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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
by 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).
- michaelt 6y agoHere's a neat video of an olympic cycle sprinter powering a toaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ 1800 watt-hours, or 1.8 kilowatt-hours, is 20 cents worth of electricity. Using a cycle to power things makes for a neat demo, and might be good for educating people about electricity and suchlike, but anyone who expects to notice it on their energy bill or carbon footprint, or even for the installation to pay for itself, is off by a few orders of magnitude.
- usrusr 6y agoYeah, the thing is, the by far best use for "bike power" is actual transportation. 0.15kWh of pedaling power can get you surprisingly far (one hour of moderate effort cycling), but would be rather unimpressive for the usual electrical applications. Apparently, almost two centuries of doing that have lead us to some very clever and pragmatic efficiency tweaks, probably because the effort-motion feedback loop is so extremely compelling to the human mind (evolution has made us brains on an endurance locomotion machine, everything else is rather unimpressive compared to peer mammals).
- OJFord 6y agoNot to mention bicycles are designed for converting rotary motion into, well still rotary motion, but forwards travel; not electrical potential. I haven't done any research or taken measurements, but particularly the low-end style tyre-on-roller that I have must be awfully inefficient. It's been briefly popular (to some extent) a couple of times to power a light while cycling. These things don't typically have large capacitors or batteries to store surplus charge, because powering the light is about all you can do! (Ok not totally fair since you're also cycling, but still.)
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoMany (most?) bathrooms in the US have more than a single, lonely bulb.