Business Idea

A couple of months ago I came with this idea of building a gym where the energy that you spent on the machines could be gathered, and in that way the gym would pay you instead of you paying them. I decided to google it though and found pretty interesting stuff..

Information extracted from: http://www.whynot.net/ideas/134

"Always thought generators could be put on all the exercise equipment(ie weight machines)....all that energy working out creates a lot of potential energy that gets lost as kinetic energy(I think....). For example, a weight machine could be pushing a generator instead of dead weight, or simply have a turbine that runs when the weights are let down...people still get their workout and we use a little less electricity. Anyone gifted in electronics know if this is economically feasible?"

"An Olympic-class athlete on a pedal bike can produce 350 watts. If he pedals for 3 hours, he will produce 1 Kilowatt-hour. Out here, a Kilowatt-hour from the electric company costs $0.07. So having a gym of say 40 Olympians all pedalling at top efficiency for a full hour would yeild a revenue stream of (40)(0.35)(0.07)= $0.98 . Less than 1 buck per hour. A solar cell array on the roof would be a much better deal."

"Well. The only difference would be hydrogen fuel cells would be involved. You can have these huge gyms where fitness freaks would transfer energy on treadmills and the like which would transfer power to fuel cell banks. These banks would allow transfer energy for other use. The best part is that you would get a discount on your gym membership depending on how much power you transfer to the fuel cell bank."

"I think this idea is fantastic. Although considering the economics mentioned above, building a system to do all of this would be expensive and have no real return for gym.
My exercise bike now at least powers itself, you pedal to make it light up."

"Following up on the comment SVE, Oct 10 2003, the numbers sound small, but scale them up into monthly or yearly savings. He estimated 350 W/bike. Assume one bike investment by a gym. But let's say the utilization/day is 8 hours (this is a busy gym) so 8 hours * 30 days = 240 hours/month of usage. To calculate the monthly savings at ~$0.07/KWhr, do this: Cost/month/bike = (0.07 $/KWhr) * (240hours/month) * (0.350 KW/bike) = $5.88/month/bike. Generating $71/year/bike in electricity could justify the additional capital expense required for such a bike. I'm taking a wild guess that the extra cost over a traditional exercise bike might be $200 so this could have a return in a few years. And of course, we're all not Olympians, so cut the yearly savings in half to normalize us all!."

Jajajaj, and this was pretty funny but interesting if you want to loose weight:
"Props to Barry. There is a device you can purchase now for the average office worker. It creates an break between the power on your monitor, and to work, or use your computer monitor you must keep pedaling. It has variable speed adjustment too so you dont have to pedal like an olympian to get work done, but you still are excersising to generate some electricity for your monitor."