Gyms have grown to be incredibly popular. Most gyms have rows upon rows of treadmills, bicycles, stepping machines and other aerobic-type machines. Why not integrate these machines that have rapidly moving parts in uniform motion into a device that can generate electricity from them? Gyms no doubt spend a lot of money on their electricity bill ironically even to actually make these machines work in the first place. Perhaps somehow these machines can be linked into the gym's electricity 'grid' thus reducing and maybe even eliminating any external electricity requirement? Surplus could even be 'exported' to nearby shops and restaurants.
Gym members could even be motivated to run/cycle etc longer and thus generate more electricity if they can share in the electricity generation. Their membership fees could be reduced on a sliding scale depending on how much they generate. There could be other rewards such as cash or vouchers provided by the nearby shops and restaurants benefiting from this system.
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I have no idea how much electricity is available through this source, but electric generating windmills are frequently not constructed by private people because a large percentage of the electric companies are refusing to permit private sources to generate their own electricity and sell their excess back to the electric companies. The companies support political lobbies to generate legislation to forbid private people from selling power to the general distributers.
I have thought of this many times. The problem in this day in age is that most of the machines actually use more energy than they would produce. There are very few completely manual machines out there. There might be the rare stationary bike left. But generally, these all require energy for the motion of their moving parts.
Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with entropy.
I read something in Popular Science about an invention to leverage the pressure placed on common surfaces to translate into energy. They had calculated the energy expended on a busy New York City street and determined how much electricity could be generated if that energy were transferred.
This same concept would be ideal in gyms, busy streets or highways (if we think that people walking expend energy, think of the pressure applied by semis on highways.)
Humans don't use very much energy
1 Calorie [nutritional] = 1.163 watthour
The average diet is 2000 Calories a day, so if all of that were converted to electrical energy, one person could run a 100 watt light bulb for 20 hours. Mechanical devices could only recover a fraction of human energy consumption.
(Conversion data from http://www.onlineconversion.com/energy.htm)
For a little more perspective...
I've pedaled bicycles that are hooked up to electrical genarators, and it takes A LOT of effort just to put out 75 Watts. Perhaps your local science-center has one of these bikes.
For a little more perspective...
The cost of electricity generation in Pennsylvania is less than 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. If the typical human energy usage (2000 Calories) were converted totally to electrical energy, we would recover about 2 KwHr per day per person. That's less than 12 cents.
Of course, the price of electricity is kept artificially low because Congress uses our tax money to subsidize energy production and all the pollution that goes along with it. Maybe if Congress stopped stealing our money and giving it to the oil companies, the price of electricity would go up and we could actually think about using our resources rationally. However, that will never happen because Congress is just a bunch of thieves, and when elections come around we are only given the choice between the greater thief and the lesser thief.
Like what others have said, you'd have a hard time powering a light in the room you're working out in, much less power a house.
I think you would get further by marketing the idea for home-based weight-loss: couch potatoes would have to generate some power to watch t.v. I've been toying with the idea for a while now. there would have to be a way to keep certain applliances turned off unless some energy was being generated by a stationary bike or some such. kids video games would work too. everyone is worried about childhood obesity, right? i think there are a lot of people out there who need to learn about working for what you want. of course this would be limited by the constraints of an honor system. we would have to get TLC to do a reality show with hosts and oversight to really spark a paradigm shift towards producing the energy that you use.
Wonderful idea. Those who criticise the relatively small power generating potential of the machines in the gym should stop there and look instead at the publicity generating potential of this business idea for the gym. Also look at the guilt alleviation potential that self generated power would have for the fatties. Instead of throwing kilos, (energy), down the drain at the gym, (and wasting all those lovely fatty hamburgers that led you to the gym in the first place), eat yourself happy and shed the fat by converting it to energy