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

By: Hoppyoz1

Hoppyoz1 — Wed, 23 May 2012 05:31:00 +0000

How about a rectal tube to collect methane as well!!

By: Bob_Wallace

Bob_Wallace — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:38:00 +0000

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

By: Zachary Shahan

Zachary Shahan — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:26:00 +0000

i think the idea is — if you’re going to be exercising anyway…

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:59:00 +0000

“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…?

By: Charles

Charles — Tue, 22 May 2012 13:55:00 +0000

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.