Miners on gas or exercise?

[mikenekro]

I stated before that I am going to be doing it for fun after you pointed out that it would be not something to do for a profit. No ROI needed.

And when I do store up enough power to run my ant s3 for an hour or a few hours, I can call it a success. Even if it isn't the most profitable or reasonable way to get power, it will still be fun to do.

Yes this is true but what machine would you be using? All the ones I have seen are next level expensive.

I will be using some neodymium n52 grade magnets along with coils of enameled copper wire. Mould those in separate resin disks and mount them with the coils stationary, magnets rotate. Hooke those up to a battery bank(batteries charged with electricity through charge controller and passed to electronic through inverter.)

That is all that is needed to create an electrical generator/alternator.

It's a fun DIY project you can make pretty cheap.

The good thing about making your own is you can determine the size of the coils and magnets which determine the electricity being generated. The speed of the rotation also determines that so it's a combo of speed and size.

How much can it generate from a human peddling is what I will find out when it's built.

Altogether you can make a DIY generator for as low as $100 depending on how big you want the magnets and coils to be. The full system would be a bit more but you can keep it pretty cheap.

I'm using some big 4" x 2" x 1/2" n52 magnets with 30 parallel wraps of 14 gauge copper enameled wire to see if I can get a good generation going.

If it doesn't produce at least what MrTeal said, around 150W in 2 hours, I can always turn it into a wind turbine or hydroelectric generator and try again.

You could probably make one with some n42 cylinder magnets around 1" diameter 1/4" thick and 16 gauge enameled copper wire 15-20 wraps for around $100.

The rest of the supplies to store the electricity and use it could be as cheap as $100. That would include the battery, a rectifier, charge controller and a small inverter. This is depending on which ones you use, of course, and the maximum watts you are looking for.

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[MrTeal]

If you want to save yourself some time and effort, consider buying a motor kit. I've wound a couple helicopter motors that needed an extremely low RPM/volt using kits from Scorpion Power systems, and it makes the job much easier. It's still a fiddly process, but since you get the casing, shaft, bearings, etc it's nothing like trying to make everything out of resin.

[mikenekro]

If you want to save yourself some time and effort, consider buying a motor kit. I've wound a couple helicopter motors that needed an extremely low RPM/volt using kits from Scorpion Power systems, and it makes the job much easier. It's still a fiddly process, but since you get the casing, shaft, bearings, etc it's nothing like trying to make everything out of resin.

I'll look into that. If I can find some good old motors or motor casings I'll probably get that instead.

http://www.fitcoins.net/

Check this out! 

I could do this fitcoins thing while I'm charging up my miners battery bank as well

[MrTeal]

If you want to save yourself some time and effort, consider buying a motor kit. I've wound a couple helicopter motors that needed an extremely low RPM/volt using kits from Scorpion Power systems, and it makes the job much easier. It's still a fiddly process, but since you get the casing, shaft, bearings, etc it's nothing like trying to make everything out of resin.

I'll look into that. If I can find some good old motors or motor casings I'll probably get that instead.

That'd be cheaper, although removing the existing windings can be a huge PITA.

Honestly, you might just be better off buying an automotive alternator from a wrecker and using that. It'd be the cheapest and least time consuming.

[mikenekro]

If you want to save yourself some time and effort, consider buying a motor kit. I've wound a couple helicopter motors that needed an extremely low RPM/volt using kits from Scorpion Power systems, and it makes the job much easier. It's still a fiddly process, but since you get the casing, shaft, bearings, etc it's nothing like trying to make everything out of resin.

I'll look into that. If I can find some good old motors or motor casings I'll probably get that instead.

That'd be cheaper, although removing the existing windings can be a huge PITA.

Honestly, you might just be better off buying an automotive alternator from a wrecker and using that. It'd be the cheapest and least time consuming.

I looked at that, and the RPMs needed to create any useful amount of energy is way to much. Even for a wind turbine it's not recommended.

Here's a quote from a site which explains the car alternator for wind turbines better than I can. You can imagine human power would be less than wind power in terms of longevity and, at some points of wind speed, RPMs.

I’m thinking about using an automobile alternator for a homebuilt wind generator. Will this work?

Ron Johnson • Albuquerque, New Mexico

Hello Ron, A car alternator is a bad choice for a wind generator. The efficiency in normal use is never more than about 60 percent. The bearings are too small to reliably support large blades (more than about 1.5 meters diameter). It is designed to be lightweight and robust, and to withstand running at very high rpm. At low rpm it produces nothing, and low rpm is where wind generators spend the majority of their time running.

If you use a car alternator in a wind turbine, the speed problem can be addressed in one of several unsatisfactory ways:

• Use a small blade area so that the short blades can spin at high rpm. This means that you cannot catch much wind, and even so, you will need a high wind speed to get the necessary rpm. It will also take a lot of wind to produce high enough power to excite the magnetic field and actually have energy to spare.
• Use gearing to increase the rpm. This involves extra cost, extra losses, extra unreliability, and overall ugly and clumsy engineering.
• Rewind the coils to work at lower speed. This means more turns of thinner wire in each coil. This reduces the cut-in rpm, but also increases the losses in the coils themselves, limiting the power output and further reducing the already low efficiency.
• A car alternator’s rotor needs to be powered to excite the magnetic field. The field has to be at a maximum to get output at the lowest speed. This represents a constant power loss of 30 to 40 watts during operation. You will also have to remove and bypass the internal regulator. The internal regulator in the alternator is not suitable for charging a deep-cycle battery via a long wire run.

While it is cheap and attractive at first look, the car alternator is more trouble than it is worth. It is better to build a purpose-built alternator for a wind turbine.

[MrTeal]

For a wind turbine, yes. For a bike it's pretty easy. Standard cadence is around 60RPM or so, and you can get around a 3:1 ratio in a high gear, so that's about 180 wheel RPM. If you use a 26" wheel and a standard 2" pulley on the alt, you'd be spinning the alt at 2300, which is way more than the minimum.

[desertfox470]

A generator is not really made to run 24/7 they are made for when the power goes out you have a backup. I think the generator would die out quickly if being used at full all the time.