People send me stuff. This story is making the rounds on Facebook. From Goods Home Design:
60 Minutes On This Bicycle Can Power Your Home For Twenty-Four Hours
Wouldn’t it be great to power your home without having enormous costs to starting a journey on the alternative road? Now, you can achieve that and also take care of your figure! The founder of the Free Electric hybrid bike, Manoj Bhargava, says that his invention uses mechanical energy in the most basic way in order to transform an hour of exercise into supplying rural household with energy for 24 hours. The mechanism is simple: when you pedals, a flywheel is put in action, which turns the generator and thus charging a battery. What better motivation to work out from now on than to power your own home without any costs whatsoever? Watch the video featured to see the bike in action.
Riiiiight.
That idea is not only ridiculous – it is impossible. Normal human metabolism produces heat at a basal metabolic rate of around 80 watts. During a bicycle race, an elite cyclist can produce close to 400 watts of mechanical power over an hour.
A regular person, who isn’t an elite muscular cyclist, might manage half that. The dead-giveaway is in the video itself, where you see the wattmeter displayed while the inventor is cycling peaking at about 274 watts:
Then there is the separate dead-giveaway shot of the voltmeter and ammeter:
From basic electricity, Power = Volts times amps (P=EI) Do the math: 12 volts x 10 amps = 120 watts.
So, at it’s best it might produce 400 watts for an hour is 0.4 kilowatt-hour. More likely the average person will produce 0.2 kilowatt-hour in one hour. At the 0.2 kWh rate, if you cycled 24 hours, you’d produce 4.8 kilowatt-hours
Look at your electric bill and note how many kilowatt-hours you used in a month, and then tell me you can keep up with that, especially in the summer when you need air-conditioning.
According to the EIA, in 2017, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential home customer was 10,399 kilowatt hours (kWh), an average of 867 kWh per month.
That works out to 28.9 kilowatt-hours per day. Compare that to the 4.8 kilowatt-hours per day you’d produce if you were able to cycle on this generator bike 24 hours a day.
The entire idea is laughable, much like the sure to fail (and it did) “solar roads” idea of three years ago. Even Treehugger called it a complete flop.
But given how innumerate the public is these days (math is hard), surely some eco-dupe will buy the generator bike thinking they can power their entire home and are “saving the planet” by “going green”.
Even if the idea was originally to help poor people who have no electricity, there’s this set of complications (from a commenter on the YouTube video):
Antediluvian Atheist
Uh, if people are too poor to afford electricity, theyA: Can’t afford this gizmo,
B: probably don’t have enough use for the electricity,
C: This thing cannot run a fridge or freezer, which is a major use,
D: And people THAT poor probably don’t have the spare calories.
This is great. I teach high school Physics and we are studying circuits right now. I’m showing this tomorrow. I train my kids to look for clues in media. Hopefully they will notice the meters and figure it out.
I use a lot of stuff from WUWT in class.
You are fired! 🙂
Excellent !!!
I also had the students figure out how many Snickers bars the UN would have to supply to provide the energy to the cyclist. People who are deprived of electricity are usually also food deprived.
And how much power is needed to manufacture the bicycle and transport it from factory to customer? How many days of pedalling are needed before the user has reached the power break-even point?
The Green New Deal for green people who are legitimately green, not Green.
Rud
Yeah–got my first bike in 1947 and then got the light with the power from a little wheel against the tire.
Just to run the small light bulb was an impressive drag.
I recall those too, quite a drag indeed. Even appears in an episode of The Simpsons. The hub based dynamos were better.
But all these things in the article are just bogus. There are many videos like this, on YouTube, claiming free energy. Most appear to emanate from India using lots of hot glue, coils of wire and magnets.
Just because you can…
Instead of giant wind turbines blighting the environment, we will instead have giant hamster wheels for Green jobs and green virtue, without toxic batteries, and mitigated risk to birds, bats, and other vulnerable wildlife. Forward… to the House Select committee so that they may personally demonstrate its… their viability.
Calculating my January winter electric bill, according to the inventors numbers, I need 376 days/month. The water flowing through the turbines on its way to the ocean can continue to provide my electricity needs.
The ‘dim bulb’ is the one pedaling…..
Hans Free???? Did Gretal divorce him?
To be fair, the video does not say power YOUR house for 24 hours with one hour of work. The video clearly aims this at the “half the world that has no electricity or electricity two or three hours a day. It is for charging a cell phone and providing light (presumably LED) at night. It doesn’t mention why this would be a better solution than a solar panel. The video looks like it was filmed in India, so I assume that is the target audience.
Why not hook up your moped to a flywheel instead? Or even the bicycle they might have.
The key point is that it uses a flywheel to store energy, not a battery. That is interesting.
I’ve heard of commercial flywheel systems before, but only with a huge price tag.
Plus, the video says energy and water are important, that we should have more of these things.
Correct. He’s not the euro-activist saying that we should give up nuclear and fossil fuels.
“Toto January 29, 2020 at 3:55 pm
I’ve heard of commercial flywheel systems before, but only with a huge price tag.”
Nothing new there. Some trams use a flywheels to store energy (Less common these days).
If you click on the article link, the headline literally says, “60 Minutes On This Bicycle Can Power Your Home For Twenty-Four Hours.” https://www.goodshomedesign.com/60-minutes-on-this-bicycle-can-power-your-home-for-twenty-four-hours/
Michael, I know. But that article was written by a journalist and titles are sometimes written by someone even more removed from the original source. I wouldn’t make fun of the inventor for something he did not say. The inventor has in mind a home in India which is off the grid.
And for the Dr Vague comment below, it’s not for 230 V AC houses. So for charging your cell phone, 12 V DC is fine. For LED lighting, 12 V DC works too. The inventor mentions fans; those come in 12 V versions too.
Few in the west are going to be interested when grid electricity is cheap. When it’s not available, or where it’s not available, will people be wanting this? That is the question.
“Toto January 29, 2020 at 9:20 pm
And for the Dr Vague comment below, it’s not for 230 V AC houses. So for charging your cell phone, 12 V DC is fine.”
I do not know of any phone that charges at 12 V DC. It is usually stepped down to 5 V DC over USB.
There are charger with 12V to use in cars, output 5V
Yes, stepped down to 5V.
Yes, but you can use a 12V accu
“Krishna Gans January 30, 2020 at 6:04 am”
You cannot charge a 5v device, Apples are very particular about that, from a 12v charger UNLESS the voltage is stepped down. That is why Apple devices fail on non-apple chargers. Cheap US$15 Honk Kong Apple chargers will kill your US$2500 cApple MAC Book on that point alone.
This would produce more CO2 from breathing than using mains power would.
Didn’t Fred Flintstone have one of these?
C’mon Granma. Your turn next.
Correction to my comment. Google shows there was a lot of publicity for this project in 2015. At that time it was said it had been in development for three years and the first prototype did not work.
This report from 2016 shows pictures of a simpler design.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/ambitious-free-electric-bike-project-brings-energy-to-poverty-stricken-areas
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/ambitious-free-electric-bike-project-brings-energy-to-poverty-stricken-areas
You can find other comments on the web showing why this won’t work (for Westerners). 100 Watts input, subtract friction losses, etc., …
The photos show 12 Volt lead-acid batteries. These need to be topped up to full voltage regularly to avoid damage. But they are not efficient to charge in that part of the cycle. I liked the flywheel idea better, but evidently it is only there to even out the power input, not to store energy.
I think that there were a bunch of electric generating bikes at the Olympic trials (or some other track/field thing). About 15 of the things, up to five of them occupied by dimwits offering there services to reduce the electric use of the venue.
“Toto January 29, 2020 at 4:15 pm
The photos show 12 Volt lead-acid batteries. These need to be topped up to full voltage regularly to avoid damage.”
Nope. Lead-acid batteries are considered “deep-cycle”, that means can handle full discharge and full re-charge cycles. You are talking Li-Ion and similar that have the 40%-80% “ideal” discharge/charge ratio.
Those who do not use lead-acid batteries for off-grid applications can be excused for not knowing this. All batteries technologies come with a list of “do and don’t”, even if the batteries themselves do not. There are several types of lead acid batteries, for car starting, for RV deep-cycle, traction batteries. They are designed for different applications. Using a start battery for deep-cycle applications would be a waste; it would not last. Even deep cycle batteries are damaged by repeated deep discharge cycles. What is less commonly known is that leaving a lead-acid battery in a “partial state of charge” (which means not fully charged) damages the battery. This is because sulfates form on the plates. In normal use, that is normal and reversible, but if left discharged, the sulfates form stable crystals which reduce the capacity of the battery, possibly permanently.
https://www.pysystems.ca/resources/articles/the-perils-of-flooded-lead-battery-discharge-below-50-and-partial-state-of-charge/
https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/sulfation_and_how_to_prevent_it
Lithium-ion has many advantages. If anybody still wants to generate electricity with a bicycle, they should use that technology.
Remember how the industrial revolution helped remove the need of back breaking physical labour?
Millennials don’t remember it. That’s why they think this stuff is a step forward, rather than a jump back.
Professional athletes are way above most humans when it comes to power output. World class male can sustain around 6W/kg of body mass. A male in good shape, meaning trim without disability, around age 40 can sustain about 2W/kg of body mass. So for average weight of 70kg, expect 140W.
The battery being change would run a few LED lights overnight. Also good for powering a 24″ 12V LED TV for the evening.
That extra exercise uses calories, so your food bill will go up.
Over the Holidays I went the science museum with my kid. They had a bicycle hooked to a generator hooked to a 100 watt light bulb.
I can go 45 minutes on an exercise bike at 6/10th resistance.
I lasted about 6 minutes lighting the 100 watt bulb before I said “not worth it”.
Gilligan did.
Just think: all those poor kids who work 12 hours in a sweatshop could now come home and do more work. Talk about ” pulling yourself up from your bootstraps”.
I did a 12 minute warm up on a stationery bicycle at my local gym 2 days ago.
Thought I was going flat out.
The meters might be dodgy but the read out told me I had produced enough power to run a 15w globe for 2 minutes.
Depressing
“Power your home for 24 hours with a bicycle”
Wasn’t that in a movie a while back? “Soylent Green”, I think. Charles Heston peddling for all he’s worth the run the TV for an hour?
Just think how many immigrants could be employed by the greens. Money is no object if you are saving the world.
“without any costs whatsoever”???
It doesn’t look like it’s made from thin air.
“No pollution”??
Right, so the pedaller isn’t breathing -tick.
All the components materialized from thin air – tick
..and put themselves together and connected the output to the appliances by the fairies that live in the garden – tick.
Who’s he kidding? My pick is there’ll be loads of suckers. As they say there’s one born every minute.
Somehow I don’t think a grant application would get up in order to determine how long the average human plus calories required could pay back the embedded energy in the contraption plus battery. One must always allocate one’s resources effectively in these matters.
“The founder of the Free Electric hybrid bike, Manoj Bhargava…”
Free? Where can I go to get me one of those “free” electric hybrid bikes?
Hey grand kids, if you want to charge your phones, come pedal this bike.
What a great exercise idea! But only if the bike is free.