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.
My (UK) electrical consumption last year was a mere 1325kWh – It’s surprising what you can do in order to live within limited means. Averaged over an 8760 hour year that works out to about 150 watts. So even if
a perfect storage system existed, allowing me to spread that demand evenly, I wouldn’t have a hope of covering it by cycling – even if I was super fit (I’m not) and did nothing else but pedal 24hrs a day…
1325kWh is equal to 3122kcal daily. But this doesn’t take into account human (in)efficiency which is ca. 22%. That means you would need to burn 14.190kcal daily – more than Tour de France participants do. My personal max was ~7000kcal, and that was after a 100+km inliner race…
Why use man power? Why not use water buffalo power? Just think with enough water buffaloes and “power stations” you could power a small village, then sell buffalo dung to cook and heat the huts. (Call it “Back in Time Project” to get government grants and subsidies.
Right — many thousands of yrs ago, man was smart enough to figure out how to domesticate much-stronger animals for such work.
Some today aren’t so smart….
Man has been smarter – innovation – faster, stronger, smaller but more efficient, yet the solution to AGW is to create larger, less efficient gadgets with much bigger footprints to power the world.
progress or anti-progress?
Umm, it is NOT a regular bicycle. Depending on the gearing it could work
The efficiency of modern bicycles have been improved to the point where nearly all the power through the pedal stroke is converted to making the back wheel spin, Very little loss of power in the drive chain = 95%+ efficient. The design in the picture is going to have a similar loss of power in the drive chain, so unless there is some of multiplying factor gismo in the flywheel, the wattage output will be only slightly less than the input.
lol, no.
Watts is watts is watts is watts. It doesn’t matter how shiny the bike is, what special magical magnets they use, or how many gears it has. If you can only put 200 watts into it then there is no way you can ever get more out of it.
If you could get more energy out of it then you put in, what is the point of bicycling in the first place? Just hook up the output to the input, give the pedals a slight spin and you’ve just created a perpetual energy machine.
LOL, thanks for the laugh.
Oh dear. Is math. hard?
Lacking the cycling manpower? Just connect a large mains electric motor to the pedals, voila free electrickery.
Having used an old US Army model pedal style generator I find this idea intriguing. We got lots of convicts! Lets us get this up and running. Pedaling 8 hours a day would certainly get them healthier, and probably ut down a bit on recidivism among the fat, lazy portion of the criminal community. Win/Win!
I’d rather prefer a modern LENR reactor from Leonardo Corporation or a Sun Cell from Brilliant Light Power in my cellar. Clean, cheap and plentiful energy. Sometimes I think the greens don’t want clean energy, science and reason to spread around.
I think Fat Albert should be forced to ride one of those to power his 20,000 square foot mansion for a year, to show us all his “commitment” to his “cause.” Think of the benefits – he’ll be too breathless to speak, which will save us all from listening to his hypocritical bullshit, and he won’t have any time to travel in his motorcade of SUVs and limos to his private jet in order to, you know, attend “events” where he can tell us all how we need to reduce OUR “carbon footprints,” so there’s lots of energy “conserved” right there that would be otherwise be uselessly squandered. As a bonus, he might have a myocardial infarction and end his ceaseless twaddle permanently!
Obama would have gone all in with grants and loans provided to politicos as applicants and used the tag line “we don’t pick winners” when justifying all the taxpayer money flung in all directions (to predetermined insider targets).
They must not be pedaling fast enough in North Korea on most nights to keep the lights on. It’s Greta Paradise.
Time to start selling the plans for that 200mph carburator again. Yes, I know cars don’t have carburators anymore, but that’s irrelevant. If you believe it’s true, it can be.
I can’t count how many offers I get for these free energy ripoffs. There must indeed be a lot of really dense and clueless people with money out there.
Simple search of Treadmill Generators has many hits including those available to purchase. Soon you could have one at your desk to power your PC.
There is a cost for fuel, no matter what the source. On an extended bicycle trip I found that the cost of extra food consumed per mile was about equal to the cost of gasoline per mile for a car – and the car weighs a ton and a half!
Depends on what you eat. I would need 32g of potatoes to fuel 1km of bycicle ride, the same 1km with my diesel BMW would cost me 7 eurocents. Of course, fuel is expensive in Germany. In the US it would cost me the same as potatoes.
You are eating the food to burn for energy. The carbon in the food is being converted to CO2 to provide the energy just like any fossil fuel engine. And omigod you are emitting CO2 -probably 50,000 ppm in every breath you exhale! Probably more efficient to burn the food directly to power a small steam engine.
SNAKE OIL ™ – cures EVERYTHING!
A 50 watt solar panel is $75 or less and would easily provide more energy on most days. Seems like a much cheaper and sustainable alternative to this contraption.
Of course a solar panel that small isn’t nearly enough to power a home otherwise every house would be solar powered already. But in remote locations it would be enough to provide minimal power for charging a phone and a couple of led lights.
So a person cycling for an hour to charge a battery to 200 watt-hours (enough to keep a 20 W LED bulb lit for 10 hours) would get sweaty, and have to take a shower, and would consume more than that to heat the water to a comfortable temperature. But at least the person would get a good cardio workout.
Up until about ten years ago, there was a science museum in West Hartford, Connecticut which had an exhibit where people could turn a crank (with their arms and hands, not their legs) and the electric power generated would light a 150 W dimmable (incandescent) light bulb. Most people were astonished how quickly they got tired and winded from keeping that bulb lit, which did incite some of them to turn off light bulbs when no one was in the room.
Unfortunately, the museum was moved to another city, and that exhibit was taken down. It could still be used as a teaching aid to show the amount of energy needed for electrical appliances. People don’t teach common sense as well as they used to!
Another method might be to show someone making a 24-inch long cut through plywood using a circular power saw, then ask the student to make a cut the same length using a hand saw, and see how long it takes, and how tired they get.
The video dates from around 2015. If you navigate to the billionsinchange.com website, they no longer mention this. You can find it with a web search.
They are now touting a portable battery system that can be charged from a bike like device, or portable solar cells. They DO state you get enough power for a few lightbulbs, a fan, maybe a laptop, etc.
No mention about powering a whole house. These products are really designed for the poorer countries that have inconsistent power availability.
They should combine one of these with an electric car to create the world’s first electric pedal car. 😉
” average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential home customer was… an average of 867 kWh per month. ”
Something I noted many years ago. There are 730 hours in an average month. So one needs about 1 kilowatt average constant power for your house. That’s a good estimate and an easy number to remember.
Yep, and 730 kWh is 730,000 Wh
730,000 Wh × 60 min × 60 sec … is 2.63 BILLION joules.
2.63×10⁹ J ÷ 4,184 J/food-calorie = 628,000 food calories per month.
628,000 ÷ 30 = 21,000 per day.
That’s ONLY 10× what a healthy young fella nominally consumes.
And he’d have to produce over 1 kW, each our, 24 hours a day.
I don’t think so.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
So…
When I was a kid, as was popular for young turkey-headed adolescents, I begged my mum for Christmas, for a doohickey that I could attach to my bike, on the front tire, that had a small magneto-and-front-facing-light … and a wire to a back light. The idea being, at night one would stop, flip the magneto to touch the tire, then ride along making power for the light.
Wicked! I got one!
So, first thing I did was hook it up. Couldn’t see much in the day (it was the incandescent age!), but the thing definitely asserted a drag on the bike.
A few days later, I went to a friend’s house in the late afternoon, and came home in the dark. Flipped on the magneto, and sure enough, a beam about as bright as your average 1960s flashlight came forth!
Wicked! It worked!
However, within a couple of our town’s long blocks, I was winded. By the time I got home, nearly exhausted.
________________________________________
By comparison, on another afternoon, the ride was easy.
So, it was the magneto.
Being somewhat-of-a-science-geek-kid at the time, I thought … well, maybe if I take out the lights, I could see whether it is the darn magneto having a lot of intrinsic friction, or the power it generated.
That experiment was telling: I whizzed at full speed around the block a few times (equivalent to 6 full long-block lengths), with the magneto-and-no-lights spinning against the tire. Yah, I got a bit more tired than with no generator. But nowhere near as worn out as with the lights on. Good science required that I screw back in the lights and do the same course again. I did … and became totally exhausted.
My conclusion then was, “it takes quite a bit of my power to light up a couple of stupid flashlight bulbs”. Not entirely unreasonable.
________________________________________
Later in the year, we went to the great big Day-of-Science at the Berkeley Hall of Science. They had borrowoed a large high-efficiency generator and set of high-wattage movie-projection bulbs, and hokked them up to a bicycle crank, gearing and so forth, so as to have an efficient connection between one’s leg and the power generator. It had a large ‘stop-watch’ timer … and a buzzer that’d ring if your ‘output’ fell below the 300 W criteria.
You sat in the chair, and cranked up. When you got over 300 W, the timer would automatically start. It’d keep track of the time until you gave up. The buzzer would buzz, and the clock would stop.
QUITE competitive! A long line of people wanted to try to get to the ‘top of the chalkboard’.
I didn’t make it longer than 35 seconds. HARD work! And boy, I was struggling at the end.
________________________________________
The moral of the story, to me, was that “making power by human power was a føøl’s errand”. Sure, just about everyone could ‘sprint’ their output to above 300 W, but for any sustained length of time, it was mostly too much.
And that’s only 300 watts!
I would assume that one MIGHT be able to sustain 150 watts for a half hour. Using math, that’d be
J = watt&sdit;seconds
J = 150 W × 30 min × 60 sec
J = 270,000
Looking up kilocalories, one finds that
1 kcal = 4,184 J, so
270,000 J ÷ 4,184 = 64.5 kilocalories
To put that in perspective, “kilocalories” are also the Calories of the food industry. So, 65 calories of food, put to good use.
AND you’d be well worked out, too.
Puts it in perspective, doesn’t it?
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
I seem to recall this was the standard for the plebes in Soylent Green!
I see this as the exact OPPOSITE of how this manufacturer presents this product.
We are the culmination of millions of years of evolution and natural selection. We are optimized to use our relatively weak physical attributes, and our relatively LARGE brains to survive and pass on our genetic attributes to the next generation.
Our greatest achievements have happened due to our curiosity about ourselves and our environment, and how we can use our intelligence to improve our probability of sustaining our lives long enough to propagate the species. We have got so good at it, we now can use some of our abilities to do things we enjoy, instead of using the bulk of our lives struggling for the basics of life: water, food, shelter, clothing, sanitation.
This invention implies we should get back on the hamster wheel of struggling for basics, instead of using the strength of our species to rise above the limitations of our physical ability to produce power.
If you want to do this for exercise that is fine. And I applaud those that understand the needs of our bodies to burn calories and force their bodies to regenerate and strengthen the very systems that have allowed us to progress as a species. We are optimized for manual labor, but not doomed to require it for production. We leverage it, and amplify it, using our intelligence, to survive. We still need to exercise, not for production, but as a function of our history. Our bodies are designed for a life of physical exertion and we have risen above that. Exercise is because our bodies cannot change as quickly as we can change our situation on this Earth, and utilize the combination of our Brains and the resources available to us.
The member of our species that would like to put us back into the lives of our ancestors have the opportunity to live that lifestyle for themselves. They don’t want if for themselves. They want to force it on others so they can rule with the impunity they crave. A powerless public is one that is easily exploited.
This product will never produce enough power to replace any of our current systems of energy mass production or to alleviate our current demands for energy.
It is a gimmick, designed to fool those at the lower end of our intelligence spectrum.
This scenario was presented as a distopian cautionary tale against UN proposed climate actions in a book called Agenda 21 by Glen Beck and Harriet Parke, 2012. In it, humans were confined in villages where they were not allowed to leave or enter the pristine animal habitats, and were REQUIRED to pedal a bike for several hours a day or their food rations would be restricted. A scary prospect if UN were ever allowed to implement their plans fully.
In conclusion, we have consensus that this man-powered bicycle generator is a bad idea, for a variety of reasons. One that I did not see was that stationary bicycles are up there among the most boring activities in the world.
I had never heard of Manoj Bhargava before.
However, this was not a rich greenie hypocrite imposing his ideas on Americans. He is nothing like Al Gore, Leo DiCaprio, Soros, Elon Musk, or even Greta. His version of saving the world is about improving the lives of the poor. It seems the super rich feel guilty about having so much money, but few actually give it away to help the poor. Few of these famous people are your friends; they are not the friends I would have.
But my first impressions of Manoj Bhargava are good. So the bike was a bad idea. He was innocently naive. At least that was a refreshing change.
The 2017 film is here:
https://billionsinchange-staging.hxeycjd4-liquidwebsites.com/film/