Thursday 1 November 2012
Animal House: Power Your Home With Pets
Hurrican Sandy has caused a lot of power outages. The vast majority of Americans have their power supplied by utility companies. Nonetheless, there are those who go off the grid, turn to alternative energy, or combine the two. There are a lot of ways to power your house by alternative means. Even your pets can deliver the power. Figure out how many pets it would take to power your house for a day.
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2 comment(s):
The math is wrong here.
I think they mistook average home power of 32kWh per day to be 32kW per day, which is wrong; one is a measure of power (kW) the other energy (kWh).
32kWh is 32000*60*60 Joules per day (115200000 Joules). Taking the example of a greyhound (mass ~30kg, speed ~17.5m/s) the dog makes 30*9.8*17.5=5145Nm/s (J/s or Watts) of power. Dividing 115200000[J]/5145[J/s] gives 22390 seconds or 373 minutes or 6.21 hours of continuous running at top speed. This is assuming perfect energy conversion as well.
So their stated 17 minutes for a greyhound is just wrong. You would need 22 greyhounds to achieve this in 17 minutes!
Get your facts straight Internet!!
Oh dear, someone on the internet was wrong. Glad it wasn't me....
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