The best performing turbine blades the home builder could make are carved timber blades. With timber you can achieve a near perfect set of blades, but the process is very labour intensive and requires some timber working skills. Timber is a very good blade material, its flexible and durable, to find out how more about hand carving timber blades visit Hugh's web site.

There has been some development in using large diameter PVC pipe as blade material. By cutting a PVC pipe lengthways and reshaping the leading and trailing edge with a file, you can achieve a near perfect blade profile, and the process is so simple you could make a complete set of blades is an hour. You would need some large diameter thick wall pipe, 250mm diameter and 10mm wall thickness. A concern it that PVC is a bit of an unknown for durability. UV light will weaken the PVC and it may shatter, sending sharp PVC splinters in all directions, so a safe operating life of 2 years or less is expected. .

You can download a blade calculator here. Its an excell spreadsheet so you will need to have Excell installed ( part of MS Office ). The formulae used is based on the work of others, so I cant guarantee its accuracy.

You can also download a blade calculator from Warlock's site.