Make Electricity While You Exercise
(Page 3 of 5)
October/November 2008
By John Gulland
David works out of his home office in San Jose, Calif., as the client services director for a Web agency, and he sits in front of a computer most of the day. He needed a way to stay fit and remembered the pedal power generator he had built in college. As a serious bicyclist, David combined that interest with his passion for renewable energy, and in 1976 built a pedal generator to use as a trainer. The generator worked, and it certainly showed him the limitations of pedal power. But the trainer was heavy and cumbersome with its homemade frame, so he liquidated it at a yard sale rather than moving it to his new digs.
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Then several years ago, he built what he calls the PPPM (pedal power prime mover) for daily exercise and as an outlet for his penchant for tinkering with renewable energy.
It seems one’s satisfaction with pedal power has a lot to do with attitude. David’s house is a good candidate for the little extra power his morning fitness program produces because it’s already energy efficient. The Butchers have moved well down the road to energy self-sufficiency by relying on renewable energy. He and his wife have a 2.5-kilowatt grid-tied solar array and are net suppliers of electricity to their local utility. They also use their electric bike or tiny electric car for local errands.
David came up with his pedal generator after thinking about how to reduce the friction loss inherent when a rubber bike tire turns a small roller with a generator attached. He also wanted to smooth out the normal jerkiness of a freewheeling pedal stroke. And, finally, he needed a way to spin a half-horsepower generator fast enough to achieve peak efficiency. The result was a 36-inch-diameter plywood disk in place of a regular bike’s front sprocket. A groove cut around the perimeter guides a light chain that turns a sprocket on the generator. (He’s recently gone back to a design that uses friction instead of a chain to run the generator. It’s much quieter.)
Unlike many other pedal power generators, David’s creation is not adapted from a bicycle frame, but is built from scratch using simple materials. He sells construction plans for the PPPM on his Web site. (See "Resources," below.)
An Off-grid Boost
Linda Archibald came to our neighborhood three years ago. She had a contractor install a small solar-electric system to power electric equipment, including a well pump and the laptop computer that is vital to her consulting business. Her 330 watts of solar collectors, battery bank and an inverter provide for her modest electrical needs — except during what Linda calls “the dark times” from October through December. The first cloudy autumn was tense, with the batteries running low frequently enough to be a serious problem. It was then she asked me about pedal power.
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