Way cool! Want to produce some pedal power for a free meal?

[crazycanuck]

I saw this article this morning and thought..Funky!!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8621038.stm

[Blueberry]

Love it!! Wish we could hook up our home trainers and get power back onto the grid - we produce some serious watts in the winter with the hours and hours and hours and....

[Tri Girl]

I wanted to visit Copenhagen before, but now I *REALLY* want to go!!! That's really great!!
If I ride for an hour (40 watts)- do you think they'd give me $144 worth of meals? Hmmm... cycle to eat free- that's my kind of deal!

and Blueberry- I was kinda thinking the same thing. I wonder how an ordinary person could do that. I could surely at least power my phone or computer or something. I wish I were a science person.

[VeloVT]

Love it!! Wish we could hook up our home trainers and get power back onto the grid - we produce some serious watts in the winter with the hours and hours and hours and....

love it! this would be awesome. I also like that it would provide another incentive to actually use the trainer in the winter...

[OakLeaf]

It's a great idea, but won't they go broke doing it?

I mean, I realize the price of gasoline is kept artificially low in the USA, and by extension, I'm guessing the same is true for other energy costs - I know fuel extraction and insurance are heavily subsidized. But the maximum rate we pay at home is $0.114 per kilowatt-hour - plus a couple of flat monthly charges, so the actual effective rate is a little bit higher, but not much. And I know that commercial electric rates are higher in the USA than residential. But €2.6 per 10 watt-hours is thirty times my highest rate.

[Bike Chick]

How cool is that??? We need to take lessons from these folks. 36% of the city's population commutes to work??? That's marvelous! And I wonder if you have a limit to what you can order for your efforts?? Do they have a special "power generator menu" or could you order anything you want with dessert and a cappucino?

[sfa]

I doubt they'll go broke doing this.

Most likely this isn't about reducing energy use/increasing production so much as it is about raising awareness and, through that, increasing their business. They will only have a certain number of bicycles available for this, and will probably only allow one free meal (which will cost them a lot less than the market value of it) per session, so even if you stay on for an hour you're only going to get one meal. Since they seem to be catering to business travelers who will see this as a replacement for their planned trip to the gym, they will most likely only be giving out a handful of free meals each day (assuming the business travelers have other places to be most of the day).

In return for these free meals, they are getting a bit of generated electricity and a LOT of publicity. I know I had never heard of this hotel before today, and now I know the name, their location (even in the UK) and that they are a creative company that supports causes I support. That's a pretty good tradeoff for them.

Sarah

[mariacycle]

Love it!! Wish we could hook up our home trainers and get power back onto the grid - we produce some serious watts in the winter with the hours and hours and hours and....

on a past season of the real world the computer was only powered by the bike next to it so they were forced to trade off generating power I looked it up online that season out of interest and it doesn't seem REMARKABLY difficult to set it up but more of a DIY project than I'm willing to take on...

[OakLeaf]

If you already have backup (or exclusively off-grid) power with a storage battery, then I wouldn't think it would be too much trouble to wire a bicycle generator into it. If not, it would be a pretty major undertaking for the small amount of power you could produce that way.

We haven't done that yet, but we keep poking around the idea. We can go without electricity for a few days in warm weather (and really, our co-op is top-notch in restoring outages), but water, not so much. Our well is over 300 feet deep, too deep to pump by hand.

[Biciclista]

we have a generator that fits on the back of a bike with a blender on top. We've had smoothie parties. Unfortunately I sold the bike that used to be hooked up to the blender/generator.
I'd like to see more ways to use your bike to generate power (I do have a schmidt hub on my bike so I can make my own LIGHT power), i think all children's computers ought to be hooked up to bicycles!!!

[shootingstar]

As some of you may know, some bikes already have a built-in pedal powered lighting system for back and front. Some Dahon folding bikes offer this.

But it would be fantastic to have a lightweight battery storage system for our pedal powering for any type of ride that we do and use that saved power for other things off-bike also.

Or hey, at least power up the helmet webcam! Or our digital camera on hand.

So many useful small-scale applications for cyclists.

[OakLeaf]

we have a generator that fits on the back of a bike with a blender on top.

Huh. I never looked that closely at one of those setups, and have never seen one IRL, but just assumed that it was a direct drive to the blender blades. Wouldn't that be more efficient?

There are some people with a bicycle-powered ice cream churn that show up to some of the "green living" events in my area.

[GLC1968]

We have been tossing around the idea of hooking up one of our bikes to our grain mill. The mill is electric, but it also has a hand-crank option. The hand-crank is physically very HARD...so with a few pulleys, we could do it by bike easy enough.

From there we could charge up batteries or other items...or even crank the agitator on a washing machine....

Some day, anyway.

ETA - our first order of business would be to hook the cream separator to the bike. It would be much easier to maintain a constant speed using a bike than cranking by hand (I would imagine).