Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

12 vote plug muscle power... volt even.

http://www.econvergence.net/electroacc.htm

$800 for everything.

http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html
Average household uses 10,000 kwh electricity a year

The average cost per kWh of electricity is about 10 cents.
So, .01 cents per Watt-hour.

That's $0.1 per kWh
or $0.0001 per Watt-hour.

So $800 / $.0001 per watt-hour = the need to generate 8,000,000 watt-hours to pay this off.

At low-normal rates of 100 watts, that's a mere 80,000 hours. I'm in decent shape so let's cut that to 40,000 hours. At one hour a day, that's 40,000 days, or more than 109 years.

Note that if you can have a bunch of people using this for most of the day you can cut the payback time to ten years or less.

I would think that the bicycle to power conversion could be made more efficient, and that the whole hookup could be made a lot cheaper, if we start to design our living areas around multiple sources of power. The power generator itself is less than $100 I think. And the cost of electricity will rise a little bit toward its true cost, although wind power is amazingly efficient without the major subsidies of wars, local pollution, and global warming.