Some reading this will notice that their comments were alongside my own, which is what this post is- how the idea of the gym I thought of could become possible.
Continuing the thought of having this equipment in a public area where anyone can use them by joining the gym, and paying a small fee, I would like to explain how this would work. Government sponsored gyms could pay for these facilities, which would be incredibly expensive and need a certain amount of investing to get started, would do the following: stimulate jobs, more efficient technology (if the electricity generated would even be enough to be stored and if so storing it to the most efficient way), getting the obesity problem down, so long as the cost of membership and availability of membership are appropriate, and also help awareness of electricity usage. For example: "Oh leaving the TV on while I take a shower wouldn't hurt," type of thought would be phased out if after a workout a person sees that they generated X amount of watts of electricity while leaving that TV on used this much. Also the more electricity generated a person would receive a discount on their membership fee or some sort of incentive system to generate its' popularity. Keeping in mind a professional would need to work out for hours a day to get maybe a few cents worth of electricity and the cost of an average gym membership, if using a discount system, it would not be possible for a person working out to profit, meaning cash, from working out- good news for the gym and those invested in them.
I think the idea is creative, but the return would be minimal and irregular. Thus, it would most likely be too impractical. There would be no consistency in the amount of power generated as it would be dependent upon the number of people working out at a given time and each's own rate of working out. There may not always be enough power generated to meet the demand of let's just say the gym for example. If the energy were to be stored, I think it would become too expensive an operation, and the large effort would not be rewarded sufficiently. You could add incentives and advertise this green minded idea further, to allure people. Overall, I think its clever, but not really feasible. If you look carefully nowadays you will see some of the machines' screen displays are actually powered by you while you work out, and not electricity from the gym.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Guillaume, but I don't think an operation like this would be in it to generate massive amounts of electricity. The machines used probably wouldn't be able to provide enough electricity to even come close to the gym's demand for power. However, I feel like something like this could still be profitable over time. The knowledge that you are generating electricity to power the things around you while you work out would be exciting for people. Even if this amount is considerably small, I think people would still choose this gym over its competitors. I even think that this gym would be able to charge more for their memberships because they have something new that no other gyms have.
ReplyDeleteIf the gym could get enough funding through incentives to make the equipment close to the cost of regular gym machinery, I think that they would be able to turn a profit.
While it may not be a completely feasible idea, it should be alluring enough to the public to actually work economically.
Although I don't think anyone still cares, I f*cking knew it could work, I just had the wrong target audience: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/inmates-brazilian-jail-cycle-freedom
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