Make Electricity While You Exercise

Most treadmills and stationary bikes use electricity, but

what if you could produce electricity while exercising?
With a pedal-power generator, you can! And you can
use the electricity immediately to power a television,
computer, stereo or other electronics or store it in
batteries to use it later.
By John Gulland

Why not convert your workout into useful power by

using a pedal-powered generator?

While you probably wont produce enough electricity to

power your entire house, pedal-powered generators
can play a small but useful role in some homes.
Pedal-Powered Generators
My neighbor Linda Archibald has an off-the-grid house
that is powered by an array of photovoltaic cells (solar
panels). When she asked if she could recharge her
backup batteries with a bicycle adapted to generate
electricity, I was skeptical at first.
After doing a little research, I found that an efficient
bike generator pedaled by a reasonably fit person can
produce about 100 watts of continuous output. An
experienced biker can produce a peak of more than 400

watts, but peaks dont count for much when it comes to

pedal power generators. Assuming an ambitious
exercise period of one hour, a person could produce
about 100 watt-hours of electricity. That is one-tenth of
a kilowatt-hour (1 kilowatt-hour = 1,000 watts for 1
hour).
Most of us pay our local utilities about 10 cents per
kilowatt-hour for electricity, including taxes and
surcharges. By getting our heart rate up and breaking a
sweat for an hour, we could produce 1 cent worth of
electricity. Not much incentive, I thought.
With the electricity produced by an hour of pedaling,
we could light a 100-watt incandescent bulb for an
hour, or power a 20-watt compact fluorescent bulb for
about five hours.
Pedal power is a fun idea that does generate usable
amounts of electricity, but its easy to understand why
a human-powered device can be viewed as a trinket
without a meaningful role in a households energy
supply. Nevertheless, some pedal generators are used
regularly to do serious work. The critical factor to
making pedal power a viable option is matching
expectations with realistic output.
Will Pedal for Power
To find out what types of applications are practical for
pedal power, I called Sheila Kerr, part owner and
customer service manager of Windstream Power, which
is probably the nations most successful manufacturer
of pedal devices designed to produce electricity.
Sheila remembers pedaling the Bike Power Generator
her dad built in the 1970s, and she couldnt have
imagined then that she would earn her living building

and selling human-powered generators. Her father,

Colin, is a physicist who went into the solar business in
the quiet Eastern Townships of Quebec in the early
1970s.
After a couple of moves, the family and the business
landed in Vermont, where it thrives today. The company
also sells wind turbines. Our Human Power Series is
our bread and butter. We ship several hundred a year,
Sheila says.
Windstream Power offers two human-powered devices.
One is the Bike Power Generator, which is a stand to fit
your bike to; it quickly converts a regular bicycle to an
electricity generator.
The other product is the Human Power Generator, a
floor-mounted stand with a pedal on each side and a
generator inside. Simply sit in a chair in front of the
Human Power Generator and start pedaling.
Windstreams customers often have surprising uses for
its products. For example, the company shipped more
than 300 units of the Human Power Generator to
Siberian forestry camps to power communications
equipment.
Both models produce direct current (DC), but you can
purchase a battery pack that includes an inverter so
you can power household appliances that run on
alternating current (AC).
Educators, off-gridders and marketing firms that want
to use pedal generators to promote a green image are
Windstreams main customers for human-powered
products. Schools and museums also have been steady
customers for the company. Windstream builds
interactive and educational displays that can provide

the participants with an opportunity to experience the

physical energy required to produce electricity, Sheila
says.
She describes a particularly effective display in which
the generator load can be switched between a compact
fluorescent light bulb, which is easy to light up by
pedaling, and an incandescent bulb, which takes more
effort to light because of its greater energy
consumption.
Sometimes a Little Power Goes a Long Way
While a human-powered generator wont produce the
output of a wind turbine or photovoltaic array, it can
produce usable power that contributes to your overall
energy needs. If you use less electricity to begin with,
the amount generated by pedal power can meet a
larger percent of your power needs.
David Butchers experience is a case in point. Every
morning he goes out to his garage and pedals a
stationary bike for at least a half hour. The effort he
puts into his workout isnt wasted on friction as it is in
most fitness gyms. Every pedal stroke makes electricity
that is sent down a cable to his office in the house to
power several small electrical devices. Pedal power
recharges his electric razor and his cell phone, runs a
computer monitor, and periodically runs the
compressor that tops off the air pressure in the tires of
his vehicles. David also runs the bike generator directly
to a water pump whenever necessary for aerating and
filtering the small backyard fishpond.
David works out of his home office in San Jose,
California, as the client services director for a Web
agency, and he sits in front of a computer most of the

day. He needed a way to stay fit and remembered the

pedal power generator he had built in college. As a
serious bicyclist, David combined that interest with his
passion for renewable energy, and in 1976 built a pedal
generator to use as a trainer. The generator worked,
and it certainly showed him the limitations of pedal
power. But the trainer was heavy and cumbersome with
its homemade frame, so he liquidated it at a yard sale
rather than moving it to his new digs.
Then several years ago, he built what he calls the PPPM
(pedal power prime mover) for daily exercise and as an
outlet for his penchant for tinkering with renewable
energy.
It seems ones satisfaction with pedal power has a lot
to do with attitude. Davids house is a good candidate
for the little extra power his morning fitness program
produces because its already energy efficient. The
Butchers have moved well down the road to energy
self-sufficiency by relying on renewable energy. He and
his wife have a 2.5-kilowatt grid-tied solar array and are
net suppliers of electricity to their local utility. They also
use their electric bike or tiny electric car for local
errands.
David came up with his pedal generator after thinking
about how to reduce the friction loss inherent when a
rubber bike tire turns a small roller with a generator
attached. He also wanted to smooth out the normal
jerkiness of a freewheeling pedal stroke. And, finally, he
needed a way to spin a half-horsepower generator fast
enough to achieve peak efficiency. The result was a 36inch-diameter plywood disk in place of a regular bikes
front sprocket. A groove cut around the perimeter
guides a light chain that turns a sprocket on the

generator. (Hes recently gone back to a design that

uses friction instead of a chain to run the generator. Its
much quieter.)
Unlike many other pedal power generators, Davids
creation is not adapted from a bicycle frame, but is
built from scratch using simple materials. He sells
construction plans for the PPPM on his Web site. (See
"Resources," below.)
An Off-Grid Power Boost
Linda Archibald came to our neighborhood three years
ago. She had a contractor install a small solar-electric
system to power electric equipment, including a well
pump and the laptop computer that is vital to her
consulting business. Her 330 watts of solar collectors,
battery bank and an inverter provide for her modest
electrical needs except during what Linda calls the
dark times from October through December. The first
cloudy autumn was tense, with the batteries running
low frequently enough to be a serious problem. It was
then she asked me about pedal power.
At the time, I was planning to build a wind turbine using
an alternator made up of permanent magnets and coils
of copper wire. This was to be a low-speed alternator,
which, as it turned out, matched the rotational speed of
a bicycle rear wheel. After much measuring and
consideration, and after buying a used mountain bike
from a pawnshop, I managed to shoehorn the alternator
I had built into the rear of the bike and drive it with the
normal multispeed bike gears.
No one was more surprised than I at how well Lindas
power bike performed. It was pleasant to pedal and

seemed at least as efficient as any of the human

powered devices I had researched.
As an added bonus, the bike was remarkably quiet in
operation because of its low speed and low friction,
unlike some types of bike generators. But because of its
complexity and the amount of time devoted to its
construction, it cost several times more than any other
power bike Id seen.
Just the components purchased to build it cost more
than $600, plus all the labor. Linda paid a total of
$1,300, surely a premium price for a bike that could be
expected to produce only 100 watts of power. Despite
the high cost, I still had doubts it could make a
meaningful contribution to Lindas power needs.
I neednt have worried. After more than a year of use,
Linda views the bike as part of her overall electrical
system and is pleased she is no longer totally at the
mercy of the weather.
In the end, I just integrated the bike into my normal
routine, she says. In cloudy weather, the more
computer work I have to do, the more pedaling Ill do.
The bike has put my solar-power system under my
control.
Unlike David, Linda doesnt use the bike for fitness,
although that is certainly a by-product. What really
matters to her is how it reduces worry and stress. Now
I can just deal with low power conditions during cloudy
weather without fear of discharging the batteries too
far, she says.
Lindas off-the-grid existence has led to some
interesting exchanges when her city-dwelling children
come to visit. Her daughter, an athlete, was induced to

pedal furiously one morning in order to use her electric

hair dryer. And Lindas 19-year-old son had to pedal one
evening to reach an agreed battery voltage before
watching a movie on Lindas laptop computer.
For many people the idea of pedaling to produce
electricity or perform other work has a lot of appeal. In
North America, though, we use so much cheap
electricity that the output from pedal power seems
miniscule by comparison. According to the Energy
Information Administration, the average American
household (2.4 people) goes through about 30 kilowatthours per day, which is 300 times more electricity than
a reasonably fit person pedaling a good power bike can
produce in an hour. Thats enough to cause anyones
enthusiasm to waver.
On the other hand, people such as Linda Archibald and
David Butcher have found ways to match the modest
output of a pedal generator to their needs and
expectations. In the process, theyve proved that,
under the right conditions, pedal power can be
effective, fun and satisfying.