The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: funke829 on November 23, 2015, 01:35:21 AM
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So I was Interested if anyone has looked into bike generators. A big part of this blog has to do with saving money from riding a bike. With this type of life style there has to be some days when you don't need to travel but still have the energy to bike. So I started to look online for ways to generate electricity with a bike. Found out you can use an old car alternator. With a few other items. Then I found http://www.econvergence.net/product-p/hppawa-1.htm. I assume those that already have a solar system set up could add this on. What I don't know is at what rate you have to generate power for this idea to start gaining traction. I plan on doing some research. Though, I'm guessing there is someone here who would know enough to draw up an equation to even factor in the cost per calorie you burn to generate said power. Just out of curiosity I would love to make an excel sheet on this.
Or using a treadmill to do the same thing. When you think of people at the gym running on theses every day for from 10 minutes to a couple hours. What could that translate into power?
Any help to the math on this and/or links to other posts on this would be appreciated
Update: From what I found if you could run at peak performance for 1 hour generating 300 watts for a year(365) equals 109.5 kwh times WA cost average 8.44 cents or 2014 the average residential cost was 12.50 cents. You get 9.24$ and 13.68$ respectively a year. Which would be extremely hard to make any financial gain from after equipment cost. But was interesting to me never the less.
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Update: From what I found if you could run at peak performance for 1 hour generating 300 watts for a year(365) equals 109.5 kwh times WA cost average 8.44 cents or 2014 the average residential cost was 12.50 cents. You get 9.24$ and 13.68$ respectively a year. Which would be extremely hard to make any financial gain from after equipment cost. But was interesting to me never the less.
Yes, and on top of that you would be burning about 1000 calories per hour generating that much power, so 365,000 calories for the year, increasing your annual fuel needs by 25-50% (depending on your current diet of course). So add 25% (conservatively) of your food budget back in. Math doesn't work out!
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Bike-to-electricity is idiotic. It's one of the worst possible ways to make power.
If you want mechanical energy, just attach that thing straight to the bike.
Seriously, there's no way this makes any sense at all except as an exercise bike that might run it's own cooling fan.
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Bike-to-electricity is idiotic. It's one of the worst possible ways to make power.
If you want mechanical energy, just attach that thing straight to the bike.
Seriously, there's no way this makes any sense at all except as an exercise bike that might run it's own cooling fan.
Yes, the energy is much more useful if you can use the mechanical energy directly rather than suffer the loss in converting to electricity and back. I have thought it would be nice to have a way to pedal power a grain mill rather than using a hand crank to grind wheat into flour without electricity - but certainly not for any money saving potential over using electricity to do the job.