Awesome Exercise Bike To Generator Hack

[cheesynuts]

I have often wondered if a person could build a successful exercise business around the idea of the customer helping generate green energy while they exercise on their bike. I would assume that an hour long spin class with 20 of these bikes could generate a fairly usable amount of energy. I love the videos! Your work is often satisfying some of my own curiosities. Thank you so much

[stevetobias]

Use some hot glue around the edge of the magnets to hold them better. Also try putting a rim around a third of the flywheel to add more coils. You can also hook every second coil in series to have two lines of higher voltage or even better hook them in parallel to increase current. The two lines would then allow you to use full wave rectification. This flywheel could also be hooked up to a wind mill or a water wheel or anything really.
This was an excellent video Rob. I wish you lived in Australia so I could send you stuff, but unfortunately I cannot afford the shipping to the UK.
Love this channel there really should be more people like you out there, your a one in a million mate.

[wibblywobblyidiotvision]

A far more efficient way to use this would be to rip out the flywheel and hook up a small alternator and its regulator / rectifier in the place. You'll need to futz with the gearing, of course, alternators need quite a lot of RPM. About all you'll ever get out of this is 100W or so at peak, even the guys doing the Tour de France only produce about 400W and a regular cyclist is lucky to do 150W sustained, chuck in 50% losses for the alternator and your potential output is around 75W. Don't get me wrong, that's still quite a lot, and certainly worthwhile, if only as an object lesson as to the cost of energy*

Rolling your own alternator, which is effectively what you're doing, is unlikely to net you much in the way of efficiency; that said, with a sufficiently large number of magnets you can make a low RPM alternator built around the flywheel (which, as it stands, is only still spinning because you're not extracting any real power from it). If you can find a scrapped, /modern/, washing machine you might be able to salvage the motor from it. Newer machines have multipole 3 phase pancake motors and should be pretty good as generators.

* Friend of mine runs a refuge (climbers hut) in the Alps, way off grid and a 2 hour, 800m climb, hike from the hearest road - his power supply is a very limited solar setup. He gets a lot of people coming up with the standard question "can I charge my mobile phone / drone / gopro / gps / all of the above?". Until this season, the answer has been "go jump", but it is now "go pedal". He's set up an old road bike driving an alternator which powers (via regulator / rectumfrier) up to 5x2A USB ports (50W max). It's a wonderful thing. No bttery, of course - you want to charge, you get to pedal. No freeloading.

[chipheadnet]

Brilliant! Now you just need to go to the junk yard and find 2 more bikes to harvest the magnets.

[etherlon]

Looks like something that could be done to the roofline rotating ventilator. Great result! Thank for sharing, cheers.

[azlandpilotcar]

If you've patience enough, you removed enough fine strand wire emi shield from the large plasma tv to wind your own coils.

[matakaw]

Awesome video as always. If you have a spare moment there's a great video by James Biggar (That's his channel name), where he builds a wind turbine totally from scratch and achieves 3000 watts. His builds are beautifully constructed and worth a look at. Thanks again, mate, cheers.

[onedayagogo]

very good test run. one thing I noticed, with this configuration, the magnets will be acting on the steel frame of the bike, so they might be better on the sides of the flywheel, maybe placed on both sides to keep it balanced, etc. and get double the power or something. so many options with this set up. it's great 👍👍

[chipheadnet]

Got me wondering about a similar conversion with a treadmill. Train my dog to run on it :)

[WayneTheSeine]

kids, "I want to play on the tablet." Dad..."Git to crankin" Awesome.

[chuxxsss]

Nice work. Got a trend mill yesterday for 50 dollars Au. Strip it down did vlog it. Very dirty machine, but now clean as a whistle. Now I wish I still worked at tv repair place as we had hundred of microwaves. Anyway good work Rob. Maybe they did power Gilligan Island with that bike. Lol

[pulesjet]

Hub motor, Telling ya. That was magic. Yes, More Coils . DIY Coils about 9 would do you fine. Configure 3 phase.

[Teknopottu]

Can't wait for those extra coils. Inspirating stuff.

[MAGnetICus_Attractus]

You need a MESS(mass energy storage system) I was going to use a shifting bike then a few 50 pound plates On the shaft. Engage the generator once the flywheel is up to speed. A 26" diameter rim to a 2" shaft, the end of the shaft has a 4" wheel to turn the smaller generator pulley. Basically make it so one turn of the pedals equals many turns on the flywheel. I used a GM alternator, a stationary bike treadmill, a giant bike, a belt from a lawnmower and a battery.

[philipvernejules]

, that's probably what most of us wanted to see and it fell nicely in your lap discovering the magnets. You can certainly explore a couple more variations , do you think .
Say another coil connected in parallel, relays used as coils from your parts car outside, small transformers as coils from microwave circuit boards or other . .trying alternate north south placement versus same pole placement arrangement and on and on...It's a good hobby horse certainly .

[your_utube]

Power galore! What an improvement over the friction version. Ben at Applied Science channel even used magnets to melt metals. I was thinking of a reverse version of this. Maybe you can try this Robert. In this version you stick pieces of metal on the outer rim of the flywheel. Then you put a piece of soft core metal in the electromagnet and on the opposite side of that, pile up the magnets you have. So you will have (1) magnets, (2) Coil (with soft iron core inside coil) and (3) pices of iron on the outer rim of the flywheel. This means that you do not need more coils, but you can change to different coils to experiment with number of turns and thickness of wire, plus you do not need many magnets, plus the iron pieces cut in a band saw are much more affordable, available and easy to make. That would be an amazing experiment to compare approaches, results and cost.

[cptrikester]

Very cool. Much quieter this way, too.
If the magnets were mounted on the sides, the rim would contain the centripetal forces.
Wonder how much power could be produced with a full array of magnets / coils.
I hope you get enough coils.

[ryanlebeck]

You could take an old computer power supply to pieces and build your own step up transformer system for your bike(in addition to any new coils included) to increase wattage.

Still great stuff!

[robinvince]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but were you just taking your voltage reading with no load and then afterwards taking your current reading straight across the coil? In that case, you can't just multiply the 26V by 80mA and say that's your power. The voltage and current must both be present AT THE SAME TIME. When you were reading your mA the loading due to your current meter will have reduced your voltage down to just fractions of a volt. You need to connect a suitable resistor as a dummy load. Then you can measure the voltage across it and calculate the current and power. Quite likely, the real power being generated will be a tiny fraction of what you thought.

[xspotbox]

Respect Sir, any bicycle can work as a generator, again you demonstrated how simple those devices really are in principle.
And also how much energy is wasted just because well paid engineers, with all kinds of technologies in their disposal. just don't want to bother with such trivial concepts.