I was just watching george clarkes amazin spaces for some reason.. He was on a shonky looking turbo setup that was set up to a bunch of light bulbs. It just got me wondering how much electricity could your average cyclist make in their gaff on a turbo?

Couple of hundred watts? Not much.

you’d be lucky to make more than 20 pence worth per session – and it’d be a session at least two hours to get near that!

If you did an hr you might get 300Wh

Elec is probably around £0.15/kWh

+ £0.03/kWh export

+ FiT Tariff (as its renewable – lets guess at £0.3/kWh)

So 0.3kWh x (£0.15 + £0.03 + £0.30)

=14.4p / hr

Gonna take a while to make your millions, especially if you eat anything in that hr 🙂

Enough to run the Christmas lights then?

It baffles me why gyms don’t power something with all the watts they could generate.

Ok, something fun of course, powering the heater for the showers probably wouldn’t be great, especially at quiet times…

A light on their sign maybe? The motor that makes the cake stand in the coffee lounge rotate?

It does make you wonder doesn’t it. What with the current keep fit trend and ridiculous energy bills.

My old gym put a stack load of solar panels on their roof to offset the machines. Good idea really given the size of the roof.

It baffles me why gyms don’t power something with all the watts they could generate… A light on their sign maybe?

I costed up a job to do just this for a local gym. They wanted the illuminated sign on the roof to be like a giant power meter. Never heard back from them, though.

It does make you wonder doesn’t it. What with the current keep fit trend and ridiculous energy bills.

average power output on a gym machine, I dunno, 100W, 200W maybe, 300W from a tdf rider on his day off?

might be able to switch a couple of light bulbs on or power the telly for a bit, I guess

It baffles me why gyms don’t power something with all the watts they could generate.

Some do – there was one in the news that was entirely powered by the machines. And some machines are powered by the person using them, they go off if you rest for more than about 30s.

200W is more feasible for a typical cyclist for an extended period, several hours – maybe enough to watch TV and a light to see by.

Im pretty sure that Sainsbury’s in Gloucester have a roller type system at the carpark entrance that uses the force of cars driving in and out to spin the rollers round to produce some electricity boost, seems like a good, simple idea.

EDIT – Kinetic plates and it rocks rather than spins
http://www.igd.com/our-expertise/Sustainability/Energy/4038/Sainsburys—launches-the-worlds-first-people-powered-checkouts/

An average cyclist produces 150-200W – with inefficiencies, you’d be lucky to get 100W out.

A few years ago I helped the BBC with a pedal-powered outside broadcast thing. The radio reporter was puffing away on the static trainer while he interviewed me about the new wind turbine the Glasgow Science Centre had just installed.

Unfortunately, they gave me the figures before the broadcast:

“So how much more power is that turbine producing than I am?”
“Quite a lot – about a hundred times as much”
“Wow, that’s a lot – so what fraction of the Science Centre’s electricity is it producing?”
“Not much – about a thousandth”

😀