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How many of your out there remember going to a friend’s house or a garage sale and seeing one of those tension controlled exercise bikes? For those of you who do remember, do you also remember the inch or so of dust that they were covered with?
Well, as we head into a possible Road Warrior type future, maybe those bikes have promise. The following comes from CNN (full article here):
LONDON, England (CNN) — Would you still watch your favorite television program if you had to cycle for an hour before you could view it?
Couch potatoes will be horrified, but fresh advances in human-powered technology — where users power appliances through their own motion — could one day see a ‘workout-to-watch’ scenario become reality.
Human power is rapidly gaining in popularity worldwide as businesses seek ‘greener’ methods of operating.
The profile of the technology is set to receive a further boost this month when a human-powered gym opens in Portland, Oregon, and again in September when the human-powered ’sustainable dance club’, Club Watt, opens its doors in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
The story brings back to mind the Amp Human Powered Energy Event that was a part of the Super Bowl last year.
While I think that generating power from a stationary bike is pretty cool, I also think that for those of us that commute, it would be awesome to have a way to capture energy on your daily ride. I have not done any research on the issue yet, but if any of those of you out there have, I’d love input. Have any companies or hackers out there created an easy way to capture the energy from your ride and use it for power at home?
The story also reminds me of my favorite ESPN commercial ever:
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Filed Under: green power
2 comments for this entry ↓
1 ian // Nov 23, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I have a Bion-x electric assist system on my bike, which has a regeneration mode that includes four levels of resistance. This allows me to dump (maybe “trickle” is a more appropriate word) juice back into the battery, either from going down hill, or from pedaling harder than I need to simply to move myself and the bike. If you hacked the system and installed a way to access the power in the battery *other than* the system on the bike, you would indeed have this system you are speculating about. I don’t think you’d get much from it. More likely, you could put it up on a stand when the weather is too bad to ride, and store that energy for later. I still don’t think it’s a ton, but that would be better than trying to scavenge extra power while commuting, which I’m sure is minimal at best.
2 Chad // Nov 24, 2008 at 8:18 am
Bre Pettis, formerly of MAKE, has a new show called History Hacker; in the first episode he shows how to generate electricity using a bicycle…basic Faraday device, magnets and a copper coil.
http://brepettis.com/blog/2008/09/04/history-hacker-history-channel/
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