Make Electricity While You Exercise
(Page 4 of 5)
October/November 2008
By John Gulland
At the time, I was planning to build a wind turbine using an alternator made up of permanent magnets and coils of copper wire. This was to be a low-speed alternator, which, as it turned out, matched the rotational speed of a bicycle rear wheel. After much measuring and consideration, and after buying a used mountain bike from a pawnshop, I managed to shoehorn the alternator I had built into the rear of the bike and drive it with the normal multispeed bike gears.
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No one was more surprised than I at how well Linda’s power bike performed. It was pleasant to pedal and seemed at least as efficient as any of the human powered devices I had researched.
As an added bonus, the bike was remarkably quiet in operation because of its low speed and low friction, unlike some types of bike generators. But because of its complexity and the amount of time devoted to its construction, it cost several times more than any other power bike I’d seen.
Just the components purchased to build it cost more than $600, plus all the labor. Linda paid a total of $1,300, surely a premium price for a bike that could be expected to produce only 100 watts of power. Despite the high cost, I still had doubts it could make a meaningful contribution to Linda’s power needs.
I needn’t have worried. After more than a year of use, Linda views the bike as part of her overall electrical system and is pleased she is no longer totally at the mercy of the weather.
“In the end, I just integrated the bike into my normal routine,” she says. “In cloudy weather, the more computer work I have to do, the more pedaling I’ll do. The bike has put my solar-power system under my control.”
Unlike David, Linda doesn’t use the bike for fitness, although that is certainly a byproduct. What really matters to her is how it reduces worry and stress. “Now I can just deal with low power conditions during cloudy weather without fear of discharging the batteries too far,” she says.
Linda’s off-the-grid existence has led to some interesting exchanges when her city-dwelling children come to visit. Her daughter, an athlete, was induced to pedal furiously one morning in order to use her electric hair dryer. And Linda’s 19-year-old son had to pedal one evening to reach an agreed battery voltage before watching a movie on Linda’s laptop computer.
For many people the idea of pedaling to produce electricity or perform other work has a lot of appeal. In North America, though, we use so much cheap electricity that the output from pedal power seems miniscule by comparison. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average American household (2.4 people) goes through about 30 kilowatt-hours per day, which is 300 times more electricity than a reasonably fit person pedaling a good power bike can produce in an hour. That’s enough to cause anyone’s enthusiasm to waver.
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