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Use Your Bike as a Backup to Your Backup Power Supply

134 points by kouzant 6y ago

deepvibrations 6y ago
Very interesting to know roughly how much energy one can create doing this! Being part of the current trend of people riding at home on Wahoo Kickrs/Zwift and other turbo trainers, I do feel like that energy could be put to use somehow! Even if it were just to power a fan to cool myself down whilst riding, it would be nice to think the energy was being put to good use!
- rzzzt 6y ago
  700W continuous output for a few minutes exerted by a professional: https://youtu.be/S4O5voOCqAQ https://youtu.be/S4O5voOCqAQ (For mere mortals, it will be indeed closer to 100W.)
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  I think once you do the math, and realize how incredibly little power a human can generate compared to modern electricity, you realize it's not really worth it. Literally forgetting to turn the light off in your bathroom twice a month would probably waste more power than a super-committed, hour-every-day stationary-bike-using person would generate. I don't mind these kinds of "solutions", but I do object when they go in the "make me feel guiltless about everything else I do because I hooked my bike up to a generator" bucket.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    Agreed, but my son's crank flashlight is a great teaching tool and it never runs out of batteries!
  - Zigurd 6y ago
    If you get above 400w, consider turning pro. Even though it won't run your refrigerator, I would have been pleased to be able to plug an external mobile device battery into a smart trainer during a recent power outage so i could continue to work on a book manuscript while power was out.
    - miahi 6y ago
      I don't think you can have a 400W bike FTP without already being a pro.
      - _Wintermute 6y ago
        There might be a handful of time trialists here in the UK with day jobs that could do that, but yeah no one is doing that without dedicating a huge part of their life to training.
    - rjsw 6y ago
      The winner of the Giro d'Italia stage today was doing nearly 600W for just over 17 minutes.
  - dbrueck 6y ago
    But, but, but... you're ruining the movie "The Matrix"! ;-)
    - rienbdj 6y ago
      I wish The Matrix had humans in virtual reality cages because the AI had a mandate to keep them alive and well, and this was simply the most efficient mechanism for doing this. This would have made the resistance far more ambiguous as they would actually be fighting for freedom but against the well-being of humanity.
      - gruez 6y ago
        >I wish The Matrix had humans in virtual reality cages because the AI had a mandate to keep them alive and well Humans have finite lifespans, right? So all the AI has to do "relieve" itself of the burden of keeping humans alive would be to not let them reproduce. This would be pretty easy considering that it's pretty hard for people to spontaneously become pregnant while hooked up to those pods.
    - frutiger 6y ago
      Apparently the original story had the AI use the network of human brains as a giant neural network. As the story goes, the movie executives thought this would be too difficult for most people to understand, so they switched it out and used the thermodynamically unviable power source motive instead.
  - WJW 6y ago
    Just as a quick example: Bringing a pot with 1 litre of regular room temperature water to boiling temperature takes about 0.1 kWh. A regular person produces about 100W during strenuous but still aerobic exercise so you'd need about an hour of cycling to generate enough energy. This doesn't include heating the pot itself btw.
    - angrysaki 6y ago
      Not disagreeing, but just wanted to point out that if the goal was to generate heat then humans could potentially be more efficient because of internal efficiency. The ballpark number I often see is 25% efficiency, so if you were able to somehow capture the waste heat they'd be able to heat up the water 3x as fast.
      - fastball 6y ago
        Fair point, though that is arguably the only situation involving electricity (besides heating the room itself which doesn't involve heat capture) in which you're actually trying to generate heat.
      - WJW 6y ago
        This would probably work better when heating up rooms rather than water. The benefit of using electricity as an intermediate form of power is that it becomes possible to heat water up to boiling temperature. Exercising humans never reach boiling temperature no matter how hard they try.
  - csunbird 6y ago
    When you think about it, humans are really energy efficient at moving their limbs.
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    You’re correct on the side of power generation, it’s a tiny amount. On the other side, we have come a long long way when it comes to efficiently using power. The combined power usage of my bathrooms lights is probably less than 60W. The largest MacBook uses less than a moderately trained human can produce. On average, fridges need paltry amounts, compared to what they needed a decade ago. Certainly, running a vacuum or boiling water won’t work with human power generation, but if you want that as a backup, you probably can fall back to a broom and use a gas/multifuel cooker in the meantime.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    More importantly, I bet your hour a day user never comes close to the energy nessesary to build the bike and associates electronics in the first place
  - dheera 6y ago
    Not only that, but human power is incredibly inefficient, especially if the food you are converting into that power is not plant-based. It's significantly better if you eat plant-based, but nowhere near a bunch of solar panels covering the same area that the plants did.
  - Panino 6y ago
    > I think once you do the math > Literally forgetting to turn the light off in your bathroom twice a month 8h * 5W * 2 = 80Wh per month (Unless you're talking about using incandescent light bulbs, which would be like using a 4mpg vehicle in a discussion about average vehicle efficiency. Personally I think a 3W LED is better than a 5W, but I know most people disagree.) Our main bathroom light draws, I'd guess, 0.1W. It shows up as 0.0 with a kill-a-watt so I don't really know. And it's only used for about half an hour a day at most. > a super-committed, hour-every-day stationary-bike-using person 60W * 1 * 30 = 1800Wh per month So no, forgetting to turn a light bulb off for an entire night, twice a month, does not waste more electricity than that gained by a cyclist who is capturing their electricity. I think it's a great hack to turn this machine into an electrical generator.
    - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      Come on, this is "missing the forest for the trees" pedantics. I think you will find that the average bathroom in the US uses way above 5W. Regardless, it's just an example. The DoE says the average US residential customer uses 909 kilowatt hours per month. Using your math of a committed cyclist that generates 1.8 kwh per month, you're still looking at under .2% of energy replacement. Which, again, even the smallest efficiency improvements in a house would completely dwarf what a human could produce.
      - Scoundreller 6y ago
        I really think room lights are approaching 5W/bulb. I have a 3x5w bulb setup and keep 2 unscrewed just because it’s too bright when I have to go in at night. Incandescents are a hard sell when LED bulbs are $1-$2 and pretty reliable.
      - Panino 6y ago
        I can only respond to your words. If you don't like my choice of bulb, then do your own math and show it like I did. See what watt bulb (not bulbs plural, or moving the goalposts even further, an entire bathroom) it takes for your assertion to be true. Actually I'll just do that myself because it's easy. Now, we already discussed generating 1800Wh per month using this bike. So: 1800 / (8 * 2) = 112.5 Or in other words: 112.5W * 8h * 2 = 1800Wh So you'd need to run a 112.5W light bulb for 8 hours per night, twice per month, just to equal the amount of electricity produced by the article author. Although you said that leaving the light on wasted more, so, let's just go with a 113W bulb. I'm old enough to remember 100W incandescent light bulbs, but even then, they were rarely bought and used because that's an insane amount of electricity for indoor lighting. Now where I live I can't even buy incandescent bulbs because they're not for sale. For 112.5W to be average, there would need to be millions of Americans using stadium lighting just to take a shit. I think you should take a step back and reflect on why you're so quick to attack someone for doing a cool hack (this is Hacker News) that reduces their electrical usage (in the time of climate change).
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    A single square meter solar panel which costs on the order of $100 will outproduce a human. If you're camping or in a power outage and want to charge your phone or some led lights, sure, a bike charger makes sense, but you'll never be net positive with the energy you create vs. the energy needed to produce the generator.
    - ezzaf 6y ago
      Solar panels only outperform a human when the sun is shining. From the article: "But what if skies remained gray for many days in a row? Rather than trying to purchase enough battery storage to cover all reasonable eventualities, I decided that my backup source of electricity needed a backup itself, one that I could use to charge that battery during times when my photovoltaic panels won’t function" As a primary source of energy a cycle generator doesn't make a lot of sense. But as an on demand source to cover occasional periods of low solar generation it's a great hack.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    It's even crazier if you start comparing the energy used for training massive AI models vs. the paltry wattage required to keep a human brain operating.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits
soperj 6y ago
There's gotta be a more efficient way to covert the biking power into actual power. Anyone know?
- qz2 6y ago
  Pay someone else to ride it.
- simongr3dal 6y ago
  You could try to somehow attach the generator directly to the pedals/crank, that way you won't lose energy to the chain and the bearings on the rear wheel. It's probably not a meaningful improvement if the bike is well-kept and the rear wheel is lifted from the ground.
  - soperj 6y ago
    Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking. thanks.
- PeterisP 6y ago
  Take the fat and carbs that you would have eaten to power that exercise, and burn them directly in a heat engine, skipping all the biology.
- kouzant 6y ago
  Now that all races and events are collapsing under Covid, we could hook in pro cyclist and pay them to cycle. Win win situation
cbanek 6y ago
I wonder how much more efficient the generation could be? 60Watts is still somewhat impressive in the rig mentioned, but I wonder if maybe better control of the rpms of the generator (through gearing) could give more efficient generation. I feel like at the gym, the workout bikes (which I think are generally powered by pedaling), will give you a wattage output that seemed higher than than 60 watts, but again, that's about resistance (and not taking into account the inefficiencies of power generation). Seems like it could be made usable for a daily power generation machine (reminds me of "Oxygen Not Included", where you have the person run on a hamster wheel to generate power).
- YawningAngel 6y ago
  Pro cyclists can sustain 300W for an hour or more, and even trained amateurs can break 200W pretty happily, so 60W sounds like a lot is being left on the table, yes.
  - aghillo 6y ago
    Indeed. Thomas De Gentd averaged 298w for 6hr on stage 17 of the Giro d’italia a few days ago according to his strava feed (measured off his SRM powermeter).
    - angrysaki 6y ago
      Or a bigger guy (Ganna), https://www.strava.com/activities/4229195275 https://www.strava.com/activities/4229195275 333w for 6.5h, 460w for the first climb (35 minutes).
  - hilb3r7 6y ago
    The hour record is held by Bradley Wiggins, and it's estimated he averaged 440 watts. For comparison, I'm reasonably trained, and could maybe hold that for 4 minutes. I'm also considerably heavier! I would guess that a random average adult male who doesn't neglect general fitness, but doesn't necessarily cycle, could put out 160w-220w for an hour if they were forced to. 60W is insanely easy tho, pretty much anyone without some sort of extreme physical limitation would be able to do that.
jakear 6y ago
Rowing machines are in my experience much more efficient. 200W is maintainable for an hour or more with some experience. (2 minute split, for any rowers out there). 60W (3:00/500m) is genuinely difficult to pull - any effort at all will exceed that.
- angrysaki 6y ago
  Everything I have seen says cycling is generally more efficient. I think the 80w the author quoted is quite low. They may just be a small very person.
  - jakear 6y ago
    That seems odd to me - sure in the water rowing is slower (friction is way higher), but in terms of muscle use and energy output, rowing uses way more muscles and gets better range of motion in the legs.
    - angrysaki 6y ago
      I think it's that the cycling movement is just more efficient for sustained efforts, possibly because it uses less muscles. For sustained efforts, I don't think being able to use more muscles is an advantage, since you're going to be limited by your cardiovascular system. If you created a bike that you could also generate power with your arms, i woudln't expect to be able to put out more power because muscles are the limiter. The muscle fiber distribution might be in favor of only using your legs as well (eg. fast vs slow twitch) I'm not much of a rower, but after your pull, pulling your body forward for the next row is all wasted effort as far as producing mechanical work. Cycling doesn't really have any wasted phase like this. Here's a bunch of rowers comparing their cycling/rowing watts: https://www.c2forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=186612 https://www.c2forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=186612 What I'm not sure is if you were to measure total energy expenditure at the human (as opposed to the spinning wheel), then cycling/rowing might be closer.
- miahi 6y ago
  80W seems low for somebody who bikes every day, I guess it's not actually FTP (what you describe by maintainable for an hour) but aerobic.
gayprogrammer 6y ago
> Actually, generating power with their muscles provides a valuable lesson for kids, whether or not the power goes out. The article ends on this point about parenting philosophy, but I think the author does not set up or discuss it enough. What I don’t exactly understand is the underlying suggestion to manufacture this project as a “hard lesson” for the children. I believe it is widely understood that children learn very much by emulating their parents. So what the parent regards as important, their children will see, and internalize those behaviors. When I see parents worry about children taking something for granted, it can look like parents feel regret about parts of them that they see mirrored in their children.
zamadatix 6y ago
How cloudy does it have to be for a 3rd <$100 solar panel to provide less than 0.06 kWh of charge over 1 day? Clear skies are of course always better but I don't think I've ever heard just how bad it is when they aren't.
- qqqwerty 6y ago
  Depending on your latitude, in the winter on a cloudy day a small DIY system might be near useless. The panels might have a voltage when short circuited, but getting enough power through the DC-to-DC converter with enough leftover to overcome the internal resistance in the battery would be a tough. At best, it might trickle charge the battery and keep it from losing charge from self-discharge. The advantage to the bike is that it not only covers the days where the solar is falling a little short (and where an extra panel would also work), but also on the days where the solar is failing to produce anything of significance (at which point you would either need a ton of extra panels, but even then you still might not be covered).
FpUser 6y ago
The reported 1 hour power seem to be on a low side. Average untrained male should not have much troubles generating 100W. Reasonably fit male that cycles regularly should be able to put about 200W. For longer intervals the power will of course decrease. Still of course the power is low comparatively to traditional sources.
chrisan 6y ago
Now I'm picturing Wade Watts powering his rig in Ready Player One
geocrasher 6y ago
I'm surprised this made it to IEEE's website, as bicycle generators are long understood to be unsustainable. I think more could be gained by a small wind turbine or even a small water turbine, although those are definitely more complicated.
- fiziks_hckr 6y ago
  From my experiments making my own, got around 100W of power. For reference, a laptop is around 30watts, charging a cell phone around 5w, electric shavers, fans for air circulation, small monitors are also game, so there are things you can power. Storage can be achieved with a blocking diode and a supercap, or more conventional easily obtainable battery charging circuitry. The article wanted to use these as supplementary power, and so during an emergency wouldn't be far fetched for bike-power to be useful. That being said, for sustaining refridgerators (always on), or for using large power draw of washing machines, dryers, and microwaves, one would definitely need to rely on more than just biking (e.g. stored wind or solar as you pointed out). But again, bike power can be useful as a backup or for emergencies.
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  I think the novelty here that justifies the article is that this article challenges the oversimplification of "unsustainable" into "useless". This is an argument that bicycle generators can have value in some specific, non-critical instances, like when you already cycle daily and aren't very familiar with how to build and maintain a wind or water turbine (as you suggest).
scottlamb 6y ago
> What I really don’t relish, though, is losing Internet access In my experience with Comcast Business Internet, their upstream equipment goes offline a few minutes after a power outage. So regardless of how you're powering your own equipment, it's hopeless. The cell network appears to persist through power outages, but bandwidth, packet loss, and jitter aren't ideal in the best of circumstances. When it's the only Internet access for the whole neighborhood, you should probably just give up on your videochat meetings...
- zrail 6y ago
  That's really interesting. It seems like in my area their system stays up and running but that's probably because lots of people have their home phone service running through Comcast.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  A little while ago we had a state wide power outage and after a few hours even the cell towers were gone (there may have been some reserve for emergency calls on other networks). I can't remember if it was this incident or another one short after that left me without power for 3 days in a first world country that wasn't hit with a large natural disaster. After this the local government quickly made changes so these days it isn't so bad. One of the improvements is a massive battery backup system owned by Tesla which is able to smooth power supply when there are unexpected spikes in demand or a power station goes offline. Its kind of weird sitting in the dark with absolutely no communication ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout
exabrial 6y ago
When rowing I can throw down a significantly larger amount of power than when I'm cycling (almost a kilowatt in a short sprint), but ultimately my average sustainable power in both sports is about between 150w-250w. This article got me thinking about calculating the amount of LED bulbs someone could power given a certain V02 Max... hmm.
- virtue3 6y ago
  that's not a bad sustained! Check this out: olympic (cyclist) sprinter powering a toaster! it's intense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ
  - exabrial 6y ago
    Only for about 45m :/ these kids whooping my butt in races can do 100w more and not break a sweat haha
supernova87a 6y ago
When energy gets dug or pumped out of the ground so cheap, you forget how hard it is to generate 100W, and what you're calling on in resources every time you turn on lights or drive a car.
kenned3 6y ago
I've actually considered this many times, but the math never works out. I ride 50KM 3 times a week, Strava's "estimated power rating" is all over the place, given i ride the same trail every time i would think it should not be like this. Lets be reasonable and say 160W (somewhere between all the ratings strava gave) avg for my 2 hour trip. I think I am a pretty strong rider, at the peak of the season I can beat electric bikes on flat ground as my top speed is higher then theirs (I dont have a speed limiter, they do) I can tell you this is NOT easy and once you realize how much physical effort it is you appreciate being able to plug things into the wall. it is the sustained power output that will kill you.. You can probably dump 10w of power for a long time, but putting out serious power for extended periods of time isnt easy.
- Rapzid 6y ago
  https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-cycling-power-output-compare https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-...
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  There was a video of an Olympic cyclist powering a toaster with a bike. He wan't able to keep it up enough to toast one piece properly. I was super in to cycling a while ago and I was only able to average 200w over an hour but thats not quite accurate because I was going super hard and then taking rests every 20mins which stops the clock.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    This is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ Spoiler: the toast gets toasted
  - sneak 6y ago
    That’s a bad demo, as toast takes high power for a very short time. Just about any human in decent health could probably cycle long enough (with effort) to charge a battery to provide the requisite energy (over the course of, say, 30 minutes) and then output that energy at high power to toast over 3-4 minutes.
louwrentius 6y ago
My blog is solar-powered. Unfortunately, since late September, solar can't keep up. (Not a surprise given my suboptimal conditions.) A bicycle as a generator would probably allow me to have a bit of exercise and easily provide enough power to get my blog through the day. 1: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-power.html https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po... 2: https://louwrentius.com/solar/solar.png https://louwrentius.com/solar/solar.png
- Danieru 6y ago
  You need more solar panels. Panels are a numbers game.
  - Faaak 6y ago
    More so that they're cheaper than ever.
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    Yes, but I have no space for them on my balcony ;-)
rntksi 6y ago
Obligated to mention "Oxygen Not Included". The game features "duplicants" in a futuristic scenario trying to survive in deep space. The first technology to produce power is a sort-of hamster wheelie that one of them has to cycle on to generate power. Very funny game.
js2 6y ago
I've been watching the Long Way Up motorcycle travelogue series with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman on AppleTV+. They're doing the trip from the tip of South America all the way to Los Angeles on a pair of prototype electric Harley Davidsons. The support crew is in a pair of prototype Rivian pickup trucks. The Rivians have a "tow to recharge" mode that they've used several times already in the first half dozen episodes. The show is great and I'm as fascinated by their dedication to do the trip on electric bikes (the first parts of the trip were in freezing and sub-freezing temps in areas with long distances between grid electricity availability) as I am by the scenery and their narration. Anyway, sorry for the tangent, but the title reminded me of the series. I hope it escapes AppleTV+ so that non-Apple folks can watch it at some point.
clouddrover 6y ago
Better off using an electric car. The Honda e has a socket in it for appliances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsmQaVSYx-c&t=555 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsmQaVSYx-c&t=555 The Nissan Leaf can be used to power your home. Useful if you want to keep your fridge running in an extended power outage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78XGElU2I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78XGElU2I0 https://thedriven.io/2020/07/09/nissan-leaf-owners-should-be-able-to-use-their-cars-to-power-their-homes-later-this-year/ https://thedriven.io/2020/07/09/nissan-leaf-owners-should-be...
taneq 6y ago
If you want a sustainable intermittent power source and you don't have a stream nearby, you can't do better than a solar panel. They're ridiculously cheap these days and, with a bit of battery backup, are a far more practical electricity source than human muscle power.
geokon 6y ago
Is there a good way to put a generator on the bike itself? To say charge a powerbank/phone? I have a crappy bike (no gears, tons of rust) and I have a bad habit of going as fast as it lets me good. However I honestly don't really want to go faster than 15mph or so b/c it's generally unsafe. The problem is I have some mental block of making myself go slower. I guess I enjoy the workout. So I want to put in a resistance in somehow that I can crank up to make myself go slower. Does anyone have an ideas? The generators I've found online seem kinda whimpy and just slide on the exterior of the tire/rim. Is there is something more hardcore I can put on the chain or something?
- toper-centage 6y ago
  It's called a dynamo? Hub dynamos are the most efficient.
- kroolik 6y ago
  There are dynamos you put into the front wheel. I think they are more efficient than the ones you are Talking about (exterior). https://hollandbikeshop.com/en-gb/bicycle-wheels/front-hub/dynamo-hub/shimano-dh-c3003-hub-dynamo-6v-3w-36-hole-silver/ https://hollandbikeshop.com/en-gb/bicycle-wheels/front-hub/d...
  - geokon 6y ago
    Everything I've read say they provide very little resistance. Maybe I'd just need to attach more loads. Like a seat warmer :)
adrianN 6y ago
Don't do this for environmental reasons. You'll never make back the energy embodied in the generator: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/05/bike-powered-electricity-generators.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/05/bike-powered-electri...
deleted 6y ago
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thescriptkiddie 6y ago
The author claims to have 200 watts of solar panels but only 420 Wh of battery, and because it's lead-acid only half of that is really usable. Unless they live somewhere that only gets 1-2 hours of insolation per day [0] that is nowhere near enough to store an average day's generation. Likely most of the energy is likely being wasted. http://www.bigfrogmountain.com/SunHoursPerDay.html http://www.bigfrogmountain.com/SunHoursPerDay.html

134 points by kouzant 6y ago

Very interesting to know roughly how much energy one can create doing this! Being part of the current trend of people riding at home on Wahoo Kickrs/Zwift and other turbo trainers, I do feel like that energy could be put to use somehow! Even if it were just to power a fan to cool myself down whilst riding, it would be nice to think the energy was being put to good use!

rzzzt 6y ago
700W continuous output for a few minutes exerted by a professional: https://youtu.be/S4O5voOCqAQ https://youtu.be/S4O5voOCqAQ (For mere mortals, it will be indeed closer to 100W.)
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
I think once you do the math, and realize how incredibly little power a human can generate compared to modern electricity, you realize it's not really worth it. Literally forgetting to turn the light off in your bathroom twice a month would probably waste more power than a super-committed, hour-every-day stationary-bike-using person would generate. I don't mind these kinds of "solutions", but I do object when they go in the "make me feel guiltless about everything else I do because I hooked my bike up to a generator" bucket.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  Agreed, but my son's crank flashlight is a great teaching tool and it never runs out of batteries!
- Zigurd 6y ago
  If you get above 400w, consider turning pro. Even though it won't run your refrigerator, I would have been pleased to be able to plug an external mobile device battery into a smart trainer during a recent power outage so i could continue to work on a book manuscript while power was out.
  - miahi 6y ago
    I don't think you can have a 400W bike FTP without already being a pro.
    - _Wintermute 6y ago
      There might be a handful of time trialists here in the UK with day jobs that could do that, but yeah no one is doing that without dedicating a huge part of their life to training.
  - rjsw 6y ago
    The winner of the Giro d'Italia stage today was doing nearly 600W for just over 17 minutes.
- dbrueck 6y ago
  But, but, but... you're ruining the movie "The Matrix"! ;-)
  - rienbdj 6y ago
    I wish The Matrix had humans in virtual reality cages because the AI had a mandate to keep them alive and well, and this was simply the most efficient mechanism for doing this. This would have made the resistance far more ambiguous as they would actually be fighting for freedom but against the well-being of humanity.
    - gruez 6y ago
      >I wish The Matrix had humans in virtual reality cages because the AI had a mandate to keep them alive and well Humans have finite lifespans, right? So all the AI has to do "relieve" itself of the burden of keeping humans alive would be to not let them reproduce. This would be pretty easy considering that it's pretty hard for people to spontaneously become pregnant while hooked up to those pods.
  - frutiger 6y ago
    Apparently the original story had the AI use the network of human brains as a giant neural network. As the story goes, the movie executives thought this would be too difficult for most people to understand, so they switched it out and used the thermodynamically unviable power source motive instead.
- WJW 6y ago
  Just as a quick example: Bringing a pot with 1 litre of regular room temperature water to boiling temperature takes about 0.1 kWh. A regular person produces about 100W during strenuous but still aerobic exercise so you'd need about an hour of cycling to generate enough energy. This doesn't include heating the pot itself btw.
  - angrysaki 6y ago
    Not disagreeing, but just wanted to point out that if the goal was to generate heat then humans could potentially be more efficient because of internal efficiency. The ballpark number I often see is 25% efficiency, so if you were able to somehow capture the waste heat they'd be able to heat up the water 3x as fast.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Fair point, though that is arguably the only situation involving electricity (besides heating the room itself which doesn't involve heat capture) in which you're actually trying to generate heat.
    - WJW 6y ago
      This would probably work better when heating up rooms rather than water. The benefit of using electricity as an intermediate form of power is that it becomes possible to heat water up to boiling temperature. Exercising humans never reach boiling temperature no matter how hard they try.
- csunbird 6y ago
  When you think about it, humans are really energy efficient at moving their limbs.
- Xylakant 6y ago
  You’re correct on the side of power generation, it’s a tiny amount. On the other side, we have come a long long way when it comes to efficiently using power. The combined power usage of my bathrooms lights is probably less than 60W. The largest MacBook uses less than a moderately trained human can produce. On average, fridges need paltry amounts, compared to what they needed a decade ago. Certainly, running a vacuum or boiling water won’t work with human power generation, but if you want that as a backup, you probably can fall back to a broom and use a gas/multifuel cooker in the meantime.
- TylerE 6y ago
  More importantly, I bet your hour a day user never comes close to the energy nessesary to build the bike and associates electronics in the first place
- dheera 6y ago
  Not only that, but human power is incredibly inefficient, especially if the food you are converting into that power is not plant-based. It's significantly better if you eat plant-based, but nowhere near a bunch of solar panels covering the same area that the plants did.
- Panino 6y ago
  > I think once you do the math > Literally forgetting to turn the light off in your bathroom twice a month 8h * 5W * 2 = 80Wh per month (Unless you're talking about using incandescent light bulbs, which would be like using a 4mpg vehicle in a discussion about average vehicle efficiency. Personally I think a 3W LED is better than a 5W, but I know most people disagree.) Our main bathroom light draws, I'd guess, 0.1W. It shows up as 0.0 with a kill-a-watt so I don't really know. And it's only used for about half an hour a day at most. > a super-committed, hour-every-day stationary-bike-using person 60W * 1 * 30 = 1800Wh per month So no, forgetting to turn a light bulb off for an entire night, twice a month, does not waste more electricity than that gained by a cyclist who is capturing their electricity. I think it's a great hack to turn this machine into an electrical generator.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    Come on, this is "missing the forest for the trees" pedantics. I think you will find that the average bathroom in the US uses way above 5W. Regardless, it's just an example. The DoE says the average US residential customer uses 909 kilowatt hours per month. Using your math of a committed cyclist that generates 1.8 kwh per month, you're still looking at under .2% of energy replacement. Which, again, even the smallest efficiency improvements in a house would completely dwarf what a human could produce.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      I really think room lights are approaching 5W/bulb. I have a 3x5w bulb setup and keep 2 unscrewed just because it’s too bright when I have to go in at night. Incandescents are a hard sell when LED bulbs are $1-$2 and pretty reliable.
    - Panino 6y ago
      I can only respond to your words. If you don't like my choice of bulb, then do your own math and show it like I did. See what watt bulb (not bulbs plural, or moving the goalposts even further, an entire bathroom) it takes for your assertion to be true. Actually I'll just do that myself because it's easy. Now, we already discussed generating 1800Wh per month using this bike. So: 1800 / (8 * 2) = 112.5 Or in other words: 112.5W * 8h * 2 = 1800Wh So you'd need to run a 112.5W light bulb for 8 hours per night, twice per month, just to equal the amount of electricity produced by the article author. Although you said that leaving the light on wasted more, so, let's just go with a 113W bulb. I'm old enough to remember 100W incandescent light bulbs, but even then, they were rarely bought and used because that's an insane amount of electricity for indoor lighting. Now where I live I can't even buy incandescent bulbs because they're not for sale. For 112.5W to be average, there would need to be millions of Americans using stadium lighting just to take a shit. I think you should take a step back and reflect on why you're so quick to attack someone for doing a cool hack (this is Hacker News) that reduces their electrical usage (in the time of climate change).
- colechristensen 6y ago
  A single square meter solar panel which costs on the order of $100 will outproduce a human. If you're camping or in a power outage and want to charge your phone or some led lights, sure, a bike charger makes sense, but you'll never be net positive with the energy you create vs. the energy needed to produce the generator.
  - ezzaf 6y ago
    Solar panels only outperform a human when the sun is shining. From the article: "But what if skies remained gray for many days in a row? Rather than trying to purchase enough battery storage to cover all reasonable eventualities, I decided that my backup source of electricity needed a backup itself, one that I could use to charge that battery during times when my photovoltaic panels won’t function" As a primary source of energy a cycle generator doesn't make a lot of sense. But as an on demand source to cover occasional periods of low solar generation it's a great hack.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  It's even crazier if you start comparing the energy used for training massive AI models vs. the paltry wattage required to keep a human brain operating.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

soperj 6y ago

There's gotta be a more efficient way to covert the biking power into actual power. Anyone know?

qz2 6y ago
Pay someone else to ride it.
simongr3dal 6y ago
You could try to somehow attach the generator directly to the pedals/crank, that way you won't lose energy to the chain and the bearings on the rear wheel. It's probably not a meaningful improvement if the bike is well-kept and the rear wheel is lifted from the ground.
- soperj 6y ago
  Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking. thanks.
PeterisP 6y ago
Take the fat and carbs that you would have eaten to power that exercise, and burn them directly in a heat engine, skipping all the biology.
kouzant 6y ago
Now that all races and events are collapsing under Covid, we could hook in pro cyclist and pay them to cycle. Win win situation

cbanek 6y ago

I wonder how much more efficient the generation could be? 60Watts is still somewhat impressive in the rig mentioned, but I wonder if maybe better control of the rpms of the generator (through gearing) could give more efficient generation. I feel like at the gym, the workout bikes (which I think are generally powered by pedaling), will give you a wattage output that seemed higher than than 60 watts, but again, that's about resistance (and not taking into account the inefficiencies of power generation). Seems like it could be made usable for a daily power generation machine (reminds me of "Oxygen Not Included", where you have the person run on a hamster wheel to generate power).

YawningAngel 6y ago
Pro cyclists can sustain 300W for an hour or more, and even trained amateurs can break 200W pretty happily, so 60W sounds like a lot is being left on the table, yes.
- aghillo 6y ago
  Indeed. Thomas De Gentd averaged 298w for 6hr on stage 17 of the Giro d’italia a few days ago according to his strava feed (measured off his SRM powermeter).
  - angrysaki 6y ago
    Or a bigger guy (Ganna), https://www.strava.com/activities/4229195275 https://www.strava.com/activities/4229195275 333w for 6.5h, 460w for the first climb (35 minutes).
- hilb3r7 6y ago
  The hour record is held by Bradley Wiggins, and it's estimated he averaged 440 watts. For comparison, I'm reasonably trained, and could maybe hold that for 4 minutes. I'm also considerably heavier! I would guess that a random average adult male who doesn't neglect general fitness, but doesn't necessarily cycle, could put out 160w-220w for an hour if they were forced to. 60W is insanely easy tho, pretty much anyone without some sort of extreme physical limitation would be able to do that.

jakear 6y ago

Rowing machines are in my experience much more efficient. 200W is maintainable for an hour or more with some experience. (2 minute split, for any rowers out there). 60W (3:00/500m) is genuinely difficult to pull - any effort at all will exceed that.

angrysaki 6y ago
Everything I have seen says cycling is generally more efficient. I think the 80w the author quoted is quite low. They may just be a small very person.
- jakear 6y ago
  That seems odd to me - sure in the water rowing is slower (friction is way higher), but in terms of muscle use and energy output, rowing uses way more muscles and gets better range of motion in the legs.
  - angrysaki 6y ago
    I think it's that the cycling movement is just more efficient for sustained efforts, possibly because it uses less muscles. For sustained efforts, I don't think being able to use more muscles is an advantage, since you're going to be limited by your cardiovascular system. If you created a bike that you could also generate power with your arms, i woudln't expect to be able to put out more power because muscles are the limiter. The muscle fiber distribution might be in favor of only using your legs as well (eg. fast vs slow twitch) I'm not much of a rower, but after your pull, pulling your body forward for the next row is all wasted effort as far as producing mechanical work. Cycling doesn't really have any wasted phase like this. Here's a bunch of rowers comparing their cycling/rowing watts: https://www.c2forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=186612 https://www.c2forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=186612 What I'm not sure is if you were to measure total energy expenditure at the human (as opposed to the spinning wheel), then cycling/rowing might be closer.
miahi 6y ago
80W seems low for somebody who bikes every day, I guess it's not actually FTP (what you describe by maintainable for an hour) but aerobic.

gayprogrammer 6y ago

> Actually, generating power with their muscles provides a valuable lesson for kids, whether or not the power goes out. The article ends on this point about parenting philosophy, but I think the author does not set up or discuss it enough. What I don’t exactly understand is the underlying suggestion to manufacture this project as a “hard lesson” for the children. I believe it is widely understood that children learn very much by emulating their parents. So what the parent regards as important, their children will see, and internalize those behaviors. When I see parents worry about children taking something for granted, it can look like parents feel regret about parts of them that they see mirrored in their children.

zamadatix 6y ago

How cloudy does it have to be for a 3rd <$100 solar panel to provide less than 0.06 kWh of charge over 1 day? Clear skies are of course always better but I don't think I've ever heard just how bad it is when they aren't.

qqqwerty 6y ago
Depending on your latitude, in the winter on a cloudy day a small DIY system might be near useless. The panels might have a voltage when short circuited, but getting enough power through the DC-to-DC converter with enough leftover to overcome the internal resistance in the battery would be a tough. At best, it might trickle charge the battery and keep it from losing charge from self-discharge. The advantage to the bike is that it not only covers the days where the solar is falling a little short (and where an extra panel would also work), but also on the days where the solar is failing to produce anything of significance (at which point you would either need a ton of extra panels, but even then you still might not be covered).

FpUser 6y ago

The reported 1 hour power seem to be on a low side. Average untrained male should not have much troubles generating 100W. Reasonably fit male that cycles regularly should be able to put about 200W. For longer intervals the power will of course decrease. Still of course the power is low comparatively to traditional sources.

chrisan 6y ago

Now I'm picturing Wade Watts powering his rig in Ready Player One

geocrasher 6y ago

I'm surprised this made it to IEEE's website, as bicycle generators are long understood to be unsustainable. I think more could be gained by a small wind turbine or even a small water turbine, although those are definitely more complicated.

fiziks_hckr 6y ago
From my experiments making my own, got around 100W of power. For reference, a laptop is around 30watts, charging a cell phone around 5w, electric shavers, fans for air circulation, small monitors are also game, so there are things you can power. Storage can be achieved with a blocking diode and a supercap, or more conventional easily obtainable battery charging circuitry. The article wanted to use these as supplementary power, and so during an emergency wouldn't be far fetched for bike-power to be useful. That being said, for sustaining refridgerators (always on), or for using large power draw of washing machines, dryers, and microwaves, one would definitely need to rely on more than just biking (e.g. stored wind or solar as you pointed out). But again, bike power can be useful as a backup or for emergencies.
TameAntelope 6y ago
I think the novelty here that justifies the article is that this article challenges the oversimplification of "unsustainable" into "useless". This is an argument that bicycle generators can have value in some specific, non-critical instances, like when you already cycle daily and aren't very familiar with how to build and maintain a wind or water turbine (as you suggest).

scottlamb 6y ago

> What I really don’t relish, though, is losing Internet access In my experience with Comcast Business Internet, their upstream equipment goes offline a few minutes after a power outage. So regardless of how you're powering your own equipment, it's hopeless. The cell network appears to persist through power outages, but bandwidth, packet loss, and jitter aren't ideal in the best of circumstances. When it's the only Internet access for the whole neighborhood, you should probably just give up on your videochat meetings...

zrail 6y ago
That's really interesting. It seems like in my area their system stays up and running but that's probably because lots of people have their home phone service running through Comcast.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
A little while ago we had a state wide power outage and after a few hours even the cell towers were gone (there may have been some reserve for emergency calls on other networks). I can't remember if it was this incident or another one short after that left me without power for 3 days in a first world country that wasn't hit with a large natural disaster. After this the local government quickly made changes so these days it isn't so bad. One of the improvements is a massive battery backup system owned by Tesla which is able to smooth power supply when there are unexpected spikes in demand or a power station goes offline. Its kind of weird sitting in the dark with absolutely no communication ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout

exabrial 6y ago

When rowing I can throw down a significantly larger amount of power than when I'm cycling (almost a kilowatt in a short sprint), but ultimately my average sustainable power in both sports is about between 150w-250w. This article got me thinking about calculating the amount of LED bulbs someone could power given a certain V02 Max... hmm.

virtue3 6y ago
that's not a bad sustained! Check this out: olympic (cyclist) sprinter powering a toaster! it's intense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ
- exabrial 6y ago
  Only for about 45m :/ these kids whooping my butt in races can do 100w more and not break a sweat haha

supernova87a 6y ago

When energy gets dug or pumped out of the ground so cheap, you forget how hard it is to generate 100W, and what you're calling on in resources every time you turn on lights or drive a car.

kenned3 6y ago

I've actually considered this many times, but the math never works out. I ride 50KM 3 times a week, Strava's "estimated power rating" is all over the place, given i ride the same trail every time i would think it should not be like this. Lets be reasonable and say 160W (somewhere between all the ratings strava gave) avg for my 2 hour trip. I think I am a pretty strong rider, at the peak of the season I can beat electric bikes on flat ground as my top speed is higher then theirs (I dont have a speed limiter, they do) I can tell you this is NOT easy and once you realize how much physical effort it is you appreciate being able to plug things into the wall. it is the sustained power output that will kill you.. You can probably dump 10w of power for a long time, but putting out serious power for extended periods of time isnt easy.

Rapzid 6y ago
https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-cycling-power-output-compare https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-...
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
There was a video of an Olympic cyclist powering a toaster with a bike. He wan't able to keep it up enough to toast one piece properly. I was super in to cycling a while ago and I was only able to average 200w over an hour but thats not quite accurate because I was going super hard and then taking rests every 20mins which stops the clock.
- adrianN 6y ago
  This is the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ Spoiler: the toast gets toasted
- sneak 6y ago
  That’s a bad demo, as toast takes high power for a very short time. Just about any human in decent health could probably cycle long enough (with effort) to charge a battery to provide the requisite energy (over the course of, say, 30 minutes) and then output that energy at high power to toast over 3-4 minutes.

louwrentius 6y ago

My blog is solar-powered. Unfortunately, since late September, solar can't keep up. (Not a surprise given my suboptimal conditions.) A bicycle as a generator would probably allow me to have a bit of exercise and easily provide enough power to get my blog through the day. 1: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-power.html https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po... 2: https://louwrentius.com/solar/solar.png https://louwrentius.com/solar/solar.png

Danieru 6y ago
You need more solar panels. Panels are a numbers game.
- Faaak 6y ago
  More so that they're cheaper than ever.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Yes, but I have no space for them on my balcony ;-)

rntksi 6y ago

Obligated to mention "Oxygen Not Included". The game features "duplicants" in a futuristic scenario trying to survive in deep space. The first technology to produce power is a sort-of hamster wheelie that one of them has to cycle on to generate power. Very funny game.

js2 6y ago

I've been watching the Long Way Up motorcycle travelogue series with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman on AppleTV+. They're doing the trip from the tip of South America all the way to Los Angeles on a pair of prototype electric Harley Davidsons. The support crew is in a pair of prototype Rivian pickup trucks. The Rivians have a "tow to recharge" mode that they've used several times already in the first half dozen episodes. The show is great and I'm as fascinated by their dedication to do the trip on electric bikes (the first parts of the trip were in freezing and sub-freezing temps in areas with long distances between grid electricity availability) as I am by the scenery and their narration. Anyway, sorry for the tangent, but the title reminded me of the series. I hope it escapes AppleTV+ so that non-Apple folks can watch it at some point.

clouddrover 6y ago

Better off using an electric car. The Honda e has a socket in it for appliances: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsmQaVSYx-c&t=555 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsmQaVSYx-c&t=555 The Nissan Leaf can be used to power your home. Useful if you want to keep your fridge running in an extended power outage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78XGElU2I0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x78XGElU2I0 https://thedriven.io/2020/07/09/nissan-leaf-owners-should-be-able-to-use-their-cars-to-power-their-homes-later-this-year/ https://thedriven.io/2020/07/09/nissan-leaf-owners-should-be...

taneq 6y ago

If you want a sustainable intermittent power source and you don't have a stream nearby, you can't do better than a solar panel. They're ridiculously cheap these days and, with a bit of battery backup, are a far more practical electricity source than human muscle power.

geokon 6y ago

Is there a good way to put a generator on the bike itself? To say charge a powerbank/phone? I have a crappy bike (no gears, tons of rust) and I have a bad habit of going as fast as it lets me good. However I honestly don't really want to go faster than 15mph or so b/c it's generally unsafe. The problem is I have some mental block of making myself go slower. I guess I enjoy the workout. So I want to put in a resistance in somehow that I can crank up to make myself go slower. Does anyone have an ideas? The generators I've found online seem kinda whimpy and just slide on the exterior of the tire/rim. Is there is something more hardcore I can put on the chain or something?

toper-centage 6y ago
It's called a dynamo? Hub dynamos are the most efficient.
kroolik 6y ago
There are dynamos you put into the front wheel. I think they are more efficient than the ones you are Talking about (exterior). https://hollandbikeshop.com/en-gb/bicycle-wheels/front-hub/dynamo-hub/shimano-dh-c3003-hub-dynamo-6v-3w-36-hole-silver/ https://hollandbikeshop.com/en-gb/bicycle-wheels/front-hub/d...
- geokon 6y ago
  Everything I've read say they provide very little resistance. Maybe I'd just need to attach more loads. Like a seat warmer :)

adrianN 6y ago

Don't do this for environmental reasons. You'll never make back the energy embodied in the generator: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/05/bike-powered-electricity-generators.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/05/bike-powered-electri...

deleted 6y ago

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thescriptkiddie 6y ago

The author claims to have 200 watts of solar panels but only 420 Wh of battery, and because it's lead-acid only half of that is really usable. Unless they live somewhere that only gets 1-2 hours of insolation per day [0] that is nowhere near enough to store an average day's generation. Likely most of the energy is likely being wasted. http://www.bigfrogmountain.com/SunHoursPerDay.html http://www.bigfrogmountain.com/SunHoursPerDay.html