You are underestimating both gearing and the physical capacity of humans. Ride bikes much? Of course I am not talking about megawatts or even kilowatts here...but I can sure as hell keep a decent charge on a battery bank with a nice simulated century ride of about 6 hours...which is far from "trained professional athlete" country....unless you rarely ride a bike. Let's use a 54 tooth front and a 10 tooth rear...which was the high end of my old TT bike. That's just over a 1:5 gear ratio. With my standard 172.5 pedal arms I can maintain 70-90 RPM for 4-6 hours...do the math concerning the rpm of the rear axle.
The best bicycle's in the world struggle to power a toaster for one cycle. Yes there are you tube videos of this. If anything I am over estimating how much power a person can make on a stationary bike.
Just out of curiosity, is there any chance we could prevent this thread devolving into a pissing contest? Just curious...throwing it out there...you know, as a, thing.
Why? I know bike generation is a waste of space time and resources. I was planning to make one then I found out how much power a person can generate. Then it became pretty clear that time and money would be far better utilized buying a solar panel.
it's not a waste of time or resources for me...especially in the winter. Now instead of letting the energy I produce on some trainer go to waste, it's used to to charge my power-tool batteries.
If you calculate the calories it takes to make power, plus the wear and tare on one's body during a crisis event , It would not be IMO a good expenditure of resources to wear one's self out during such an event. I have weakened my self on the job, over working, and not getting enough rest, and illness is just around the corner. My son and I ( both of us being athletic,) played on one such pedal generator ,and the time we spent and the energy put out were not worth the investment. This is why my system is primarily battery. The small contributions of solar and wind, add up with in the battery, so that when enough is accumulated you can put it to work ,just like a bank account. the bigger the bank the more you can store.
For day to day exercise before teotwawki not a totally bad idea. Depending on such a thing after shtf, maybe not the best plan.
It's not so much about the gear ratio as the resistance of the generator. Picture yourself doing 4-6hrs up a 40% grade and you'll get something of what generating even a small amount of watt hours is about. On another note, wind is also very misunderstood...to generate any significant energy with wind, you have to have lots of real wind. Few places east of the Mississippi have wind. Even with real wind, there must be no close obstructions (like 300-500') to break up the flow....that generally means significant height towers.
Then when you have a nice tall effective wind turbine tower you also have a very effective lightning rod. Eastern NM where I am, West Texas around fowler TX and sweet water have some of the larges most producing wind farms in the world.
View if he still has them up for newbies Chris Olsen wind in You-tube . Ya I have seen those farms down there . Fast moving turbines & NO BIRDS left . PLZ come to the european made turbines , very slow & make way more power. Way less noise also , them down there are a disaster . In 2008 I saw many all over the world. Sloth EDIT not for TN-Andy , he knows , the rest who should . Sloth
Some of the wind attempts here have been humorous. I helped put up a study recording anorometer here once....it was down in a valley with trees all around, and the tower was 3 sections of 20' pipe. Don't know how the study turned out, but I could predict even as we were hoisting the thing up it wouldn't be good....taller trees within 100' of the opening....waste of time IMHO....but I was there mostly to observe. Another one was I put some year old batteries from my solar install on Craig's List when I happened on a big set of AGM telecom batteries. Guy that bought them told me he was going to use wind, so I agreed to haul them over to his place in NC to see his setup. I kept thinking the guy must have a location on a ridgetop.....ahahahaaaaa....nope....he was down along a narrow creek valley that couldn't possibly get more than a breeze, with little 3-4' diameter Ebay special turbine he was gonna mount on the end of his house about 10' above the roof ridge.....and buying a set of 8 L-16 batteres I had configured in a 24v 800amp hour set up on my solar (6kw at that time). I thought what a fricking joke....guy won't produce enough to even keep the self discharge of the batteries up, I might as well just haul them on to the scrap yard right now, because they will be junk in year. I tried to talk to him about solar, nope...too expensive (hey....guess what....producing REAL power ain't cheap)....he started talking about sticking a water turbine in the little creek in front of his house (no fall, little flow) and then offered me a joint to smoke. I thanked him, decided his plans were smoke, took my money for the batteries and left.....ahahaaaaa....takes all kinds I guess. Next wind experience was the off grid cabin I helped my buddy build. I convinced him solar was the primary way to go, but since he IS up on the top of a fairly cleared ridge, and the wind DOES seem to blow up there, we thought it might do to supplement the solar. SO we put a recorder on s 40' temp tower for February and March, typically our windy time here, and got 8mph average wind speed over 60 days.....12mph being about the minimum you want to see....so we didn't go any farther down that road. Some times, it peaked at 60mph..... but overall, just not enough wind....and that is the best wind site I know of in this area.