Generate electricity from the turbo trainer

javidr

I am sure somebody has already tought about this... is there any way to store in a battery the energy generated in the trainer?

Thanks

cycleclinic

Yes build kne that tuns a generating and connect to some batteries 200w thouh is not alot not enough to anything useful or save anything noticeable from your leccy nill.

cougie

Forget it. Its sadly a pitiful amount of energy.

cougie

https://youtu.be/vPxuuB_ZBuk this is worth a watch

Man Of Lard

Sustain 200W for 1 hour and you've made 0.2kWh of electricity - in round numbers about 3p worth. Assuming your conversion from turbo to electric is 100% efficient and your device for making the conversion cost £50 it's going to take you >1600 hours (9½ solid weeks, no breaks) of pedalling to break even (ignoring the cost of running the fan to keep you cool enough, the additional food, wear and tear on the bike/turbo/generation equipment)

javidr

I know its very little amount of electricity but if i will do it anyway i can have some power in the battery isnt it? Its better than nothing...

FishFish

I agree, better than nothing is better.

Man Of Lard

But in order to harvest it, you're going to expend more energy (in the form of 'stuff' that has been manufactured and shipped to your house) than you can ever hope to usefully recoup in your battery (more manufacturing overhead)

Secteur

I remember after Froome won his first TdF, the BBC came up with an "impressive" statistic - well, I must be hard to impress because the statistic was something like "Froome burnt the same energy winning the Tour to power a TV for a month"... !!

Having not thought about it, I'd have been more impressed if it were something like "run 100 TVs for 10 years", and it sounded a bit pants.

So, as above, it's not very much!

cougie

As Mol worked out for you - it makes no sense.

Are you adept at this kind of thing and up to adapting a turbo?

Harry182

Another video worth a watch -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voO ... rChallenge

markhewitt1978

Some turbos already do this to an extent, in order to power their own electronics, transmitters, electronic resistance etc. e.g the Tacx Bushido doesn't even have a plug, it's powered entirely by the rider. The Tacx Neo when plugged in uses 5W when not being ridden but when being ridden that drops to 0.5W because it's taking energy from the rider.

bobmcstuff

Man Of Lard wrote:

Sustain 200W for 1 hour and you've made 0.2kWh of electricity - in round numbers about 3p worth. Assuming your conversion from turbo to electric is 100% efficient and your device for making the conversion cost £50 it's going to take you >1600 hours (9½ solid weeks, no breaks) of pedalling to break even (ignoring the cost of running the fan to keep you cool enough, the additional food, wear and tear on the bike/turbo/generation equipment)

Man Of Lard wrote:

But in order to harvest it, you're going to expend more energy (in the form of 'stuff' that has been manufactured and shipped to your house) than you can ever hope to usefully recoup in your battery (more manufacturing overhead)

This and this - it's such a small amount that getting the equipment to store the energy is going to take more energy than you're ever going to get back.

Better off sticking some solar panels on your roof - even if you lived in the North of Scotland etc.

redjeepǃ

Should be easy enough to do in theory, but as everybody else has said you'd be wasting your time if you actually wanted to do anything with the power.

All you'd need to do is replace the resistance unit with either a 12 v electric motor or a car alternator (which is AC) and then connect it to a car battery via some control electrics (rectifier and a regulator). The easiest way would be to strip all the parts you need out of an old car together with somebody who knows what they're doing. I'd be careful playing around if you don't know what you're doing though as it may generate currents high enough to kill you (especially if you touch the wrong thing when you're sweaty).