re: 5 HR Energy CEO invents stationary bike that can power a home

I'd hook a windmill to it and only get my SO to pedal as a backup.

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A 150 pound person cycling at a "normal" rate for 1 hour burns 680 calories. That translates to 2487 Watt-seconds, which equals 41 watt-hours. 41 watt-hours divided by 24 means you could power a light of less than TWO WATTS for 24 hours at 120 volts.

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While I'm skeptical of this invention's actual, real world ability to power the average American home, this isn't how this works. That's not how energy conversions work. My burning Big C calories is in no way translatable to Watts on a battery. There are things like mechanical advantage, leverage, efficiency of work.

Yeah - at the end of the day "power" is "power" - but I can't strap 600 horses to the front if my car and do 200 mph.

That isn't how any of this works, from an engineering standpoint.

A 25W equivalent LED is one watt.
Is this going to light up an american home? No. A remote Indian shack? Yeah.

How can he claim to invent this, bike generators have been around for a century. Articles on running your house with a bike generator have been appearing in alternative energy publications for decades.

Pedal powered generators were used in WWI

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300 watt bike generator on Amazon

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WWII pedal generator,

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2008 Mother jones

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More socialists hippies trying to wreck the economy. If you wanna exercise then fine, but pay for your electricity like a fricking grownup.

How about alternating magnets to pull and push the pedals with no energy need to power the magnets?

Here is a link to an article with them turning sea water into drinking water.

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Does this stuff change the lives of people in the US? No. Does it change billions of lives in the developing world? Yes.

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Watch his documentary. It is amazing what he is doing. It isn't even a question of whether this product works... They already have a working model that can light 12 light bulbs, turn on a fan, and charge an iPad simultaneously.

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No -- I mean what the poster I quoted was describing. Plugging in a unit to the wall that would pedal the bike could not create "free" energy.. that's why I used the troll physics meme.

All you Enron Ceo's chill, it is for 3rd world countries. We dont want to slow down coal and oil burning now, what would all the allergy doctors and Pulmonologist do if we did that?

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Maybe you should look at the other things he and he team have created. For example, creating clean drinking water anywhere in the world (including using salt water).

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Water purification technology and desalination of sea water have been in use as long as peddle powered generators. Saudi Arabia produces around 1.6 billion liters of fresh water daily with desalination plants. Fail to see anything these people are doing that is a innovation in technology.