Introduction:

What is the one activity that many Americans engage in almost everyday, in which its sole purpose is to burn off extra energy...?  Exercising.  Wouldn’t it be cleaver to be able to harness all this “wasted” energy generated by people trying to keep in shape?  Well this is exactly what the Green Rabbit Machine (GRM) is intended to do.  What we did was take an old bicycle, propped its back tire up off the ground, and attached it to a large tractor belt.  At the other end of the belt we placed an alternator from an old automobile, and what this permits us to do is harness the exerciser’s mechanical energy and convert it into electrical energy.  Below is a picture of the prototype we have assembled to test this concept: 

Implementations Prone to Failure:

While we were researching and constructing our prototype, we have found out that unfortunately we were not the first people to think of this general concept.  Although, we can honestly say that before starting prototype construction, the idea was new and innovative for us (such that the reason we decided to start building came entirely from our own heads). 

Needless to say, we have taken this idea a step further and will now discuss how it would be practical to put the Green Rabbit Machine into use.  We expect that the reason no one has taken any innovative steps with this concept has to do with the fact that they were too much focused on making a retail version of the product – with a target audience being home consumers.  We acknowledge and realize that this is impractical and problematic as it would require purchasing extensive amounts of batteries to store the energy in for later use, not to mention the consumer would have to spend between 6 to 8 hours of daily exercising to get any true benefit out of it. 

Our Proposed Implementation:

So lets back up for a minute and broaden the horizon.  Instead of focusing on putting Green Rabbit Machines into people’s homes, what if we were to focus on gyms and exercise facilities?  At large, this would solve many of the problems associated to focusing only on the retail distribution channel.  Commercially, everything will be on a larger scale.  We would be able to use the same collection of batteries to store the power of 20+ machines as opposed to just one home-consumer machine.  (As of right now, our goal would then be to sell this power back to a traditional coal burning power plant – equivalent to how many solar panel systems are set up).  We will discuss this in more detail after having a look at a wiring diagram of the GRM.  For now, let’s take a look at some numeric figures.  Suppose for a minute that the UW Madison exercise facility were to perform some renovations and replace all their normal exercise bikes with Green Rabbit Machines.  Assuming we install 20 GRM’s in the facility, and that each of those GRM’s operate on average 6 hours per day (by different people of course!) – at 250 watts per machine, this would give us a total of 30 Kilowatt Hours per day.  If we were to get all of the exercise facilities across the nation to implement GRM’s, we could generate enough electricity to be comparable with that of wind or solar technologies.