2 problems, one soultion!

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by Jeff 152, Jun 17, 2007.

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  1. Jeff 152

    Jeff 152 Registered Senior Member

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    Ok two big problems today are obesity and energy needs. I just had a crazy idea that might help sove both.

    What if in every home we put treadmill type things (actually more like gerbil wheels) that converted the spinning of the treadmill into electricity. People would run more and use less power. I have no idea how much electricity that could generate, probabaly not enough to power the entire house but it would at least reduce the amount of electricity they use. For once, people would actually have an incentive to work out because it saves them money (hopefully not to buy more candy)

    Can anybody figure that out? lets just say in a family of 3 if each person runs or walks 2 miles each day, how much electricity could that generate and how much does an average family use per day? This energy could maybe go to a central home battery that would power some of the houses power needs.

    Extending this idea, maybe gyms could open up around the country that would have this same thing and would act like a power plant. Hell maybe the gym could even pay people to go there!! Could this actually work or am I an idiot?
     
    Jeff 152, Jun 17, 2007
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  3. Read-Only

    Read-Only Valued Senior Member

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    Although it might help a littel with the weight problem (and even that's doubtful since people seem to keep on eating too much anyway) but it would do almost nothing in terms of generating power. During the Korean war, they had civilian-trype radios that were powered by a guy riding a bike/generator combination machine. It was about all the poor fellow could do to just power their radio and they had to change riders frequently to do that.
     
    Read-Only, Jun 17, 2007
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  5. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    There is no "powerplant." There's a very good reason that industry and modern technology could not be invented until we unlocked the secret of converting chemical energy into mechanical energy. Muscles just don't generate enough power to do any really useful work except the work that we already do with our muscles like making the bed and setting the table. John Henry died trying to beat that steam hammer in the folk song, and a modern fossil fuel-burning excavation machine would have buried him under a mountain of earth.

    Most modern treadmills show you the amount of energy you produced during your workout, and it's pretty insignificant compared to the power demands of any electrical appliance larger than an iPod. The average adult human can generate a peak of less than one fourth of a horsepower. Which makes sense if you compare us to a horse.

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    That's less than 200 watts, just about enough to power the lights in a tiny apartment if they've all been converted to energy-efficient fluorescents, or two incandescent bulbs if they haven't. So you could power the lights to read by while you're working out, or a small stereo to pace yourself to the music. Then when you're done it's over, you don't generate any excess to store.

    My small townhouse with three adults and four dogs consumes 100 kilowatt-hours per day. That's an average load of 4,000 watts. I'd need at least 20 people pumping at exercise equipment to generate that much power. They wouldn't be able to keep it up for more than an hour, so I'd need to rotate a team of 480 people just for my house.

    Furthermore, the one-fourth of a kilowatt-hour my house uses in one hour costs us two or three cents. You can't buy the 60 calories worth of food that a human burns off in an hour of exercise for two or three cents. At least not in America, even a slice of bread costs more than that.

    The only halfway efficient thing you could do to avoid simply wasting that energy would be to pump the treadmill's output into a charger for the batteries for your computer, cell phone, etc.

    Edit: My numbers aren't exact but they're close enough for these purposes.
     
    Last edited: Jun 17, 2007
    Fraggle Rocker, Jun 17, 2007
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