The Green Bike

Written on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 10:51 pm by ecojoe
Filed under bike, eco hero, electric, health, off the grid, projects.


A Shocking StoryLast spring, two of my friends went to work building a bicycle generator. They slaved away on it for literally a couple days, but eventually it was ready to be tested. Me and Tiff stopped by for this special occasion; Thanh and Billy had hooked up the bike generator to a lamp. All we needed was a volunteer to ride the electrical monstrosity. After a moment of trepidation, I bravely stepped forward to offer my bike pedaling services, and as night fell in the thriving metropolis of Raleigh, I began pedaling…


Amazingly, it did not explode in a deadly shower of sparks. It worked. We had invented… ELECTRICITY. As that realization hit us, Captain Planet flew into the room, and everybody high-fived. It was awesome.Update: WRAL is going to put this on the news. The bad news is that we have to put the bike generator back together, as it’s been through some mess since last May.

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6 Responses to “The Green Bike”

  1. Granola Says:
    January 18th, 2008 at 10:19 am

    Cool brah, now all we need to do is reinstate slave labor.

  2. Jen Says:
    January 18th, 2008 at 11:30 am

    Sweet, Could you put directions on how you made this…I would like to try the same experiment.

  3. ecojoe Says:
    January 18th, 2008 at 11:36 am

    @Granola: Every time I go to the gym, I see tons of people slaving away on the bikes, with all that energy going nowhere. If they would put a generator on each of their bikes, imagine how they could cut their electric bill!

    @Jen: Yeah, I’ll be putting instructions sometime soon. Since we have to rebuild it, I’ll try to take some pictures of the steps involved.

  4. Jeremy Says:
    May 14th, 2008 at 9:26 pm

    Just a thought. When I was planning to make one of these I had it designed with a large flywheel to store the energy. The flywheel will keep rotating why you relx in order to keep the flow of electricity constant. Once you get the mass rotating it will be muct more constant and save you energy.

  5. ecojoe Says:
    May 15th, 2008 at 8:43 am

    Yeah, that would be our next step. We were just trying to get a rudimentary bike-power system going, then it’s on to improving it :)

  6. N.C. Go Green » Blog Archive » Raleigh Resident Uses Bike To Create Electricity Says:
    March 11th, 2009 at 10:30 am

    [...] Read More on his blog. Share and Enjoy: [...]

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