Slashdot Mirror
Gravity Lamp Grabs Green Prize
eldavojohn writes "A lamp powered by gravity has won the second prize at the Greener Gadgets Conference in NYC. From the article, "The light output will be 600-800 lumens — roughly equal to a 40-watt incandescent bulb over a period of four hours. To "turn on" the lamp, the user moves weights from the bottom to the top of the lamp. An hour glass-like mechanism is turned over and the weights are placed in the mass sled near the top of the lamp. The sled begins its gentle glide back down and, within a few seconds, the LEDs come on and light the lamp ... Moulton estimates that Gravia's mechanisms will last more than 200 years, if used eight hours a day, 365 days a year." The article contains links to the patents and the designer/inventor Clay Moulton's site." I think my laptop would require a slightly larger weight to pull this off.
Say what?!? Why on earth would they tell you that?
This is slashdot, we have articles here, not thinly disguised advertisements.
At the bottom of the
you will have to start flipping your desktop over every few minutes ;-)
How about a clock?
How is this any different than a clock powered by weights? It's nice, but hardly a new idea.
Do you have ESP?
i'm going to use the light from this lamp to power my photovoltaic weight lifting machine.
Will it still be cool to light up your lamp with gravity, when there's no gravity left and people are spinning right off the planet into outerspace? I guess it will eliminate the greenhouse gas issue by allowing the atmosphere to disappear when there's no more gravity left - but unfortunately it will also not allow people to live (the ones that are still on the planet after the other ones spun off into space as noted earlier)
But what will we do after peak gravity?
seems to me the potential energy comes from your muscles;-)
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I had hoped that "using gravity" would be sort of a cheat to get around making a perpetual motion device, but in reality it's powered by a human moving the weight. Instead, its just another clever way to capture gravity that still needs substantial human assistance, similar to a pendulum.
I really like the idea, and would probably buy one if the price is right.
However, one thing concerns me. The weights are moved up to the top by human power, which is fine, but according to the picture on the designer's website, the weights are 5 10 pound weights in each lamp, so either I'm having to lift 10 pounds 5 times every time I want to light the lamp, or I'm lifting 50 pounds. Perhaps he could incorporate some sort of foot pedal mechanism or something to more easily lift the weights. If he could figure out how to do that, and also maybe improve the efficiency a little more to get more than the 40-watt equivalent it gets now, I could see this becoming a solid replacement for traditional lamps.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
To say that it runs on potential energy? The device always *has* gravity, but it's not drawing it off. Once you supply the device with some potential energy though, it takes that energy and utilizes it.
I guess "Potentia" isn't as marketable a name, though.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I've already started looking into buying "gravity offsets" and trying to use as much rope, glue, velcro, and static cling as possible.
I like basketball!!1!
Four hours is an awesome run-time for such a device.
I lived in a house once where the land lord had a wind-up radio. It was great in every respect other than its run time; every fifteen minutes or so you had to crank it up again, which made it annoying to use.
-Fl
You didn't read it.
That's not how the electricity is being generated, rather it is coming from a rotor system.
There would be no functional difference between one 50 pound weight and 5 10 pounds weight, other than in resetting the system.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
...think it means. The human body has only about a 20% thermal efficiency. Add to this the ecological cost of transporting goods to the human for consumption, and you'll see where I'm going with this argument: what's touted as a "green" device actually costs the planet more per hour than any other light fixture ever invented.
So this idea may be useful in 3rd world countries where power grids are not available, but anyone with access to hydroelectric, wind, solar, coal, or nuclear power will actually be doing less damage to the planet by plugging the same light bulb into a wall receptacle.
End rant.
Vibrating sex toys that power themselves ?
I can't really see why a small electric motor couldn't be incorporated into the design to do this, surely it would be much more convenient?
how long before the home gym captures energy for your home.
:-)
Never
Humans can not produce large amounts of sustained output power, even when exercising. A "healthy human" can probably push out 300W for about 20 minutes before they collapse from exhaustion. Even if you can convert all of that to electricity and store it for later use at something like 50% efficiency (which would be staggeringly high), you're only talking about 0.05kWh of usable energy. You could do much better if you were willing to exercise at much lower intensity for much much longer periods of time (but who would do that just to light a minuscule handful of light bulbs). But you're really not going to ever get usable amounts of power out of your daily exercise routine.
So it's like racking a 50 pound dumbbell from the floor. Piece of cake.
"So this idea may be useful in 3rd world countries where power grids are not available."
Ranting for no good cause. That's EXACTLY where it is aimed at, anyway. May I also point out that lifting those weights is not going to produce signficant enegy usage that someone is going to have to change their diet in the richer parts of the world. Don't forget that one of the biggest problems in the wealthy world is OVER eating not undereating!
22.6 Kg x 1m x 9.8 m/s^2 / 4 hours = 0.015W if conversion is 100% efficient (which it won't be)
The red led on the front of your modem requires around this amount so the glow will be feable. To get the equivalent of a filament 40W bulb requires around 10W so the system is only around a factor of 1000 out.
wot no sig
A pulley would probably be the most efficient way, but I suggested a foot pedal because I was concerned a pulley system would interfere with the overall aesthetics of the device. Either way, though, as long as you can make it easy to lift the weights without making the lamp look terrible, I think the idea is a good one.
Ride a bike instead of driving.
Monstar L
Got me thinking about how, in a two-story house, there's all sorts of vertical movement. I was picturing a way to step on a platform (sort of like those that parking lot attendants sometimes use) to ride from the second floor to the first. That buffered ride down could throw some energy into a flywheel. And, how about all of the greywater from upstairs? Three people taking their morning showers send many pounds of water down a vertical path to ground level. I wonder if passing that through some sort of screw drive might give up a few watts.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Yup, they say it emits 600-800 lumens.
Given that LEDs emit about 100 lumens/watt, that's say, 6 watts, * 4 hours = 86,400 joules They claim it's about 2m high.
Plugging those two values into the gravitational potential energy calculator at http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/gpot.html gives a weight of about 5000kg, slightly above the claimed 22kg...
*woosh*
For the average male, yes. But this is slashdot. One only needs the strength of a wet noodle to post here, and actual exercise is frowned upon. As is leaving the basement for fresh air and/or a little sun.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
You sir, are correct.
.....3.8 lumens. A candle is ...13 lumens. So it's about a third of a candle. An ideal light source is ~680 lumens/watt would be 13 lumens, or a candle.
There's 50lbs of weight that fall about 4ft, if I'm reading the diagrams right. That's 200 ft-lbs. Which comes out to... hmm... 0.075 watt-hours. Over 4 hours that means 0.019 watts continuous power. From memory really good blue LEDs are around 200 lumens/watt so
To get ~700 lumen light at 200 lumen/watt would require 3.5 watts of power, over 4 hours is 14 watt-hours or 3700 ft-lbs. Over 4ft of fall that amounts to 925 lbs. My goodness, that is a group effort.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
If we rigged this up to the Total Gym, Chuck Norris could power the entire country in just 20 minutes a day for low low payments of $19.95.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
Why not a small internal combustion engine coupled with the electric motor?
That way, you could still run the light in a power failure by running the small ICE.
Hey, you could make the engine a little bigger and add some outlets so you could power other lamps.
(The outside of my tooth is delicious.)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Wouldn't it be cool if one could reset the device simply by flipping it over (hourglass style), rather than having to use some mechanism to reset the weight to the top of the device?
Just a thought.
Huh?
If only the machines in The Matrix knew this...
I like basketball!!1!
He might not, but from what I gather, it's something like this:
PGE = m*g*h (potential gravitational energy in joules = mass * gravity * height)
50 lbs = 22.7 kg
PGE = 22.7 * 9.81 * 1.5 (I'm assuming a generous height of about 1.5 meters here, based on his diagram which gives 58" as the height)
PGE = about 334 joules
A joules is one watt-second, so 334 joules means 334 watts for one second, or 1 watt for 334 seconds.
According to Wikipedia, "The highest efficiency high-power white LED is claimed by Philips Lumileds Lighting Co. with a luminous efficacy of 115 lm/W (350 mA)." The claims is that this light can produce 600-800 lumens. If we take the lower number, 600, that breaks down to about 5 1-watt super-efficient LEDs to produce about 600 lumens.
So that's 5 watts per second, which with energy of 334 joules yields about 66 seconds of output. A far cry from 14,400 seconds (four hours).
Feel free to correct my math, it's been years since I've taken physics.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
you're thinking pure energy output by direct action - I think the poster was suggesting using a similar process to the one described by the lamp. 2 sets of 10 reps of 50lbs (for certain exercises) can be used to create a fairly decent source of potential energy for lighting. I figure...a single rep lifts weights about 18" - if this lamp is 6' tall...and it takes 10 5lb weights to power it from that height...
that's 4 reps to get the weights that high if attached to a ratcheting system. properly constructed, I bet I could get most of the electricity for my daily lighting by doing a fairly vigorous workout every day. It'll never happen, but only because of the weird stuff you'd have to have installed. I can picture it now - a huge stack of weights, lifted to the top of my house, 10 to 200lbs at a time, in 18" increments, the sounds ratcheting sounds echoing across the neighborhood. over the course of the day, they slowly grind down to the basement or ground floor. Run out too early? do another set! You've been meaning to tone those arms for a while now anyway, right?
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
hmmmm... build a big one outside just to generate power with a wind-powered mechanical contraption to lift the weights...
* calls patent troll lawyer
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
He could've made this even greener by incorporating a small bird or monkey whose job it was to crank this to the top. This way, the people of the world are motivated to preserve wildlife so that they can read novels at night.
Wow... I'm sure you meant well, but as a VT grad that post comes off as very condescending. To myself and tens of thousands of other hokies, Virginia Tech is not just another descriptor for massacre. There are tons of great things about Virginia Tech that we would much rather be associated with than the tragic shooting. I understand that it will always be a part of our history and it's not something that should be forgotten, but it's not necessary to bring it up every time we make the news (which happens often because there's tons of cool research going on in Blacksburg, VA).
The idea sounds good to me too, but 50lbs. sounds like too much to put at the top of a lamp. I have young kids, and I don't want them getting crushed when they knock this thing over (as they almost certainly will). In addition, a lamp that requires 50lbs. of anything doesn't sound green on the construction side.
Come on. I lift 50 pounds and much more many times most days... and I pay for it!
Think of it in terms of your health/fitness and gym membership fees you save.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Whoops. Wrong.
I'm replying to my own email. Sorry!
550 lbs over an hour will yield the numbers I posted. 55 LBS will yield 1/10 of the above.
He doesn't have 10.34 watts. He has (50/550)/3600 = 2.5253E-5 HP * 745 = 0.019 watts.
This won't provide much light.
550 lbs dropping 20 feet in 1 hour is (550/550)*20/3600*745 = 4 watts for an hour.
How about designing the entire lamp so it can stand on both ends?
Then you just lay it on the floor, and stand it back up again on the opposite end.
I guess maybe the rotors can only gear one way or something.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Instead of having a 50 pound weight, why not have a much lower mass spring provide the equivalent pull?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The LEDs in products like this are either blue or UV LEDs coated with a phosphorous (not entirely unlike fluorescent bulbs).
Since this particular lamp emits too much blue, I would wager that it uses a blue indium-gallium-nitride LED.
Increasing the phosphorous coating would make the resulting color more yellow and thus negate any need to wait 15 years.
The most commonly used phosphorous emits in the 580nm range (yellow), while the blue diode itself emits light at around 470nm (blue, surprisingly).
Well, when you put it that way... I was worried about having to move 10 pounds. But 4.5 kg I can manage fine. Thanks!
either I'm having to lift 10 pounds 5 times every time I want to light the lamp, or I'm lifting 50 pounds.
Unless you are weakened by some medical condition lifting 10 pounds, 4 feet, 5 times in a row, every four waking hours isn't enough of a demand to be an issue. On the contrary I think this regular weight bearing movement might be a very good thing for the elderly or physically frail.This could be viewed as an in-home several-times-a-day physical therapy light. Maybe a moveable stop, which could allow for the weight to start higher off the floor, but would need to be rest more often would be good addition for those with bad backs or knees that can't reach low to the ground. But to force people to get off the couch every two to four hours and move a few ten pound weights can really only be a benefit for the majority of the western world.
We are all just people.
I never won a green prize for that.
I guess I was ahead of my time.
All I remember was.. the brakes didn't work, and I felt pain for 2 weeks.
The real issue is that so much power is wasted. A lot of energy is just dissipated for no reason around your home. That energy could be harnessed somewhat inefficiently but still cheaply and if it were done over time and as a matter of course the actual cost would be minimal. Of course, so would the benefits, but we all know such things add up.
I've heard about several households where a crap TV was hooked up to a bicycle-powered generator. Oh sure, the TV probably dies an early death due to brownouts, but the point is, kids in the house couldn't watch TV unless one of them was pedaling. So obviously you get enough power out of a bicycle to do work, if not useful work :)
If you can run a TV, you can certainly run a laptop. My Core Duo with a 17" widescreen peaks at 90W.
If you use the energy immediately (i.e. reducing grid use, not replacing it) then you can get every watt-hour of energy produced out of the system and actually use it. If you lived off-grid and you had a well-insulated peltier cooler-based fridge, an energy-efficient laptop, and a few LED lights, plus a composting, methane-producing toilet for handling waste and producing cooking gas, a small family could produce all the energy they needed from their food (and more!) and still have entertainment.
Of course, dropping $500 on a homebuilt wind generator and some electronics to go with it would probably do the job, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Simply building and shipping the 50 pound thing will probably consume more energy than it saves in its entire life. You are better off simply buying a high efficiency LED screw in bulb which are available right now for much less and do work.
We live on a 13,170,856,500,000,000,000,000,000 pound rock. Are you sure that 50 pounds of mass is going to break Gaia?
50 pounds of something in particular could be an environmental problem. 50 pounds of mercury would be horrible. But just "50 pounds" is nothing. Personally, I'd love to have this lamp shipped to me without any weights at all, and I'll just scrounge up the requisite 50lbs of mass. Maybe just ship it with some buckets to hold rocks or sand or dirt; I've got all of the above in abundence. Better than shipping 50 pounds around, which even without analyzing the environmental impact, is going to cost me $$$.
And that's why, in the real world, people use real measuring units. We have 22.7kg falling through 1.47m under an acceleration of 10ms-2, giving 333.69J of energy. Over 4 hours, that is 23.2 milliwatts.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You doubt the power of His Noodly Appendage?
I think you have a parse error:
The design goal of Gravia is to provide light in a room (600-800 lumens — roughly equal to one 40 watt incandescent lightbulb), over a period of 4 hours, using people to generate power.
Note the parentheses. It really does say the goal is to light a room over a period of 4 hours.
4096R/EF7BAFA6 79E1 DF98 D09D 898F 9A11 F6F0 DDDC 23FA EF7B AFA6
What he means is to confuse people into thinking that the product does something that it doesn't, without lying. The write up is clearly meant for people to fall into the trap that many people did, thinking that this thing is a 40 watt lamp replacement that runs for 4 hours. The wording is very deliberate. It's there to generate buzz for something that isn't really worthy of it in hopes to grab some venture capitol.
Your story reminds me of the time when I turned an ordinary bicycle into a gravity-powered superbike. I still have a scar from that one.
Legalize it.
Hey, don't you mean *vrooom*?
Legalize it.
Give it a stand.
Set the stand on the floor, it has an arm that goes up to 50% of the height of the lamp and attaches to the back of the lamp. The lamp would be supported by the stand and wouldn't actually touch the floor. When the weight reaches the bottom, simply flip the lamp over by applying force to the upper portion. You could add in little catch or ratchet points so it would be easy to do.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
so why has he not actually built the thing?
because it cant be made. You have a better chance at making cold fusion work or a perpetual motion machine than making this lamp do what was claimed.
first, there is no way for them to make enough energy even assuming 100% conversion to generate the electricity needed to power even 1 led for enough light to match that of a book light, many others here have covered this fact already..
Secondly the designer made HUGE mistakes in assumption is is a fact being missed by everyone else here debunking it.. Led's when rated in lumens are rated in their very narrow beam pattern, when you fire it into a lens/reflector to disperse the light to get an area lighting effect that his lamp is going for the lumens drop logarithmically. to go from the 15Deg beam pattern the LED's lumen output is measured at to a 270 degree pattern you will lose about 80% of the lumen output level.
So to get The claimed output, the device needs to generate a SHITLOAD more power, or increase the weight to be near 900 pounds or only operate for a few seconds at a time.
In other words, it does not work, cant work, and will never work. I think the guy is waiting for the laws of physics to be broken for his lamp to work.
I have been working with a company that designs LED lighting systems and most everyone get's confused because ratings on LED's are all over the road and not measured the same way as other lamp technologies.
This lamp if it used CFL lamps would have a far better chance at makign the claimed Lumen output than with LED's led's are still far-far less efficient than CFL lamps when it comes to area light output in beam widths wider than 20 degrees.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sure, if you want the lamp to run for 4 minutes instead of 4 hours.
Watt is newton per second, not newton per minute. You forgot a divide by 60.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
The first prize winner seems MUCH more interesting: An open-source design for an energy meter.
See here
Basically, he's gonna provide the design specs to build your own kill-a-watt
So, it's:
And no interest whatsoever on Slashdot? WTF?
There are already drain water heat recovery systems in existance.
http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumer/your_home/water_heating/index.cfm/mytopic=13040
http://www.gfxstar.ca/specifications.htm
As pointed out by some other posters, kinetic or potential energy recovery might lead to the nasty problem of clogged pipes, but thermal energy recovery doesn't have that problem.
Um, gears aren't magical engery-creation devices. Gears are useful if you have a surplus of torque and want to transform it into rotational speed, or surplus of rotational speed into torque, but you still only get out of it what you put into it. In the case of the mythical lamp, the motion would be multipled by 160 but the apparent weight would be divided by 160, for the same net energy production.
Today Apple announces the brand new iLamp.
I'm about as weak as a guy can be
Give me your lunch money.
-- Posted from my parent's basement
This device isn't powered by gravity, it's powered by people. Gravity only stores the energy for slow release, like a capacitor.
Er, meet my BIGGER friends, "Fat Man" and "Little Boy". And go tell that blowhard "Tsar Bomba" to get lost.
In Liberty, Rene