cent of what the July sun delivers, while the wind’s own quietest month is July and even that carries about a third of the energy of its windiest. Wind is not at its best in midwinter — March is windier — but it does not collapse in midwinter either, and sunlight does. A household running on one source has a bad month. A household running on two sources has a bad week, because the two do not fail at the same time.

Checked rather than asserted. February is a genuinely calm month at Kyiv and the chart shows that too, which is the point of drawing it from data instead of from the argument we wanted to make.

That is the same point made in every other post on this blog, and it is not a Ukraine argument at all. It just matters more where the grid is being attacked than where it is merely expensive.

What we are not going to do.

We are not going to publish a customer’s story. We have orders from Ukraine, and every one of them comes with a name, a street and a town attached. Publishing that a particular address has an independent power source is not a testimonial, it is targeting information, and no amount of goodwill makes it safe. Nobody will be named here, ever.

We are not going to run a countdown, a war-themed discount or an urgency campaign. And we are not going to tell you a turbine keeps anybody safe. It runs a light and a router for a few hours. That is worth having and it is not worth exaggerating.

If you are in Ukraine and want to work out whether any of this applies to your building, the useful thing to send us is your situation — house or flat, roof or ground, what you actually need to keep running — and we will tell you honestly if the answer is no. It often is.

The honest version of this is small and dull: a second source, a battery, and a shorter list of things that stop working.
Anyone selling you more than that, on this subject, is selling you something else.

The sixteen-hour and thirty-six-hour figures are from the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, published 12 December 2025, and describe last winter rather than the present day. The five-hour figure for July and August 2026 is from Vitaliy Zaichenko, chief executive of Ukrenergo, in an interview with RBC-Ukraine published 25 June 2026. We have given no forecast for the coming winter because we have no basis for one. No customer is named here, no order is described, and no location of any installation is published. The map at the top shows Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders, Crimea included; the public-domain Natural Earth basemap we drew it from does not, so we corrected it, and we say so rather than leave a border quietly redrawn either way. It shows no front line, because we have no source for one worth putting on a page. The monthly sun-and-wind chart is built from the European Commission Joint Research Centre’s PVGIS v5.2 typical meteorological year for Kyiv, with radiation from PVGIS-SARAH2 and wind from ERA5, drawn from 2005 to 2020; wind is plotted as the mean cube of the ten-metre wind speed, which is the energy available in the wind and not the output of any particular turbine, and a typical year composes each month from a different real year. Turbine output depends entirely on the wind at your own site and the figures on our product pages are our own published data.

What you are looking at, in order.

The first shot is a screen, not a machine, and that is where every part actually starts. The red and yellow shapes are the parts, laid out on a sheet. Arranging them so that as little steel as possible is left over is called nesting, and it is the least glamorous cost saving in manufacturing: the same parts, the same machine, the same minutes, and a smaller bill for material because somebody spent ten minutes packing the drawing tighter.

Then the bed. The black ridged strips the sheet rests on are slats, and they are consumable — the beam cuts into them a little every time, and eventually they get replaced. The sheet sits on top and does not move. The head moves.

Then the part that is worth watching twice: the sheet after the cut, with the parts still sitting in their own outlines, and the slats underneath glowing orange. That glow is the heat that went into the steel and did not leave with the part. It is also the reason the shot exists — a cut edge photographs as an ordinary line five minutes later, and looks like this for about thirty seconds.

The next bench along. Parts cut on that machine end up inside these.

The boring part is the whole point.

Nothing in that clip is dramatic, and that is the argument. When somebody else cuts your parts you pay for four things: the part, their margin, the freight, and the wait. You also accept their minimum order, which is how you end up buying five hundred of something because that is the smallest run they will start, and carrying the other four hundred and twenty on a shelf until you need them.

Cutting them here removes the margin, removes the freight, removes the minimum order, and shortens the wait from weeks to that afternoon. It is not a clever strategy, it is arithmetic, and it is most of the reason a home wind turbine from us costs what it does. The longer version of that argument, including the parts we still buy from people who make them better than we would, is in what buying a machine actually buys you.

A machine that runs is an asset. A machine that runs one day a week is a more expensive way of buying the part.

What the video does not show you.

It does not show the invoice, the maintenance contract, the extraction filters, the compressed air, or the operator who had to be trained before any of it produced a usable part. It does not show the days the machine sits still. A laser only beats outsourcing at volume, and the honest version of this post says so: we buy machines when the work is already there, not to have something impressive to film.

It also does not show quality control, which is the half of the job that happens after the cutting. A part being the right shape on the day it was made proves very little. Somebody has to keep proving it, on their own equipment, on a routine, at a cost nobody enjoys paying.

The short version.

Same footage, cut for a phone, if that is where you would rather watch it.

In a year that machine will be an unremarkable thing in the corner of a workshop, covered in swarf, with somebody’s coffee on the control cabinet.
The only trace of it will be a price that did not go up.

The footage is our own, filmed at our own factory on an ordinary production run, and is unedited apart from trimming, stabilisation and colour correction. The machine is a BODOR fibre laser that has been in service for about two years. No customer is named here and no order details are published. We have given no figure for what the machine cost or what it saves, because we could not show you the calculation — and a number you cannot check is worth nothing. Turbine specifications referenced are our own published data and are checkable on the product page.

Companies announce factories. The announcement is the easy part — a ribbon, a press release, a photograph of people in high-visibility vests. What actually changes what a turbine costs is duller than that, and it looks like this: one machine at a time, bought and installed in a workshop we own and run ourselves, taking one more step of the build in-house.

A lathe is not an announcement.

A CNC lathe turns metal. A part spins, a cutting tool moves against it under computer control, and what comes off is round, concentric and the same every time. The word that matters there is every. A skilled machinist can make one excellent part by hand. A program makes the two hundredth part identical to the first, on a Friday afternoon, by an operator who was trained last month.

In a wind turbine, that means the round things everything else bolts to: shafts, hubs, bearing seats, housings, the mating faces that decide whether a rotor runs true or shakes itself loose over a winter. These are not glamorous parts. They are the ones that determine whether the glamorous parts survive.

Stator cores, stacked and waiting. Parts we cut ourselves are parts we do not queue for.

Every step you bring in-house is a price you stop paying.

When somebody else makes a part for you, you pay for four things: the part, their margin, the freight, and the wait. You also accept their minimum order quantity, which means you buy five hundred of something because that is the smallest number they will run — and you carry the other four hundred and twenty on a shelf until you need them.

Bringing the step in-house removes the margin, removes the freight, removes the minimum order, and shortens the wait from weeks to the same afternoon. That is not a clever strategy. It is arithmetic, and it is the entire reason our prices are what they are.

A machine only pays for itself if it runs. One that works a day a week is more expensive than buying the part.

That is the honest catch, and we would rather say it than have you assume we have not thought about it. A lathe is capital sitting on a floor. It needs an operator who knows what he is doing, tooling that wears out, maintenance nobody enjoys paying for, and — above all — enough work to keep it turning. Buying machinery is only cheaper than outsourcing at volume. We buy it when the volume is already there, not to look industrial in photographs.

The volume that justifies the machine. Generators in housings, before assembly.

Owning the machine means owning the fault.

This is the part that gets left out of most manufacturing pages, and it is the part we care about most. When a supplier makes your part, a defect is a negotiation: emails, photographs, a credit note, a replacement in six weeks, and a customer who is still waiting. When you make it, there is nobody to write to. It is yours. You stop the line, you find out why, and you fix the process rather than the paperwork.

That is a harder way to run a company and a better one to buy from. It also only works if you measure. A machine that holds a tolerance is worth nothing unless somebody checks that it still is — which is its own equipment, its own routine, and its own cost.

Cutting the part is half the job. Proving it is still right is the other half.

What “local manufacturing” honestly does, and does not, mean.

Local manufacturing has become a marketing word, so here is what it does in practice. It shortens the distance between where a part is made and where it is needed. That means less freight, fewer border crossings, shorter lead times, and stock sitting nearer the person who ordered it. When a household wind turbine reaches you in days rather than months, that is why.

Here is what it does not mean. It does not make the product better on its own. A well-run factory a long way away will beat a badly-run one down the road, every time, and we are not going to pretend geography is a substitute for engineering. Proximity buys you speed and cost. Quality you have to build separately, and then keep proving.

And what we still do not make ourselves.

Nobody makes everything, and any manufacturer who tells you otherwise is being generous with the word “make”. We do not smelt aluminium. We do not draw copper wire, grow silicon, or wind our own bearings. We buy magnets, bearings, fasteners, cable and electronic components from people who are better at making them than we would ever be, and we would rather buy a good bearing than build a bad one.

What we do ourselves is the part where the design lives: cutting, forming, machining, winding, coating, assembly and test. That is where a turbine stops being a pile of components and starts being a machine that has to survive a gale on somebody's roof. It is also, not coincidentally, where the cost and the blame both sit.

The end of the line, which is the only place the argument can be checked.

The machine before this one, a laser cutter, two years in and entirely unremarkable. That is what success looks like here.

In a year that lathe will be an unremarkable thing in the corner of a workshop, covered in swarf, with somebody's coffee on the control cabinet.
The only trace of it will be a price that did not go up.

The factory described here is owned and operated by Wekraft; the machine is our own purchase, and every photograph on this page is of our own equipment, our own production and our own shipments. Wekraft has been in operation since 2018. No customer is named here, no supplier is named, and no order detail is published. We have not put a figure on what the machine cost or what it saves, because we would not be able to show you the workings — and a number you cannot check is worth nothing. The turbine specification referred to is our published data and is checkable on the product page.

What does tell you something is a long series of measurements taken the same way for a very long time. The Met Office keeps one, going back to 1884, and published its latest reading of it in July 2026. It says something more interesting than “Britain is getting hotter”, and the interesting part is not the part that makes headlines.

The warning that prompted this piece — and the five clear days behind it. Warning details: Met Office, redrawn rather than reproduced.

One warning is weather. A century of records is climate.

2025 was the warmest year in the UK series that begins in 1884. Four of the last five years sit in the top five. The most recent decade, 2016–2025, ran 0.51 °C above the 1991–2020 average and 1.33 °C above 1961–1990, and the UK has been warming at roughly 0.25 °C per decade since the 1980s.

A single record year proves very little on its own; records happen. What is harder to argue with is that they stopped being rare. When the warmest year in a 140-year series keeps arriving, and the runners-up are all recent, the series itself has moved.

Content supplied by the Met Office — State of the UK Climate 2025, published July 2026.

The winters got wetter. Then the summer ran dry.

Across 2016–2025 the winter half-year, October to March, was 3% wetter than the 1991–2020 average and 13% wetter than 1961–1990. Very wet winter months — ones with twice the 1961–1990 average rainfall — have roughly doubled in frequency.

And then, in the same decade, the total flow of England's rivers between March and August 2025 was the second lowest in a record starting in 1961. Lower than every major summer drought since, apart from 1976.

Both of those are true at once. The signal is not simply warmer, or wetter. It is less predictable.

That is the sentence worth taking away, and it is a duller one than the headlines. A country can be getting wetter in winter and running its rivers dry in summer in the same ten years, because what is changing is the distribution, not just the average. Planning around an average is exactly what stops working.

Blossom in London in early March. Not proof of anything on its own — but this is what a shifting distribution looks like from a pavement.

And this year, the Pacific has a say.

There is one more thing sitting over this particular year. The Met Office has declared an El Niño for 2026, and current guidance is that it will be a very strong one, with sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific running more than 2 °C above normal.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean for Britain, because it is routinely overstated. El Niño is a Pacific phenomenon, and its effect on UK weather is indirect. It does not deliver a thunderstorm to Nottingham on a Wednesday in August. What it does is shift the odds for the months that follow: a higher chance of a milder, wetter and windier autumn and early winter.

Set that against the summer just gone, which was hot and dry — ten days above 35 °C in 2026, three of them reaching 37 °C. A parched summer followed by a forecast of a wetter, windier autumn is the same pattern as the rest of this page, arriving inside a single year rather than across a decade.

And it points at the same conclusion. If the coming autumn and winter are likelier than usual to be wet and windy, that is precisely the half of the year when a solar roof gives you least and a turbine gives you most.

Frost is disappearing, and that changes what a house does.

Two of the clearest numbers in the report are about cold, not heat. Compared with 1961–1990, the most recent decade has had less than half as many icing days — days that never rise above freezing — and hard frosts, below −8 °C, have fallen by a factor of more than four. At the other end, Greater London has had more than four times as many days above 30 °C and nights above 18 °C.

For a household that is not an abstraction. It is less heating in some winters, more cooling in some summers, and a demand curve that no longer looks like the one your house was designed around. We are not going to tell you whether that is good or bad for your bills, because it depends entirely on your house — but it does mean the shape of what you use is moving, not just the total.

Content supplied by the Met Office — State of the UK Climate 2025.

Sea level is the measurement that does not argue back.

Temperature records invite debate about instruments and station moves. Tide gauges are harder to talk your way around. UK sea level has risen by about 20.1 cm since 1901, with a likely range of 16.6 to 23.6 cm, and roughly two thirds of that has happened in the last three decades — 13.9 cm of it between 1993 and 2025 alone. The rate is increasing.

That matters to anyone on a coast, because sea level is the baseline a storm surge is added to. The same storm arriving on a higher sea reaches further inland. If you live near the water and you are choosing where to put anything — a turbine, a heat pump, a consumer unit — that is the number to think about, not the forecast for Tuesday.

Every centimetre of sea level rise arrives here first, and only later on the forecast.

So what does a turbine on your roof actually do about this?

Nothing measurable. We will not pretend otherwise. One household wind turbine does not move a national emissions figure, and if reversing climate change were the only reason you were considering one, you would be better off spending the money on insulation and voting.

What it does is narrower and more useful. If the thing that is changing is reliability rather than average, then the sensible household response is not a bigger version of one source — it is a second one that fails at different times. In Britain the windy half of the year runs roughly October to March, which is exactly the half that is getting wetter and stormier, and exactly when the days are shortest and a solar roof produces least. The two do not fail together, and that is the whole argument.

The caveats are the same ones we give everybody. A windy country is not a windy garden: the national maps say very little about the lee of your neighbour's house. Measure your own site through a windy season before you buy anything, from us or from anyone. Know how to brake the machine before a front arrives. And check the mounting every autumn, because the winters in that dataset are the ones getting wetter and windier.

A national wind map says almost nothing about the gap between two buildings, or the lee of a hedge in Devon.

The honest summary of British weather is not that it is getting worse. It is that it is getting harder to plan around.
Everything above is an argument for not depending on one thing.

Every climate figure on this page — the 1884 series, 2025 as its warmest year, 0.51 °C and 1.33 °C for 2016–2025, 0.25 °C per decade, winters 3% and 13% wetter, icing days and hard frosts, the London heat counts, English river flows for March–August 2025, and sea level at 13.9 cm since 1993 and about 20.1 cm since 1901 — is published by the Met Office in State of the UK Climate 2025 (Kendon et al., International Journal of Climatology, July 2026). The El Niño declaration for 2026, its expected strength, and the description of its UK effect as indirect and weighted towards autumn and early winter are also the Met Office's, as are the 2026 summer temperature counts. We have not attributed any single storm, warning or dry summer to climate change, because a single event cannot be attributed that way from a report like this one. The turbine specification referred to is our own published data and is checkable on the product page. No customer is named here.