Hej hej SuperForest!
Yes! It is Tuesday (still!) which means it’s time for some pedal powered plans!
Last week, I got myself on a bike – now it’s time for Stage 2: some science…
knowhow, knowhow, knowhow!
So, I don’t know how much of your electricity basics you remember, but I needed to be reminded of this, the key equation for our purposes:
Yes! The magic triangle! To use it, simply cover up with your hand the value you want to solve for. So
- P = I x V,
- I = P / V and
- V = P / I
Here are some great online resources on electricity and pedal-power generally:
For electricity basics:
differentsourcesofelectricity.com
And for pedal power:
…but the internet is a wondrous place full of resources!
Assessing my load
The first thing I needed to do was to measure how much electricity my appliances use. Why? to understand how much power my appliances actually use, and this will enable me to understand which appliances I can realistically power by bike and the parameters of the system I will need. Now you can get an idea of this from looking at the labels on the bottom of things – they will usually set out the power (“watts”) an appliance uses. But sometimes the amount of power used (the “load”) varies – it might peak during startup, or use less than anticipated if you’re not fully blasting your amps. A more accurate way to assess your load is to use a plug-in power meter:
So simple to use, even I managed! simply plug the meter into the socket and then your appliance into the meter and bingo!
I took stock of what electrical appliances I regularly use, whipped out my plug-in power meter and tested, tested, tested. As well as getting an idea of what power my gadgets use generally when they’re up and running, when you’re planning your own system, it is important to understand what the maximum peak load would be – to ensure I don’t overload the system. And le voila – experimental funtimes, results:
- Phone charger: 7.4W (peak)
- BlackBerry charger: 5W (peak)
- Hairdryer: 1670W (high heat), 480W (low heat)
- Digital Radio: 3.8W
- Big lamp: 64W
- Toaster: 1472W
- Ipod Sounddock: 2.9W (without ipod), 7.4W (both with ipod charging but not playing, also while playing)
- Oooold Laptop: 48.9W (start-up peak, but it seemed not to vary significantly when running itunes, playing a dvd and internet usage)
- Kettle: 3058W
- Espresso machine: 1362W (peak, for short periods whilst making espresso)
Looking at these results I was shocked, though not entirely surprised, that the hairdryer, toaster, kettle and espresso machine used waaaaaay more power than the other items. Creating heat uses a lot of energy. I also learned that, when I’m not using it to charge my ipod, I should unplug the sounddock and if I’m online already I may as well play music on itunes rather than separately powering up the sounddock (or I could just listen to the radio)
AND since frankly the weather is getting better and I’m [blessed]/[cursed] with very fine hair, my hair is sort of adequately dry within 5 minutes whatever setting I have the hairdryer on, I should totally stick to the less scalp-scortching low setting to save more than half the energy!
Now, to parlay these findings into specs for the system!
Love, from myself and Flash (yes, that’s what I went for;)
SFP
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