One solution for three common yachtie problems?

[Danny Jo]

You are coming to towards the end of an interminably long night watch, and shivering with cold; you've been drawing around 10 amps running the nav lights, instruments and radar and worry about the state of the batteries; and you're dreading that hike up Ben More, because lack of exercise and too much beer has put you out of condition.

Why doesn't some engineering wiz come up with a treadmill or bicycle battery charger suitable for a boat? It would provide at least a partial solution to all of the above problems, wouldn't it?

(It's been done, but these are too primitive for boaty use:
Pedal powered generator
Quick, ugly pedal generator )

Mark

 

[sailorman]

wots wrong with paraffin, beats pedals hands down

 

[Spyro]

No. You could spend hours on a bike and it would never charge a battery enough for what your talking about. Remember the old dynamos on bikes that used to power the lights..... Useless.
What exactly are the 3 problems? Are we talking about the Island peaks race?
1 Exercise more.
2 Drink less beer.
3 When your hiking up Benmore someone could run the engine and charge the batteries.

Easy /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[Salty John]

There is a thing called, I think, a Wesson pedal generator. It produces 5 amps at 60 rpm. It was popular in the 60's I believe.

 

[Searush]

There's no reason why a bike can't be set up to drive a car alternator if you want a reasonable output at around 14V and several amps. How long you could pedal it for when unfit and where you could store it on a boat are two very different issues!

 

[Bajansailor]

The Berrimillas (www.berrimilla.com) had a bicycle powered generator on board for their epic voyage round the world last year (they did a Sydney-Hobart, sailed to England to do the Fastnet, and then sailed home in time for the next S2H - on a 34' boat....).

But I dont think they ever used it, as their wind / water generator and solar panels kept them reasonably well supplied with amps.

Has anybody ever tried pedalling one of those exercise bikes? You can adjust the amount of friction in the flywheel - seems to me to be such a waste converting it into friction, when it could be usefully generating electricity!

(BTW, be warned, the Berrimilla site is very addictive - easy to spend hours there)