Use Your Bike as a Backup to Your Backup Power Supply
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
They're doing the trip from the tip of South America all the way to Los Angeles on a pair of prototype electric Harley Davidsons. The support crew is in a pair of prototype Rivian pickup trucks.
The Rivians have a "tow to recharge" mode that they've used several times already in the first half dozen episodes.
The show is great and I'm as fascinated by their dedication to do the trip on electric bikes (the first parts of the trip were in freezing and sub-freezing temps in areas with long distances between grid electricity availability) as I am by the scenery and their narration.
Anyway, sorry for the tangent, but the title reminded me of the series. I hope it escapes AppleTV+ so that non-Apple folks can watch it at some point.
Lets be reasonable and say 160W (somewhere between all the ratings strava gave) avg for my 2 hour trip.
I think I am a pretty strong rider, at the peak of the season I can beat electric bikes on flat ground as my top speed is higher then theirs (I dont have a speed limiter, they do)
I can tell you this is NOT easy and once you realize how much physical effort it is you appreciate being able to plug things into the wall.
it is the sustained power output that will kill you.. You can probably dump 10w of power for a long time, but putting out serious power for extended periods of time isnt easy.
I was super in to cycling a while ago and I was only able to average 200w over an hour but thats not quite accurate because I was going super hard and then taking rests every 20mins which stops the clock.
Just about any human in decent health could probably cycle long enough (with effort) to charge a battery to provide the requisite energy (over the course of, say, 30 minutes) and then output that energy at high power to toast over 3-4 minutes.
“One kWh” sounds like a tiny amount, but it is 3,600,000 joules. If you want to store that as potential energy, you must (taking g=10m/s²) lift a mass of 360,000 kilograms by a meter.
Another way to see how large a kWh is: a human body, ballpark, needs 3kWh per day (125W an hour)
⇒ If you want to produce 3kWh a day, you’d have to eat twice what you normally eat.
And that, even ignoring heating and airconditioning, doesn’t power an average household in the western world.
(Primary power consumption in the US is about 10^20 Joules per year, that's around 9.7kW/person).
I actually built a bicycle generator (an AC motor with a belt around the rear wheel) and would sell organic smoothies at music festivals. The fun part was the buyer had to pedal the bike to generate the electricty to power the blender to make the smoothie.
Even with only a 150w blender, fit adults had to work HARD to get the smoothie.. well.. smooth.
Kids basically couldn't do it, or not well enough.
And that was about 20-30 seconds of pedalling.
But I wanted to build it the way I did to be educational as well. When kids struggle after 15 seconds I say "You'd have to pedal a LOT harder continuously to power your xbox. That really gets them thinking.
e.g. USB phone charger rated for 5V/2A = 10W, laptop adapter for 19V/65A = 1.2kW, electric heater rated 110V/15A = 1650W
Voltage and current are like height and width of a 2D box named wattage or energy, and you can stretch or shrink the height thus changing width, but not the total area
my i7-6600u idles at around 3W
I was roped into a team entry for a Half Ironman. Despite being more of a runner, I did the 90 km bike leg which was effectively a solo "time trial" (no drafting allowed) on a standard road bike with clip on aerobars. After averaging 35.0 km/h on the mostly flat (~600m elevation gain) course, I was exhausted. The SRM Powermeter I borrowed for the race said I had averaged a "measly" 215 W!
I think that may be some usable numbers for what an avid amateur cyclist can achieve (ftp ~4Ws/kg). And then one will have to take into account that the body efficiency of cycling is about 25%, so one will have to eat 4x that amount in calories...
Check this out: olympic (cyclist) sprinter powering a toaster! it's intense.
(For mere mortals, it will be indeed closer to 100W.)
I don't mind these kinds of "solutions", but I do object when they go in the "make me feel guiltless about everything else I do because I hooked my bike up to a generator" bucket.
Even though it won't run your refrigerator, I would have been pleased to be able to plug an external mobile device battery into a smart trainer during a recent power outage so i could continue to work on a book manuscript while power was out.
;-)
Humans have finite lifespans, right? So all the AI has to do "relieve" itself of the burden of keeping humans alive would be to not let them reproduce. This would be pretty easy considering that it's pretty hard for people to spontaneously become pregnant while hooked up to those pods.
As the story goes, the movie executives thought this would be too difficult for most people to understand, so they switched it out and used the thermodynamically unviable power source motive instead.
Certainly, running a vacuum or boiling water won’t work with human power generation, but if you want that as a backup, you probably can fall back to a broom and use a gas/multifuel cooker in the meantime.
> Literally forgetting to turn the light off in your bathroom twice a month
8h * 5W * 2 = 80Wh per month
(Unless you're talking about using incandescent light bulbs, which would be like using a 4mpg vehicle in a discussion about average vehicle efficiency. Personally I think a 3W LED is better than a 5W, but I know most people disagree.)
Our main bathroom light draws, I'd guess, 0.1W. It shows up as 0.0 with a kill-a-watt so I don't really know. And it's only used for about half an hour a day at most.
> a super-committed, hour-every-day stationary-bike-using person
60W * 1 * 30 = 1800Wh per month
So no, forgetting to turn a light bulb off for an entire night, twice a month, does not waste more electricity than that gained by a cyclist who is capturing their electricity.
I think it's a great hack to turn this machine into an electrical generator.
Regardless, it's just an example. The DoE says the average US residential customer uses 909 kilowatt hours per month. Using your math of a committed cyclist that generates 1.8 kwh per month, you're still looking at under .2% of energy replacement. Which, again, even the smallest efficiency improvements in a house would completely dwarf what a human could produce.
Incandescents are a hard sell when LED bulbs are $1-$2 and pretty reliable.
Now, we already discussed generating 1800Wh per month using this bike. So:
1800 / (8 * 2) = 112.5
Or in other words:
112.5W * 8h * 2 = 1800Wh
So you'd need to run a 112.5W light bulb for 8 hours per night, twice per month, just to equal the amount of electricity produced by the article author. Although you said that leaving the light on wasted more, so, let's just go with a 113W bulb. I'm old enough to remember 100W incandescent light bulbs, but even then, they were rarely bought and used because that's an insane amount of electricity for indoor lighting.
Now where I live I can't even buy incandescent bulbs because they're not for sale. For 112.5W to be average, there would need to be millions of Americans using stadium lighting just to take a shit.
I think you should take a step back and reflect on why you're so quick to attack someone for doing a cool hack (this is Hacker News) that reduces their electrical usage (in the time of climate change).
1800 watt-hours, or 1.8 kilowatt-hours, is 20 cents worth of electricity. Using a cycle to power things makes for a neat demo, and might be good for educating people about electricity and suchlike, but anyone who expects to notice it on their energy bill or carbon footprint, or even for the installation to pay for itself, is off by a few orders of magnitude.
I haven't done any research or taken measurements, but particularly the low-end style tyre-on-roller that I have must be awfully inefficient.
It's been briefly popular (to some extent) a couple of times to power a light while cycling. These things don't typically have large capacitors or batteries to store surplus charge, because powering the light is about all you can do! (Ok not totally fair since you're also cycling, but still.)
The power from the bike is likely to be more than sufficient for those use cases.
Question - where did you get 5W from? a LED nightlight?
More realistic, a washroom is using 60W MINIMUM.. most have those light bars above the mirror and they are closer to 300W.
I recently replaced my Halogen lights with LED and cut the kithen lights from 600W to ~60W. Substantial savings, but how many people replaced everything with LEDs?
5W.
Above the mirror we have three huge bright bulbs we only use when brushing teeth.
5W each, or 15W total.
I literally don't think I've been in a house in the past 3-4 years that isn't 90-100% LED bulbs.
However, on average, that will not be a primary driver of energy usage in the average since most people don’t spend a substantial chunk of their time painting their face.
I hate the light that LED bulbs give when I'm getting ready for bed. Thus, I have LEDs in most places in my house except for my bathroom and bedroom where I have incandescents.
"But what if skies remained gray for many days in a row? Rather than trying to purchase enough battery storage to cover all reasonable eventualities, I decided that my backup source of electricity needed a backup itself, one that I could use to charge that battery during times when my photovoltaic panels won’t function"
As a primary source of energy a cycle generator doesn't make a lot of sense. But as an on demand source to cover occasional periods of low solar generation it's a great hack.
In my experience with Comcast Business Internet, their upstream equipment goes offline a few minutes after a power outage. So regardless of how you're powering your own equipment, it's hopeless.
The cell network appears to persist through power outages, but bandwidth, packet loss, and jitter aren't ideal in the best of circumstances. When it's the only Internet access for the whole neighborhood, you should probably just give up on your videochat meetings...
Its kind of weird sitting in the dark with absolutely no communication ability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout
Unfortunately, since late September, solar can't keep up. (Not a surprise given my suboptimal conditions.)
A bicycle as a generator would probably allow me to have a bit of exercise and easily provide enough power to get my blog through the day.
1: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po... 2: https://louwrentius.com/solar/solar.png
I'm not much of a rower, but after your pull, pulling your body forward for the next row is all wasted effort as far as producing mechanical work. Cycling doesn't really have any wasted phase like this.
Here's a bunch of rowers comparing their cycling/rowing watts: https://www.c2forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=186612
What I'm not sure is if you were to measure total energy expenditure at the human (as opposed to the spinning wheel), then cycling/rowing might be closer.
Regular recreational cyclists can generally put out 200-250W for well over an hour depending on weight.
One thing to keep in mind about power numbers vs pro cyclists is that they can churn out these kinds of watts at significantly lower body weights than a recreational cyclist. For output into electricity though it doesn't matter if I’m 35lbs heavier than a pro because watts are watts.
Regardless it seems to me that these levels of output using a full body motion of a rowing machine would be exceedingly difficult for a one hour period compared to cycling that leaves most of your muscle groups relaxed.
I think the best multi-hour total energy yield efforts are from recumbent bicycles.
Still of course the power is low comparatively to traditional sources.
The generators I've found online seem kinda whimpy and just slide on the exterior of the tire/rim. Is there is something more hardcore I can put on the chain or something?
https://hollandbikeshop.com/en-gb/bicycle-wheels/front-hub/d...
333w for 6.5h, 460w for the first climb (35 minutes).
For comparison, I'm reasonably trained, and could maybe hold that for 4 minutes. I'm also considerably heavier!
I would guess that a random average adult male who doesn't neglect general fitness, but doesn't necessarily cycle, could put out 160w-220w for an hour if they were forced to.
60W is insanely easy tho, pretty much anyone without some sort of extreme physical limitation would be able to do that.
be sure to note the size of his thighs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_point_tracking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmis...
What could go wrong?
The article ends on this point about parenting philosophy, but I think the author does not set up or discuss it enough.
What I don’t exactly understand is the underlying suggestion to manufacture this project as a “hard lesson” for the children.
I believe it is widely understood that children learn very much by emulating their parents. So what the parent regards as important, their children will see, and internalize those behaviors.
When I see parents worry about children taking something for granted, it can look like parents feel regret about parts of them that they see mirrored in their children.
The advantage to the bike is that it not only covers the days where the solar is falling a little short (and where an extra panel would also work), but also on the days where the solar is failing to produce anything of significance (at which point you would either need a ton of extra panels, but even then you still might not be covered).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsmQaVSYx-c&t=555
The Nissan Leaf can be used to power your home. Useful if you want to keep your fridge running in an extended power outage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78XGElU2I0
https://thedriven.io/2020/07/09/nissan-leaf-owners-should-be...
I think more could be gained by a small wind turbine or even a small water turbine, although those are definitely more complicated.
For reference, a laptop is around 30watts, charging a cell phone around 5w, electric shavers, fans for air circulation, small monitors are also game, so there are things you can power.
Storage can be achieved with a blocking diode and a supercap, or more conventional easily obtainable battery charging circuitry.
The article wanted to use these as supplementary power, and so during an emergency wouldn't be far fetched for bike-power to be useful.
That being said, for sustaining refridgerators (always on), or for using large power draw of washing machines, dryers, and microwaves, one would definitely need to rely on more than just biking (e.g. stored wind or solar as you pointed out).
But again, bike power can be useful as a backup or for emergencies.
This is an argument that bicycle generators can have value in some specific, non-critical instances, like when you already cycle daily and aren't very familiar with how to build and maintain a wind or water turbine (as you suggest).
The game features "duplicants" in a futuristic scenario trying to survive in deep space. The first technology to produce power is a sort-of hamster wheelie that one of them has to cycle on to generate power.
Very funny game.
It's probably not a meaningful improvement if the bike is well-kept and the rear wheel is lifted from the ground.