« How to Feed a Human Powered Building | Main | Human Power Plant (1.2): Work Songs »

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Nikolay Ivankov

Wow, amazing! So, basically some 20-40 hours a week are occupied by communal duties alone, of them the most productive hours of the day. I have a vague feeling something's missing here. As far as I remember, students were also supposed to study at the university. Or not any more?

human power plant

Students are awake 112 hours per week, if we assume 8 hours of sleep each night. So 20-40 hours leaves plenty of time to study.

Lizzie

This sounds more like a step backwards to a time when we had to do a lot of work to get very little return. You've got to start thinking outside of the box instead of building more complex (and annoying) boxes for people to live in. For instance, you have people climbing stairs all day long in this building. Why aren't you building stairs that utilize the kinetic energy generated when they are stepped on-- especially as you seem to imagine that students will be running up and down the stair, generating even more kinetic energy every time their weight lands on the steps. Think about it guys. You could be capturing a lot of energy there. And are you capturing the hydro power from water running down the drains (and off the roofs) so that people could have more showers?

And, just by the way, who wants to be a hampster on a wheel for x-hours a day? That's more like slavery than "community" participation. This whole thing doesn't seem very well thought out.

Jay

I agree with the stairs comment. You should have piezoelectric pads on stair surfaces, instead of stair travel generating heat, it should funnel into the gravity battery. Heating stairs wells with wasted energy, seems...wasteful :)

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Working...
Your comment could not be posted. Error type:
Your comment has been saved. Comments are moderated and will not appear until approved by the author. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Working...

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear until the author has approved them.

Your Information

(Name and email address are required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)