ok so you spin on your office chair... your gonna do it anyway, why not have a tiny gear system that powers a generator that charges a battery pack that you can use to power... something...
or how about the same thing in your door... i mean your gonna open the door anyway? why not make a few joules of power?
or rotating doors... people make them spin... put an extra cog and wire it to a magnet and copper coil set up and create some power...
or excercise bikes and rowing machines in gyms... why not wire them to a battery pack which can power the lights in the room when someones in it... or heat the water or something... anything, just do something to use the power that is wasted by pointless activities that humans do..
by the way, i worked it out, calories to joules and then averages out... a human at 3000 calories a day (normal man) operates at 160 watts...
now thats bloody efficient-- seraphim, Dec 12 2006 Energy Harvesting Floors http://www.nytimes....0section1C.t-2.html [jmvw, Dec 13 2006] No it's bloody not. Efficient would be if we were doing 150 watts of useful work and consuming 160 watts. Currently we're using that 160 watts to slightly heat and humidify air as we inneficiently aspirate in a reciprocating fashion, pump blood around that warms our bodies slightly causing a minor convective heating effect if the ambient temperature is below 37 degrees. If it's not, we're even more horribly inneficient.
I can appreciate your sentiment, but imagine the infrastructure required to gather useful energy from a chair, or door, etc. If you compare purchase price, to energy generation potential versus current rediculously low energy prices (and therefore savings) over the useful life of an object, well then none of this will fly, not even at a gym. Not even close.
Oh, by the way, you should probably read the help file (as you were recommended to do while you were signing up), cause I can hear the pitter patter of tiny little fishbones on the way for this idea, which sadly has been repeated over and over again on this site.
I was wondering when the next "Power gym" idea was coming around....-- Custardguts, Dec 12 2006 I wish I could turn calories into jewels - surely there's a way.-- po, Dec 12 2006 bah!-- po, Dec 12 2006 I agree that the energy generated and the infrastructure required makes generation from chairs and doors etc ridiculous but I really don't understand why gyms can't be utilised.-- BlueGiraffe, Dec 12 2006 They can. It's been thought of before.-- jmvw, Dec 12 2006 ... they are still using bugger all energy, producing some pretty pissant power.
But the real problem would be applying the generated power for use. If you're talking online generation, you'll have all sorts of issues with voltage regulation, synchronisation, and most importantly, backfeed protection, lest the guy on the bike slow down too much and begin to be "motored" by the grid power.
Otherwise, how would you store the energy offline? in big lead-acid batteries? All this costs a great deal, considering reasonably short service life and low power storage.
I really couldn't see any of this getting off the ground, sorry.-- Custardguts, Dec 12 2006 I like this idea but lazy people are against it as it makes them work harder. Unfortunately it is doomed to fail and you would get all those fish bones as the same lazy people ate all the croissants.-- Pellepeloton, Dec 12 2006 Cost too much, too much work. bla bla bla bla bla.-- twitch, Dec 12 2006 It's going to be built. See "Energy-Harvesting Floors" in the The 6th Annual Year in Ideas (link).-- jmvw, Dec 13 2006 why not open a weight loss clinic, where all the larger persons of politically incorrect weight-to-height ratio, push on a massive horizontal gear, which in turn rotates a generator, which mocrowaves the popcorn, which they eat, which they burn off by powering an oven or cakemixer, or whatever, wouldnt that be a bit more efficient, oh and you could charge for the privelige, say a measly fee of $8 an hour per person, you might need say 10 people to power this, so $80 per hour pretax, to do , er, bugger all, and you could give them a chocky bar at the end of a 5 hour session, so they come back tomorrow,......yeah yeah i know i'm a sadist.-- Stork, Dec 13 2006 ok... how about gym bikes that power their own bloody screen, why use batteries when your easily generating enough power to do the job of a bloody watchbattery!-- seraphim, Dec 29 2006 //why use batteries when your easily generating enough power to do the job of a bloody watchbattery!//
Most likely because the cost to run even a small generator would be more than to buy a few watch batterys.-- acurafan07, Dec 29 2006 You get my bone, not because I don't think it would be workable, but because it's been done over a thousand times. Surely when you saw the "Other: Energy: Bioenergy: Human" category, you could have taken a little look at what all has gone before you. The HB is about new ideas... often quirky and unworkable ones... but new all the same.
[custardguts] I must disagree with you when you say //But the real problem would be applying the generated power for use. If you're talking online generation, you'll have all sorts of issues with voltage regulation, synchronisation, and most importantly, backfeed protection, lest the guy on the bike slow down too much and begin to be "motored" by the grid power.//
Grid connections that solve all of these problems are pretty well baked under the concept of net metering, which work for solar panels, microturbines, and even diesel backup generators. None of these glow, spin themselves, or produce gasoline, so I cannot see how they would cause exercise bikes to pedal themselves.-- ye_river_xiv, Dec 29 2006 ... zzzzz-- nomocrow, Dec 29 2006 For ideas such as this, it would be nice to have a template setting out a standard rationale, attached generators etc. This could be preprinted by the HB gremlin. The idea author only need insert the currently underutilized source of kinetic energy to complete the idea (eg: rain, meteorites, falling dung, masturbation, speedbump compression, windblown trees, tectonic plate motion, plane tires on landing etc).
Such a template would allow these ideas to be compared on their merits alone, without intrusive prejudices involving grammar or author.-- bungston, Dec 29 2006 Another reason is that generators create resistance. Ever attached one of those lights to a bicycle powered by your pedaling? If you have you'd notice that it is much harder to pedal. When spinning in an office char or opening a door, the only resistance is the friction. If you added a generator to the equation, you'd have to use much more energy to do both of those things.-- acurafan07, Dec 29 2006 [y_r_x] the mechanics (or electrics, as it were) for "motoring" are quite simple, and let me assure you, are of a great deal of concern in the power generation business. Any spinning generator connected to an AC power grid (read multiple supply sources) will, given a loss of rotational speed, and failure of some of its protection circuitry, turn into an electric motor, unfortunately often one many more times powerful than it's rated gereration ability. This has been responsible for torque failure of crankshafts (read: holy shit) in multi-megawatt diesel reciprocating engines, and I am told is quite disastrous for turbine engines, diesel or steam. It's often only two HV breakers (read: component subject to random failure) that stand in the way of this when an engine fails whilst online. Once again, there exists protection circuitry to prevent this, which is rather complex, and whilst in large, very well controlled installations said circuitry is very reliable, you're talking about putting these things everywhere..
This is only a concern with rotating generators. Comments about reversing entropy such as producing diesel are rediculous, and just show that you don't understand what I am referring to.
So yes, protection and control circuitry are used to attenuate the risks, however you're talking about a large distributed network of supplies hanging off every door, chair, gym piece, etc, each of which would need a very expensive inverting transformer, and some fairly whizz-bang schicko bloody control modules to prevent problems, what with varying input speeds, load, etc. You could simplify by having a DC net inside say a large gym, charging a large DC battery bank, then bleeding the power into the grid through a single point, howerver I think we're still up there with the fairies here.
Hell, make you life simpler and just heat the sauna via the bikes. Make it so you can either pay $5 to go in, or ride a bike for 30 minutes...-- Custardguts, Jan 02 2007 "" I really couldn't see any of this getting off the ground, sorry. Custardguts, Dec 12 2006""
that's why this is the HALF bakery. :)-- copycat042, Mar 21 2008 random, halfbakery