electricity from a gym: quick calcs

At the local enginering school, friends built a bike for just this purpose. Driving a DC machine to illuminate lamps. Every 50W, another lamp was added. That was 25 years ago. As I believe to remember 300W was just doable for few minutes. We weren't bikers then, but are now. So I'd assume these 300W to be doable for some while. Oh, we're biking in the hills, not in the flat.

Rene

Thanks. That seems reasonable for well conditioned cyclists.

Ed

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Then why bother posting, if you have no useful information? Maybe you belong in the "I Just Plonked Eeyore" thread?

There are some interesting numbers at:

-- perhaps the salient one here being that well-conditioned cyclists can produce ~200W for over an hour, with short bursts burst 1500-2000W.

Human-powered aircraft require a continuous ~200-250W input -- that guy who crossed the English Channel wasn't just a weekend rider. :-)

Interestingly, an ultra-lightweight single-man aircraft covered with solar panels can generate a couple kilowatts when the sun is shining brightly.

When I was in high school, the physics class did an experiment. There was a two- or three-flight staircase, and guys would volunteer to run from the bottom of the stairs to the top, timed.

Now, this wasn't restricted to legs - we were allowed to grab the railings, vault, whatever we needed to do to get to the top of that staicase as fast as humanly (teenagerly?) possible. Then, the calcs were quite simple; the guy raises X pounds Y feet in Z seconds. Some of the more athletic gus achieved almost a horsepower (746 watts), for about six seconds. :-)

Cheers! Rich

according to the bike at the university gym, when I started exercising a year ago, I produced 67 watts CW, not I'm not such a fat ass anymore and go cycling every weekend, I do about 90 CW, 140 peak for say 30 seconds. I'm 37, younger punks could do more.

there, some real numbers

Steve Roberts

I'm 67, and produce 45 watts with my arms. Don't know about legs... after the hip joint replacement next month I'll see.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
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If you could come up with a cheap do-it-yourself liposuction machine, the fat could be burned as fuel... :)