... and your car was an electric car, how many stationary bike miles would you have to pedal to power the car for 1 mile?
A question that occurred to me after Mr Evilwrench mentioned the idea of making everyone generate their own electricity through stationary biking (in the post about weight-loss contraptions).
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I guess it depend on the weight of the car.
Obama, for instance, would probably have zero time left to fund raise.
Not good when you are the president married to a single mother.
In Bedrock they just powered their cars with their feet.
Ahead of their era...
A good athlete can generate about 1/3 of a horsepower, and a horsepower is 750 watts, so call it 250 watts per hour.
The Leaf has a 109 mile range and a 24 kilowatt hour battery, or about 220 watts per mile.
Call it one hour of pedaling for one mile of car.
Let's do a sanity check. A 200 pound bike rider might go 20 miles in that hour, or 2 ton miles, similar to a 2 ton Leaf going 1 mile.
Great question, and I don't know the answer, but I look forward to hypotheses.
It makes no sense to power cars with electricity.
Agenda 21 asks that question.
Doesn't matter. The uber tree huggers now want to ban bicycles because people are huffing and puffing on them, and generating that evil green house gas carbon dioxide.
Ps. I am not making this up. You can never satisfy these people. I'd just as soon they all dropped dead, and then they would quit generating CO2. But they won't because they are, each of them, a special snowflakes.
"It makes no sense to power cars with electricity."
And "recent studies" have shown it's more polluting over the life of the car.
Another way to look at this is putting range into your electric car at a rate equivalent to filling your gasoline car tank at approximately 8 gallons per minute. You can get the equivalent energy in a gallon of gas, and then take the standard number that an electric car can go the same distance on about 1/5th the "liquid" energy. Run the numbers, and it is about 3 megawatts. (Whatever its other faults, gasoline is a very efficient way toa store energy.) Take Tom's calculation, assume 330 miles range for at typical fill-up, and you get around 2 megawatts. Considering the various assumptions, an excellent crosscheck.
What about all the energy used to get food, water, and gas delivered to you, and waste hauled away? Then add in all the energy needed to provide defense, medical care, entertainment, government, etc.
This may even require asking the 47% to do some cycling too, but I don't want destroyed just for bringing it up.
Through the COURTESY of Fred's two feet. Important distinction.
TomHynes- I have raced for 28 years and train with PowerTaps. 250 watts for an hour is quite achievable but is in the province of the much better than average racing cyclist. Of course dependent on weight of rider. It's "easier" for me to ride at 250 for an hour than a rider 45 lbs lighter. 300 watts for an hour is rare. If we're talking about the average homeowner, I'd count on 150-200 watts an hour. However, if that's how they had to generate electricity, they'd get much better very quickly!
Bagoh, your elderly beloved mother is a member of the 47%, would you make her cycle for her needs?
200 watts/hour.
303 watts per mile
Equals 1.515 biking hours per mile of driving. Minus leakage. And cold weather.
Use the damn portal
Take a look at some old WWII movies like "Merrill's Marauders" or "Objective: Burma" where power for the radios were generated by a hand crank.
Gives you an idea of the intensity of the labor involved.
Bottom line. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. It is a waste of energy.
"Bagoh, your elderly beloved mother is a member of the 47%, would you make her cycle for her needs?"
Just like I do now, I'd have to cycle for her, and dozens of others who watch from the couch. But actually she works every day, running a business and caring for actual elderly women, so she earns her own money, and collects a pension from a private company she worked for. She pays her way.
And if she finds out you called her "elderly", she will ride her bicycle to Wisconsin just to kick your ass. For your own safety, you need to be nice to me. I can't stop that juggernaut once I put it in motion. I'm kinda like Kim Jong-un. She is my nuclear option, and I'm a little nuts.
The uber tree huggers now want to ban bicycles because people are huffing and puffing on them, and generating that evil green house gas carbon dioxide.
I did a quick search on that and couldn't find anything. Who are these uber tree huggers?
I knew a man whose father used to hitch him and his brother to a plow so they would get used to work :) I see a parallel here, we could harness healthy young greens and use them to run our carriages down town for shopping.
For distance travel there would need to be stables for the pullers, say every ten miles or so, with candy bar dispensers and hay for sleeping.
You'd have to pedal 0 miles, if the bike is stationary.
Garage, they're the ones biking around inside Carnifex's cranium.
How many hours of cycling for a person to pump enough electricity into the grid to pay down a month's welfare payments? You can watch "The View" on a tiny screen on the handle bars.
Here is a link I found. Maybe it has more info after the first page, but I don't click through on multi-page articles.
100 Watts of power from a normal person, it says.
Now that's a winning idea, bagoh20.
Bagoh, yes I believe she could kick my semi elderly ass, lol.
She still does collect her SS though, right? You didn't talk her into repatriating it did you? And your mother sounds adorable.
FYI Ingaramus, Soc Sec for the elderly is not welfare.
No kidding AJ, but they are a part of the 47%.
It's not I that would ever consider taking away SS from the elderly or disabled, how about you, AJ?
edutcher said...
Take a look at some old WWII movies like "Merrill's Marauders" or "Objective: Burma" where power for the radios were generated by a hand crank.
Gives you an idea of the intensity of the labor involved.
I actually used some of those old radios back in the mid 1970s. The receivers were battery operated but the transmitter was powered by the hand crank setup. The hand crank setup had a folding seat and you turned the cranks with both hands. It was no fun, no fun at all.
The radios used vacuum tubes and were for Morse code only. Every time the operator depressed the Morse code key, the load on the poor guy turning the crank got pretty heavy. It tended to make your communications brief.
100 Watts of power from a normal person, it says.
That term "normal" should leave out Lance Armstrong ;)
I found calories/hr expended cycling (230 - 1100), conversion of calories to joules (4.18) and how many joules/volume of gasoline (34.8 MJ/L), but I don't know how much of that energy is lost upon combustion. From there you should be able to figure it out, though, assuming you know the mileage of your vehicle and the conversion factor of liters to gallons (0.264).
Chuck, I feel your dystopia! Moving right along, there's convincing evidence that highland Kenyan stock will produce the best pullers over long distances.
Let's talk about this next time we run into each other at Al's dacha!
The light on my bicycle was self-powered. What a drag, and I mean it.
A hippy-type guy in a refreshment hut on Maui offers smoothies but you must blend them yourself via bicycle power. My brother was into it, thought it knee-slapping hilarious because I'm a spaz and could not keep my feet on the pedals at the time. Very funny, that. It takes a lot of peddling to make a smoothie and James had to take over or it'd be all lumps.
Basically, you've got 1,000 to 4,500 Joules/hr expended cycling. Once you detract from the energy of gas (8.5 MJ/gallon) the amount that's not converted to actually moving the car, then you could solve it that way.
I guess you could say that at with avg engine efficiency of 25 to 30% and an avg mileage of 25 mpg you could assume ~100kJ/mile, meaning about 1/25th of a mile, but then consider how much heavier the car is and whether there are any passengers. If four passengers are all pedaling equally vigorously to earn their gasoline/energy quota, I guess that's 1/6th of a mile.
Or 1/3rd of a mile in my twice as fuel-efficient vehicle.
That's a lot of dead dinosaurs.
Regarding Carnifex's comment about treehuggers wanting to ban bikes:
There was a Republican WA state rep who wrote the folowing to a constituent: “Also, you claim that it is environmentally friendly to ride a bike. But if I am not mistaken, a cyclists has an increased heart rate and respiration. That means that the act of riding a bike results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride.”
Actually, take those calculations down by more than half if cycling stationary. I hadn't caught that caveat and assumed that Meadehouse was doing the rugged outdoorsy thing.
If you go backwards...
Bike Stationary Peddler needed with an electric personality.
TML: As a biker you also know that a fit fattie on a bike can produce tremendous power so it could well be that the output of a heavy person would be initially strong but would diminish as they lost weight. Looking at TomHynes math, your input and Ritmo's I would take a guess that one and one half hours of pedaling would be about right for a SmartCar sized electric with one passenger on level terrain.
Michael, I know a couple of fit fatties. They can crank the watts for sure. Since they wouldn't have to move themselves, they'd do well generating power. The guys I race and train with are some of the best in the country at their level (I'm not one of them; I hang on for dear life) and age (all 40+ masters, including the 2008 Masters Nat Road Champ at 50+). So these guys can all kick my ass. My best 5-hour watt output was 209 watts. And that almost killed me. I weigh 190. By contrast, let's look at the pros. For instance, the 2010 Tour of Flanders, Cancellara rode an average of 285 watts for 6 hours and 22 minutes. Just insane power and strength.
Inga, on the one hand you try to score a cheap shot on Bagoh20. He schools you in response. Then all you've got is her SS but you play that card anyway. And then a post or two later say you wouldn't take that away from the elderly.
So what do we learn from this. If it was me, it would be don't try to score with cheap shots. Too often you find that it wasn't the easy lay-up you thought it was. But that's just me.
FWIW, if you're going to play the 47% game, it seems to me that SS retirement benefits are the 2 of clubs rather than the Ace of spades in your hand.
Keep in mind, a kilowatt-hour (kW-h) is a unit of energy;
a kilowatt (kW) is a unit of power -- energy per unit of time;
a watt per hour (W/h) is a ramp rate.
In my experience a cyclist in reasonable condition can generate 200 W without much strain; over a 10-hour day, that would generate 2 kW-h. An average American household uses ~10 times that much per day.
If an electric vehicle can go 3.3 miles/kW-h, that would be ~6 miles per day. ... Or 0.7 mph -- you could walk faster! (Of course, you do get to take a whole car with you.)
China is the least polluted country on the planet based on number of bike riders.
Ingaramus- it is not welfare.
I don't care about the 47%. About 5% of the population is lazy and shiftless an they are the ones who are bankrupting the country and we are letting them.
AJ, you DUMBASS, I didn't say it was welfare. I WAS talking about the 47%. Why did you even address me, you dope.
CWJ, I wasn't scoring a cheap point on Bagoh, was questioning his comment about the 47%. He didn't "school me". I think he understood perfectly what I meant, some of you folks are such busybodies.
When Romney made that comment about the 47%, he didn't realize ( or want to admit) that a portion of those 47% are people on Social Security. It's not liberals that would take that away from them.
You might want to carefully cheek Obama's budget and Obama care Inga.
TML I am impressed. I won't even put on my heart monitor half the time now and I have given up riding with others. Great sport. I will repeat: 209 for five hours is fantastic punishment.
Inga, riiight.
CWJ, I do not know what you are getting at or what your beef with me is, but you are being annoying and ridiculous.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/02/the-cost-in-human-energy/
here is a post on this theme
), but I don't know how much of that energy is lost upon combustion.
An internal combustion engine uses about 30% of the heat in the fuel to work. The rest goes out the exhaust.
250 watts for an hour is quite achievable but is in the province of the much better than average racing cyclist
The Chevy volt has a 16.6Kwh engine, of which 30% is always held in reserve. Volt gets 40 miles on the battery, so 290 watt hours per mile.
So even if you push out 250 Watts for an hour, it's not enough to go a single mile in a volt.
"If you had to generate all the electricity you needed by pedaling a stationary bike..."
I'd invent the nuclear reactor.
Rabel beat me to it:
200 watts/hour.
303 watts per mile
Equals 1.515 biking hours per mile of driving. Minus leakage. And cold weather.
also, there is an inefficiency in charging the battery, I thought I read 20%, but someone is claiming 35%. saying it's 20%, you need to put in 364 watts, or getting close to two hours per mile.
@ bagoh20
"And if she finds out you called her "elderly", she will ride her bicycle to Wisconsin just to kick your ass. For your own safety, you need to be nice to me. I can't stop that juggernaut once I put it in motion. I'm kinda like Kim Jong-un. She is my nuclear option, and I'm a little nuts."
All hail the Great Leader bagoh20 who scored 38 under par on a 18 hole golf course including 5 holes in one!!
Don't nuke me.
I don't live in New Jersey.
These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Ingaramus is such a great name for you.
You people are nuts.
Inga wouldn't ever consider taking SS away from the elderly?
I'm sure Warren Buffet is relieved.
Why do people automatically assume "the elderly" as a group/class are poor?
Notice that Harry Reid said he's protecting the "very old" in the budget discussions.
Does anyone remember when "the greatest transfer of wealth this country has ever seen" was discussed?
I'm reading this stuff about generating electricity on a bike & my 1st thought was "Gilligan."
Seeing Red, means testing, nothing wrong with it at all, I'm all for it.
It's a Republican idea.
That's the kind of question that would be perfect for XKCD.
I wonder how much pedaling it would take to fire up the factory that made the bicycle, and before that the furnace that made the metal, and before that the mining and construction to build the facilities, and the you still need oil for the damned tires and plastic. Thank God for dinosaurs, or the wonderful luck of evolution, whichever you need.
That reminds of something I thought of the other day when evolution was being argued over for some reason. I asked myself what real difference does the knowledge of evolution make in our lives. It doesn't effect technology, or human relations, or anything other than just the human need to know. So why the big fight anyway? If we found out tomorrow that evolution was just a mistaken theory, who would be affected other than people in the few related fields of study. It never even mattered to religion until religious people were forced to have their children taught it.
I absolutely buy evolution, but I don't see how it would matter much if I didn't.
You can push a car about two miles an hour. So you'd have to pedal with that much effort for a half hour. The electricity part is a red hearring.
I'd assume you'd chose a more comfortable super-low gear but that doesn't effect the power output you're producing.
Have Meade walk alongside and keep you upright at that slow speed.
So, Inga, you are for taking SS away from the elderly. If you are a small businessman, the government took 12.4% from every paycheck for decades and it's OK.
That's just SS, not Medicare and the new Obamacare taxes.
But my dear Seeing Red, it's a Republican idea! What now you don't like it?
What about Warren Buffett??
Republicans are so fickle.
Make up your damn minds.
"Don't nuke me."
But I'm so ronery.
~~~~
No, Inga, My mom keeps her S.S. She was forced to pay in, and she voted for Obama, so she should be entitled to at least that, a windfarm loan, and an exemtion from Obamacare.
~~~~~
"Equals 1.515 biking hours per mile of driving. "
Either I'm missing something, or that's absurd. Two people pulling an electric car with bicycles is not gonna get far, but it would solve the unemployment problem.
Yes! Your Mom deserves her SS and I don't wanna make her mad.
I don't think anyone should get more than what they put in plus 5% interest, and although I've argued the other side, I'm fine with it being means tested now that it's totally screw up, and insolvent. I'm also fine with raising the age of benefits. I would take care of my family, and if I couldn't, I'd leave them outside the igloo in the cold like decent people do.
Actually, my best solution would include mandatory hang gliding once a week for everyone at age 65.
I don't like the word "deserve".
She paid into the system with years of hard work, she DESERVES her SS.
Liberals over-use the word deserve.
Listen to the pols. Deserve this deserve that. We should have a national drinking game with the word "deserve"-- Then at least we could all be collectively drunk.
She paid into the system and has earned her SS, and she will be lucky if the SS program remains solvent with our ever increasing and incredibly irresponsible debt.
When you earn something you "deserve" the reward of your labors. Pretty straightforward.
"If you had to generate all the electricity you needed by pedaling a stationary bike..."
I'd be screwed.
Man, it seems like everything here lately has been death, cancer, heartbreaking abortion nightmares and Tiger Woods.
OK. I give up.
So how many miles must Tiger Woods pedal on a stationary bike to power a concentration camp oven for helpless sick ADHD babies?
Whatever your answer is, please subtract two yards.
I'm not about to start talking like a conservative to please anyone. I bet if you asked Bagoh's mother if she deserves her SS, she would say "hell yes".
Just don't throw Momma from the train.
I've talked about this with Mom. I tell her that she will get far more out than she paid in, and because of that I will not get mine. She says that they were told the same thing her whole life, so she doesn't believe it now either. But I think the real issue is that pretty much nobody turns down a government check, so whatever justifies taking it will suffice.
Of course I never made that argument with her, or the last words I ever heard would be "I brought you into this world, and you're right, you won't be collecting yours."
Everyone deserves free_____
..and if you've worked hard, you deserve to pay a little more. Unless you're king 18.4% Obama.
Hmmmm, I don't remember saying a word about free stuff. So why bring it up? Do you think Bagoh's mother is getting "free" stuff? I'm confused.
Inga said...
Just don't throw Momma from the gravy train.
FTFY
"Do you think Bagoh's mother is getting "free" stuff?"
Yep. She's going to Europe this summer for a birthday present. Be good, but tough with your kids, it might pay off some day.
Suggested new words and phrases for the modern age: "deservitude" and "just deserves."
(1) The nation toiled under deservitude until jobs were allowed again.
(2) He got his "just deserves" after a lifetime of work. Actually the expression "just deserts" means exactly that but fell out of favor and was even linked (comically) to "just desserts" : link
An internal combustion engine uses about 30% of the heat in the fuel to work. The rest goes out the exhaust.
An engine that can do that is pretty good. Hopefully you understand that the ideal thermodynamic efficiency of an Otto cycle engine with a plausible compression ratio is about 50%. The Second Law tells you half the heat must go "out the exhaust," for the same reason you can't put a millwheel in a creek that's so "efficient" the water leaves the wheel with velocity zero.
The world would be a better place if thermodynamics replaced the last two years of English in high school as a required subject.
What's the point of having electricity if we are doing all the work ourselves anyway?
Doesn't that defeat the entire purpose?
@Carl: People who hate inequalities absolutely despise the Second Law.
Better question:
In a prison powered by inmates pedaling stationary bikes, how many hours of pedaling would be require to cook an inmate's meal?
Better question:
In a prison powered by inmates pedaling stationary bikes, how many hours of pedaling would be require to cook an inmate's meal?
Better question:
In a prison powered by inmates pedaling stationary bikes, how many hours of pedaling would be require to cook an inmate's meal?
My niece drives one of these
In other news, a Chinese smuggler's boat containing thousands of pounds of illegal meat from endangered species crashed into a protected coral reef yesterday.
Carl said...
An internal combustion engine uses about 30% of the heat in the fuel to work. The rest goes out the exhaust.
An engine that can do that is pretty good. Hopefully you understand that the ideal thermodynamic efficiency of an Otto cycle engine with a plausible compression ratio is about 50%. The Second Law tells you half the heat must go "out the exhaust," for the same reason you can't put a millwheel in a creek that's so "efficient" the water leaves the wheel with velocity zero.
For the purposes of our discussion here let's assume it's the average automobile engine.
The world would be a better place if thermodynamics replaced the last two years of English in high school as a required subject.
Also basic economics.
Come on. I can't believe I've gone through over 100 answers and no one answered the question that was asked.
How many stationary bike miles would you have to pedal to power the car for 1 mile? Not how much time would you need to pedel, but how much distance? And then to complicate matters, we have people trying to convert watts and horsepowers, etc.
How many stationary bike miles would you have to pedal to move yourself the equivilent of 1 mile? Answer: one mile.
Let's assume you are 150 pounds. Then it takes one mile of stationary bike riding to move 150 pounds of mass the equivilent of one mile. Figure a car weight of 2000 pounds (or 150 x 13.33).
How many stationary bike miles would you have to pedal to move 150 lbs of mass x 13.33 the equivilent of 1 mile?
13.33 miles
I asked myself what real difference does the knowledge of evolution make in our lives. It doesn't effect technology, or human relations, or anything other than just the human need to know. So why the big fight anyway? If we found out tomorrow that evolution was just a mistaken theory, who would be affected other than people in the few related fields of study.
But (one can say with high probability that) evolution is not a false theory — any more than gravity (i.e. Einstein's theory of general relativity) is at all likely to be suddenly found one fine day to be a false theory. Both scientific theories have been so successful — have made so many predictions that have been checked in so many different ways, oftentimes coming from entirely, independently different scientific directions — that though each will certainly be modified as further science is done, the general picture is clear. In the case of evolution, evolutionary change has occurred, and is occurring.
As a result, the most that's likely to occur is not that evolution will really be found to be false (because it's not!), but rather that everyone (through bad or false science, or Muslims or fundamentalist Christians or Hindus taking over the world) will come to believe that it's false — or (perhaps more accurately) not just false but blasphemous and Devil-inspired.
So, if something like that were to happen, what would be the effect? Would it really only be a few people in “related fields of study” who are affected? No, I suggest it would have many effects, a lot of them negative, but let's just consider a couple of practical ones.
For one thing, there is the multitude of rapidly proliferating antibiotic-resistant diseases that are threatening to return us to those frightening days of the earlier 20th century and before when any scratch was potentially fatal for anyone of any age due to possible runaway infection. (My own father died from such an antibiotic-resistant infection about a dozen years ago.) These diseases are a direct consequence of evolution acting on bacteria in the altered environment of carelessly distributed antibiotics. They are wholly our fault. Without comprehending that fact, and taking sensible corrective action, things can only get worse in this regard.
Then there's cancer. In this age of DNA genomics, we now understand that cancer isn't “caused” per se by mutagens like smoking. It's much more insidious than that. Rather, what mutagens do is provide that raw fodder for evolution — genetic diversity — among various lineages of cells in the body. Such modified lineages, possessing various strengths and weaknesses, are then impelled by the other half of evolution — natural selection — due to competition between the lineages acting in the various micro environments present within the human body — into evolving in a wide variety of directions, most of which are probably harmless.
But some such lineages may find themselves progressing in a direction which ultimately strips them of the body's normal controls against runaway proliferation. In effect, such lineages raise the Jolly Roger and take up a life of independent piracy. And life is often very good for such pirates — until the host dies.
See this journal article in Nature on the subject of cancer genomics for more about this new understanding of the fundamental nature of cancer.
Anyway, without knowing and really comprehending the real cause of cancer, we're unlikely to be able to do much about it. Meaning a lot of people will (continue to) die. How's that for an effect on our daily lives?
Bender I don't think that's correct because it doesn't take into account the inefficiency of converting and storing the energy.
I've been proposing that for a long time--an adapter device to make your TV only powered by your exercise machine (treadmill, elliptical, Nordic Track, rowing ergometer). I have access to the engineering brainiacs who could make this a real thing.
Meaning--I could only watch TV if I powered it myself.
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