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

[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!!!

[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.