Posted by news on July 16, 2012, 1:10 am
On Sun, 15 Jul 2012 16:00:46 -0400, "Jim Wilkins"
>> ...
>> ... The human body cannot produce even a fraction of a horsepower
>> for extended periods - 1 HP = 746 watts. If you're in good shape,
>> you
>> *might* produce 1/3 of that - but don't expect to do it for hours.
>>
>One horsepower was the work a horse could do averaged over 24 hours,
>so if a mine owner needed to own ten horses to keep his mine pumped
>out he should order a 10HP steam engine.
>Horsepower and human power:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower
>"When considering human-powered equipment, a healthy human can produce
>about 1.2 hp briefly .. and sustain about 0.1 hp indefinitely; trained
>athletes can manage up to about 2.5 hp briefly[11] [12] and 0.3 hp for
>a period of several hours."
>Watt padded his estimate to protect against customer complaints, since
>the mine owner could easily see if the 10HP engine was keeping the
>mine as dry as his 10 horses had.
>jsw
Sustaining 0.1hp indefinitely means you can run a small laptop or a
netbook plus a cable or DSL modem for as long as you can manage the
pedals. That could be useful, but it's not enough for the original
poster to continue on with thoughts of "selling power back to the
grid".
For example, my Dell dual core AMD laptop uses 42 watts or 80VA when
the battery is fully charged. That goes up about 50% if running the
laptop and charging the battery at the same time (figures from a
KillAW@att).
Posted by Winston on July 16, 2012, 4:08 am
news@jecarter.us wrote:
(...)
> Sustaining 0.1hp indefinitely...
(At my peak of fitness, I could generate 70 W for about 30 minutes
then I was *quite* finished.)
--Winston
Posted by Vaughn on July 16, 2012, 11:43 am
On 7/16/2012 12:08 AM, Winston wrote:
> (At my peak of fitness, I could generate 70 W for about 30 minutes
> then I was *quite* finished.)
That implies that in a mere 28.6 hours you could generate a whole kW/h
of power, and (at .15 per Kw/h) it would only take 190 hours to generate
one dollar's worth of electricity.
Assuming that you could cobble all the equipment together for $00, and
you had no maintenance or cooling costs and 100% efficiency, you would
break even on your investment in a mere 95,238 hours of peddling.
This idea is looking better and better!
Vaughn
Posted by Jim Wilkins on July 16, 2012, 11:51 am
> ...> Assuming that you could cobble all the equipment together for
> $00, and you had no maintenance or cooling costs and 100%
> efficiency, you would break even on your investment in a mere 95,238
> hours of peddling.
> This idea is looking better and better!
> Vaughn
The payback period is a lot shorter if you can delete the gym
membership.
jsw
Posted by Winston on July 16, 2012, 1:54 pm
Jim Wilkins wrote:
>> ...> Assuming that you could cobble all the equipment together for
>> $00, and you had no maintenance or cooling costs and 100%
>> efficiency, you would break even on your investment in a mere 95,238
>> hours of peddling.
>>
>> This idea is looking better and better!
>>
>> Vaughn
> The payback period is a lot shorter if you can delete the gym
> membership.
I did it by *losing* 0.1 kWhr/hr.
So it only cost me 1.4c to exercise for 1/2 Hr using
pedal power.
I'll make it up in volume. :)
--Winston
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>> ... The human body cannot produce even a fraction of a horsepower
>> for extended periods - 1 HP = 746 watts. If you're in good shape,
>> you
>> *might* produce 1/3 of that - but don't expect to do it for hours.
>>
>One horsepower was the work a horse could do averaged over 24 hours,
>so if a mine owner needed to own ten horses to keep his mine pumped
>out he should order a 10HP steam engine.
>Horsepower and human power:
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower
>"When considering human-powered equipment, a healthy human can produce
>about 1.2 hp briefly .. and sustain about 0.1 hp indefinitely; trained
>athletes can manage up to about 2.5 hp briefly[11] [12] and 0.3 hp for
>a period of several hours."
>Watt padded his estimate to protect against customer complaints, since
>the mine owner could easily see if the 10HP engine was keeping the
>mine as dry as his 10 horses had.
>jsw