Generate Electricity Working Out (It’s a Growing Trend)

May 22nd, 2012 by Zachary Shahan

We’ve written about the potential to turn gyms or home DIY workout facilities into electricity generators numerous times before (even an idea for human-powered river gyms), but it seems the idea is starting to get a bit more popular. Here’s a roundup of some electricity-generating facilities from sister site Green Living Ideas worth checking out:

Exercise to Create Renewable Energy (via Green Living Ideas)

If you walked into an energy generating gym, you might not notice at first. You’d see your regular sweaty, toned bodies on sleek workout machines, but there’s a special icing on the cake here – these machines are hooked up to batteries that generate electricity. Essentially, kinetic energy from…

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Tags: human power, human powered gyms, human powered technology, kinetic energy, quickies

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

Hoppyoz1

How about a rectal tube to collect methane as well!!
http://sandeen.net/wordpress Eric

“A 30-minute workout on an elliptical will generate around 50 Watts of power, which is enough to power a CFL bulb for 2.5 hrs.” – for this to make any sense, you at least have to keep Power vs. Energy, Watts vs. Watt-hours straight. You probably meant 50 watt-hours above…. about 1/2 cent worth of energy. Wouldn’t the money be better spent elsewhere, for that kind of return…?
Charles

I once saw a program at the BBC where they generated the electricity use of just one person by means of stationary bikes equipped with a dynamo. They needed a lot of people cycling to cover the load. If I remember correctly, they needed more than two hundred to cover the peaks.

So it is a nice feel-good-idea, but will deliver only a drop of water on a hot plate.
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  i think the idea is — if you’re going to be exercising anyway…
  - Bob_Wallace
    
    Then Sir William Cubitt, a noted 19th-century civil engineer, … designed a treadmill for English prisons. It’s aim was to generate power for mills. It looked like a very wide paddle wheel. Workers held on to a bar and climbed the paddle blades. It was like walking upstairs for hours on end. They had to keep lifting their legs. Gravity gave them no choice.
    
    A typical treadmill shift lasted eight hours. Workers spent 40 percent of that time resting. That’s a lot worse than it sounds. It meant raising the lower half of their bodies 11,000 feet per day. And yet, hard as it was, 200 men and women could hardly match the output of one water wheel.
    
    The English put vertical separators between prisoners in 1838. Each was to labor in isolation, repenting his crimes and purifying himself through toil. Those treadmills were still operating in this century. Oscar Wilde,
    sent to prison for gross indecency in 1895, worked on one. When he came out, he wrote about it in the Ballad of Reading Gaol.
    
    *We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns
    And sweated on the mill,
    But in the heart of every man
    Terror was lying still.*
    
    http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi374.htm