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scale up the number of hamsters, and yes, computers could run on rodent power. http://www.otherpower.com/hams...

I did a bit of research.
http://www.otherpower.com/imag...
A lead-acid being used only near top-up charge level can reach 50% efficiency - but that's only if you maintain it near full charge, and only dip into it a little bit, as they are least-efficient at charging when almost full. If you're using it in a deeper cycle the efficiency is much better, easily reaching 90%. You have to really abuse it to hit 50% efficiency, but it is concievably possible for a poorly-designed system, perhaps one that performs only light load-redistribution as a secondry function while intended for long-term backup power with corresponding capacity.

I thought that charging/discharging batteries was a major source of inefficiency but it appears better than I thought: up to about 90% according to this - http://www.otherpower.com/imag... . However, there is a lot of variation under practical considerations.

In any case, comparing 35% efficiency of internal combustion directly to a battery is misleading because it fails to take into account the full cycle of generating power, transmitting it, storing in a battery, then using it. This - http://auto.howstuffworks.com/... - makes a stab at overall efficiency estimation but provides no references for its figures; it concludes that battery-powering a car is about 26% efficient as opposed to 20% for internal combustion.

Or maybe a night light.

If you live in a house, you could just generate your own power. Many cases have less need every day to keep dependending on others and paying for it.
http://otherpower.com/

Or follow the example of the folks over at http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.shtml and roll your own and cut out the middleman. Following the equipment paying for itself, you may save enough to buy these trendy britches.
        I offer an upgrade idea to make these pants an "ahead of their time, boon to mankind and several women". Send the power to a battery unit which will be switched via cleverly hidden button at the bottom of the crotch to a diode array and eventually a spark gap in the vicinity of your sphincter. Once a previously socially offensive blast of gas from that Reuben and stout you had for lunch appears in your lower colon, reach down, grab your crotch (hitting the button), utter an appropriate phrase or sound and let her rip! Your erstwhile smelly issue is now fueling your extremely afterburner pants. Be the life of the party, amaze your friends, eliminate pollution in an entirely green way ( that hippy chick down the block will give you some leg for sure!) The once socially unacceptable fart is now converted to an entirely cool flame shooting out your ass. This will revolutionize society, maybe create new sports, it's a win win win situation. Free electricity, mind blowing wardrobe and alter the market value of cabbage worldwide.
      Is this a cool world or what?

http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.shtml

They prove you very wrong.

That the end of the hamster wheel as we know it.
Pity of all the effort, science and passion others put into it... So long to you, deep and hamster-wheel inspired phylosophy of life...

This site shows that a hamster has an estimated power output of 200 milliamps at 2.4 volts which equals 480 mW or just 200 mW if the text is unclear.

Now some quick numbers
USA power useage: 3.34 TW
Required hamsters to power USA: 7-17 trillion
each hamster needs 2 sq ft for their cage

Resulting required space for a hamster power grid one hamster deep(they gotta breathe right?): 14 to 34 trillion sq ft
Total size of the USA: 82.7 trillion sq ft

So our hamster powered grid requires 17-41 percent of all the land area of the continental USA.
Answering the question you were scared, perhaps not man enough, to ask: no we CANNOT power the USA with hamsters.

Extra credit for estimating the effect on the climate from the heat output of 17 trillion hamsters.

Good day Sir!

Not a problem, http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.shtml or http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_solar.html or http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_hydro.html should do the trick. Let's face it, web providers are D.I.Y. geeks at heart and further,the heat from flame wars could be chimneyed and harnessed to a generator as well.

It's all good.

Not a problem, http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.shtml or http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_solar.html or http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_hydro.html should do the trick. Let's face it, web providers are D.I.Y. geeks at heart and further,the heat from flame wars could be chimneyed and harnessed to a generator as well.

It's all good.

Not a problem, http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.shtml or http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_solar.html or http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_hydro.html should do the trick. Let's face it, web providers are D.I.Y. geeks at heart and further,the heat from flame wars could be chimneyed and harnessed to a generator as well.

It's all good.

In order to be environmentally friendly so we don't have global warming and end up in another ice age there is something you can do. We all must do our part or you will get blamed next time we see a bald polar bear shed of its fur drinking an umbrella drink and munching deep fried penguin.

        Put up a wind charger system and backup array of solar panels on the roof. Set aside a spare office and fill it w/ 12v car batteries and the appropriate inverter boxes for your countries power needs. That way you can save a poor little penguin from the deep fryer and Al Gore can finally shave his male poser beard.

      O.K., that was a LOT tongue in cheek and I apologize to any penguins who may have been offended by my mention of Gore. I'm still burning from reading another article on /. about Minitrues subdivision of Miniclim.
Seriously though I'm not even a greenie and I firmly believe wind and solar power not only make your properties look techie cool, but will also offset that horrible electric bill.
There is a DIY site that can show you how to accomplish all this. http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.shtml I've spent many fun hours planning my own system to get off the grid and rid myself of a paycheck sucking bill.
          You may think I'm joking, but consider this, do you want to entrust your servers to the wiles of your local stupid greedy unionized electric company and some stupid UPS that needs replaced every couple years or take matters into your own hands?
        Food for thought,pass the penguin.

http://www.otherpower.com/ For actual people who've been using windpower in everyday life.
Also developing DIY windpower systems. I tend to trust actual life activities over lab/study simulations and experiments which may overlook details not practical to reality.

These people wired a generator to a Hamster Wheel and the hamster makes enough power to light up a nightlight.
http://www.otherpower.com/hamster.html

Ok, it depends what you're going for, if you live in an area where free wood by the side of the street is commonplace Steam-Powered Generators are pretty awesome, I've been wanting to build one for ages because I'm drowning in free wood, plus the awesome, one example here; http://www.otherpower.com/steamengine.shtml These people got 2Kilowatts out of theirs, which could power probably a fridge OR a wall unit AC + minor appliances and lighting without a battery bank. This can also come in handy if the power is out AND the gasoline supply has been cut off for a long period of time, or if gasoline is just way too expensive. If that's just too damn exotic and awesome for you, and if money is a limiting factor and you want to DIY; Car Alternator + Mower Engine + 110VAC Inverter works wonders. Or you can just buy a portable consumer-grade generator like normal people, and take it out with extension cord when needed. How often do you plan to have your power out? Do you really need a robust whole-house system?

Wind turbines are fairly easy to make
http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.html

But that's not true.
Here's the generator...
Here's how you carve lumber into turbine blades...
and here's more information.

Think of all those bearings,

The design I linked to uses the wheel bearing of a junk car.

the gearbox,

What gearbox?

But how much of an improvement will they be over fluorescent lights

Unfortunately what TFA doesn't say is that currently LEDs are only good for spot lighting and not area lighting. In other words they can be used to read a book but not light an entire room. While LED lights for areas are available they are more expensive than other LEDs, which are themselves expensive.

Falcon

Oh, and try walking or biking to work in Wisconsin in February.

Build your own wind turbine, put solar on your camping trailer, etc.

http://otherpower.com/

talk a lot more than the people who get it done.

http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_systems.html is one page on a site run by a group who develop off-grid and grid-tied systems they might be a fun place to browse, also try their discussion page. Some of the stuff they get working looks like props from a mad max movie but they do work. wood fired steam engine driving a dynamo, anyone?

http://www.otherpower.com/

Try going here.

Heres an interesting project that I have always wanted to try: http://www.otherpower.com/wardmil.html

The best modern available white LEDs (as of late 2007) produce about 60-90, maybe 98 lumens of light per watt of electricity delivered to the LEDs when the LEDs are supplied "typical" current or that at which their characteristics are specified. Many others that are in recent LED products achieve merely 20-45 lumens/watt. Most such white LEDs are and will be slightly more efficient when moderately underpowered and will usuallty be less efficient when overpowered.

In my car I tossed the 12V "cigarette lighter" from the dash to the truck. I also increased its power from a small 5A fuse to a 10A fuse, so I can run a reasonably sized 120V inverter (also in the trunk) to power a few devices on-the-go.


Drawing twice the power than the wire was fused for is a good way to need another car soon. Unless you also upgraded the wire, I wouldn't recommend changing the fuse size.

I have a reasonably sized inverter in my trunk also, next to the battery. 1KW will power most anything except hair dryers you care to bring along.

At home, we have a DC run throughout the house wherever we upgraded our power,

This is not a good idea. Volts X Amps = Watts in DC circuits. To run a 100 watt laptop cross the house on 12 volts with less than 10% voltage drop requires a huge wire. Do the math.

http://www.otherpower.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=6346

Don't forget a 50 foot cord is a 100 foot DC path.

To cut your loss in the wire by 100 as in a 10$ loss is now a 0.1% loss, go from 12 volts to 120 volts. That is the simple reason for the big inverter in the trunk. I can run a 100 foot 14 AWG extension cord and have less than 1% voltage drop in the cord to a 100 Watt laptop.

From the page "14AWG = .00297 ohms / foot". Doing the math, a 100 foot 14 gauge extension cord is 200 feet of wire with a resistance of .00297 ohms per foot. 0.00297 X 200 = 0.594 ohms. To get 100 Watts at the far end of the wire at 12 volts, you need to deliver 8 and 1/3 amps. That amprage going on that almost .6 ohm wire will have a voltage loss of 0.594 X 8.3333 or 4.9499 volts. To get 12 volts out, you need to put in 12 + 4.9499 volts. Volts X Amps in the wire is the power lost.. Let's see, lost 4.94 volts along 200 feet while carying 8.3333 amps. That's 41 Watts. In short to drive a 100 watt load, you toss out almost 1/3rd of your power in the wire.

Now using the same cord and laptop but now using 120 volts. Instead of needing 8.3333 amps for the 100 watts, we now need 1/10 of that or 0.8333 amps. Our voltage loss is now 1/10th what it was or 0.49499 volts at 1/10th the current. We now lose 1/100th the power in the wire we were before while still delivering 100 watts to the laptop. Now the wire has a loss of 0.41 Watts. I don't need to boost anything to make up for it.

I'm shocked that more devices aren't standardizing on DC. 18V, 5A+, not a big deal -- but so many devices could use it (charging tools, video games, cell phones, even some computer monitors). Simple, without needed ANOTHER heat-generating and wasting transformer. My laptop is DC, too, yet I need the darned transformer throughout the house.

Do the math and you won't be shocked at all. I would rather lose 5 watts in a laptop power supply than 40 watts in the 50 foot wire from the battery fuse box to the laptop.

I've standardized on 120 VAC for almost everything. As a bonus, I don't have to buy special 12 volt CF bulbs at $15 each. I can use the buck a bulb ones instead. It's all about saving money. A 1 KW inverter is chaep and can be located very close to the battery to keep loss minimum in the low voltage wire.

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11234952&search=inverter&Mo=13&cm_re=1_en-_-Top_Left_Nav-_-Top_search&lang=en-US&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Sp=S&N=5000043&whse=BC&Dx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntk=Text_Search&Dr=P_CatalogNam

they estimate a hamster to generate about 200 miliamps at 2 volts

http://www.otherpower.com/hamster.html

You might like this page: http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.html

When you consider the use of a cow vs. the use of a small animal (like a hamster) you start having to understand how we turn physical motion into electricity.

A small animal like a hamster is really cute, but they don't produce much usable electrical power. They only run long enough to get a workout, and if they get tired... they stop running. Yes, someone actually turned their hamster's wheel into a generator. The hamster could light up LEDs, but that's nowhere near powering a laptop.

A cow, on the other hand, will produce excellent torque - if you can get it to walk - but then you waste some of that power changing the low-amp high-volt power into higher-amp lower-volt power. Remember - pumping water is essentially a high-torque/low-speed process, but most electrical generation is low-torque/high-speed. (But that's because most electrical generation is for AC power, not the charging of DC batteries. For DC charging, high-torque/low-RPM might work nicely.)

However, what they're probably going for here isn't the optimal conversion of animal power to electrical power. What they're probably trying to do is transform into electricity what they perceive to be widely available power.

All you need is an appropriate length of oxygen free copper cable/wire with sufficient shielding and appropriate gauge. All but the lowest of low end OEM cables meet these needs. Beyond this, there is zero difference in cables other than packaging and branding. Any perceived difference is in the listeners head.

Close but a few facts are left out. Lets touch base on speaker cable and what it needs to do. It needs to move electric power from one place to another. Along the way it needs to keep most of the power (all cable has resistance and loss even superconductors which have a bit less). In moving power is should deliver all frequencies the same.

Now back to your statement... oxygen free copper cable/wire Hmm, the first step seems to trend to snake oil. I'll grant you that oxygen free has lower resistance than plain copper, but how much? Is it worth the money? Would the money be better spent on maybe a larger wire size? You will find the lack of copper wire resistance tables for copper wire and oxygen free copper wire almost completely absent. The reason is because the change is almost not measurable. If it essentially makes no change, why spend the money.

Copper wire facts are easy to find and are well docummented.

http://www.otherpower.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=6346
http://www.stealth316.com/2-wire-resistance.htm
http://www.epanorama.net/documents/wiring/wire_resistance.html
http://amasci.com/tesla/wire1.txt
http://www.thelenchannel.com/1wire.php

On the other hand the data on oxygen free seems to be tied up in perceptions and not solid facts. Where are the tables?

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20060198757.html
http://mobile-emotions.com/speakerwire_faq.html?1062644160781
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire.htm
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5443665-description.html
http://www.cda.org.uk/megab2/elecapps/pub122/sec72.htm

"Oddly enough, it isn't the freedom of oxygen in copper wire that makes any difference. The process of removing oxygen also removes the impurity of iron and it's this impurity that can cause the resistance to be slightly higher."

Could someone please define and give a measurement to me for Slightly higher? As in is the change enough to spend money on? Until someone publishes a table, I would assume slightly higher is slightly less than the measuring test equipment. A larger wire size is a measurable change. Oxygen free as far as I am concerned is below the threshold of measurement.

Beyond this, there is zero difference in cables other than packaging and branding.

OK here I disagree with you again. The number of strands and twist in the wire affect the ability of a wire to withstand repeated flexing. When I worked doing some TV studio stuff, I had to show some of the features of some of the cable to the staff. The low loss and low price was a draw to the PHB who thought he was a studio engineer. I showed him the flaw in his reasoning when I held up a 3 foot piece of coax and pushed out a ceiling tile. Then I held up a 1 foot length of super flex which had much poorer response and the 1 foot length flopped over like a piece of braided nylon rope. The signal loss for the studio was a trade off for cable that stood up well following the cameras without breaking. A cable that lays flat instead

show me how to violate Big Oils patents in my backyard lab and grow a garden/solar array that will provide my family with enough energy to suit their needs, for free (or whatever it costs for us to personally harvest it), and I'll step off the Big Oil treadmill *today*

These guys built a 3KW wind turbine in their back yard.
http://www.otherpower.com/
Not all projects on this site are as complicated as the big turbine on the front page. Lots of ideas for generation, storage, and reduced consumption of power on these pages. Join the forums, start a project, and quit bitching.

Trust me. "Big Oil" (every industry can be evil. just put "big" before it) does not have a patent on windmills. That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

Try telling any green environmental lefty that Ethanol is a bad thing and show them why, and they turn their nose saying, "But, but, but, but its GREEN!"

Flourescent is more efficient than semiconductor lighting.

Depends. Fluorescent is slightly more efficent than pure-white LEDs (which are based on an absorbtion-reemission system). But for coloured lighting, LEDs are substantially superior. Looks as though LEDs are going to start winning on the white scale in the next few years, too. You can now get 64 lumens/watt (compare with 60 typical from CF and 80 from traditional fluorescent) from a white LED, and the figures keep looking better. LEDs are also instant-on and have an even-longer lifetime than CF.

Please give evidence of a longer than 20 year lifespan for a PV panel.

Pictured here are solar panels that are 20 years old and still have 90% output: http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_solar.html

I don't have any links to show you - but the notion that solar panels "age" is not actually true.
(maybe google will find it for you, it was a site on "how to repair solar panels" or something like that).

You're possibly thinking of this one.

Someone beat you to it.

Let's try this with some more accurate numbers.

180 Watt Solar Panels ($880 each)

That's 8,888 180 Watt panels to get to 1.6MW peak.

Total cost for the panels: $7,821,440. Now, let's say for spending that much money google is able to negotiate a modest 5% discount to bring the cost per panel with discount down to: $7,430,368.

I'm going to stick with the above assumption that wiring and converters at this level will come in around 20% of the cost. Which is $1,486,073.

Now let's assume they can get the whole thing installed at a price of $500 per panel on average. That's $4,444,400.

There, my total cost for installation is now: $13,360,441.

It's hard to estimate how many watts per day one of the 180 watt panels will produce because it depends a lot on local weather patterns and how they're positioned. But over a 24hour/365 day period I'm going to go ahead and assume an average hourly production ballpark figure of 25 watts per panel. So that's 25 watts x 8,888 panels: 222.2KW hours. Multiply it by 8,760 hours in a year: 1,946,472 KW hours/year.

The best I could find for electric rates is Sacramento at $0.111/kwh.

At that rate, google will save $216,058/year.

Solar panels last much longer than 15 years. Here's a company that claims a lifespan of 30+ years and they have a 25 year warranty. Here's a guy who talks about a 21 year old panel still producing at near it's peak rating.

From personal experience I can say many older panels lose some efficiency and after 12-15 years their output drops to ~80% of the their original peak output. But let's assume the gradual loss of output will coincide with a gradual increase in the grid power price, offsetting each other.

So let's say a 30 year life, $216,058/year comes to $6,481,740. Subtract that from the installation costs and you get: $-6,878,701. Not nearly the $120M loss you estimate.

Now, if prices did, in fact, quadruple (which over a 30 year period isn't only unheard of, but likely) the numbers get ever closer to a net of zero. Not to mention the publicity google gains from this and the mitigation of risk by not leaving themselves susceptable to rising energy prices. And who knows, the panels may last 40 years.

Either way, it's not the giant boondoggle you make it out to be.

Windpower is also reasonable here. Somplace on the net there's instructions for building a 5 kilowatt one out of disk drive magents and an airplane propellor (but I've lost track of if and am too lazy at the moment to spend some quality time with google looking for it).

Probably not the site you're refering to, but there's a lot of good wind-power stuff at otherpower.com.

Did we cross the threshold of solar panel arrays giving off more power before the MTBF than it takes to create them?

As I understand it the MTBF of solar panels is so high, the notion that this could possible be true is absurd. Lifetime of a solar panel is often quoted as some low figure (10 years for older ones, 20 for more modern designs), but what's normally quoted is the time it will take until output drops by 5%. Even assuming exponential dropoff, you'd have to multiply this figure by 4 before output drops to half as much power as the cells produced when they were first manufactured.

These guys have some experience working with old solar panels.

Servicing the windmill on the ground is not the big deal you make it out to be. There are safe ways to correctly raise and lower a mast in order to perform servicing. I am not familier with the WEB site you mentioned but I'd be interested ni it if anyone tracks it down. In the meantime check out http://otherpower.com/ to learn how to build windmills and to get some lessons learned form folks who are already running them. One of the more eye opening things I learned about was magnetic sand - now THAT is some nasty stuff to get mixed up in the bearings of your windmill! They have an interesting forum there too where peolpe from all over the world post - some of whom have no other source of reliable power. The best way to go offgrid IMO is a combination of wind, solar, and if at all possible water. Water is some really good power it seems but there are issues there too - also discussed on otherpower as well as in HomePower magazine....

I would suggest that you build your own windmill. You should be able to build one with similar power for under a $1000 (I think), or maybe a bit more if you need to buy tools like a welder and such, but then you have an excuse to buy tools too. Check out Other Power for more details.

If you like a challenge, and *maybe* a cheaper price, why not try to build your own?

OK, so while I couldn't find it in my bookmarks... A google search of volvo and windmill did nicely.
http://www.otherpower.com/bartmil.html

-nB

solw dwon cbowoy i'ts been one minute since your last confession. wait... wrong forum.

Here in California, our power is tiered. The first chunk is at something like 7.5 cents. My most expensive electricity was over 30 cents per kWh. Compared to that, 9 cents is already much less than I'm paying.

Of course, with my luck, it would fail right after the warranty (which is probably a year), making it cost $3.80 per kWh. :-) Devices with moving parts are a high risk unless you're buying in bulk. It's the whole MTBF problem all over again. Thanks, but I'll stick with solar.

When the cost per unit drops below $1000 for a moderately sized prefab, call me. Until then... not so interesting... even with power at 30 cents per kWh. Besides, you can build your own from parts for far, far less than $9,000.

http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.html - build your own

Actually no, LEDs aren't there yet.

Slightly older, but bog standard white LEDs
http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_lighting.html

Until recently state of the art still could not compete, it was only earlier
this year that a superior effeciency was announced.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED#Operational_param eters_and_efficiency

Nevertheless, the properties (diffuse vs. directed) make LEDs a poor general
replacement for CFLs. They are excellent for task lighting though, and have
the interesting ability to fail gradually; "bulbs" contain multiple LEDs and
they may not all fail at once.

So build one of these. ;)

FuKing generator.

some links to start with.

http://www.otherpower.com/wardalt.html for making the alternator that makes huge power from low rpm's.

http://redjar.org/jared/projects/windmill/gallery. html for basics on the design we modified heavily.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/1974_March_ April/The_Savonius_Super_Rotor
another link to the basic design.

http://home.messiah.edu/~jebeneze/WindEnergy/WindE nergy.htm

I have never really drawn up plans of our modification, put it this way slit more barrels in the rotors to make what looks like a "turbine". Using light materials is important here to make the thing to start and run in light winds. plastic barrels work great here. if you have the ability to form carbon fiber you can make it even more efficient in slower winds.

basically we mount it on top of a stub of TV tower guyed to all hell for strength. we then have a metal pipe structure around the rotor to hold onto the top bearing of the pipe that runs down through the bottom bearing where a pully is attached.

it's as simple as that.

Efficiency

LEDs are certainly better than flashlight bulbs.

But when a white LED delivers 15-19 lumens per watt, its about the same as a 100W incandescent and five times worse than a fluorescent. LEDs appear bright because they put out a fairly focused beam - not because they put out lots of light.