Meet the “Gravity Lamp”
Posted on February 24th, 2008 in Things we should do more of, Science!, Labs/Experiments, Tech News, Lacking a Category | No Comments »
“A Virginia Tech student has won the Greener Gadget Award for a clever
LED lamp that gets all of its power from gravity, which is a seriously
renewable resource. Working kind of like a grandfather clock that needs
to be wound in order to work, the lamp has a weight that’s raised up
every day. As the day goes on, it slowly lowers, with that movement
powering the LEDs.”
Cool. A lamp that I power (gravity brings the weight down, but I lift it up).
It doesn’t need to be plugged in. Put it anywhere you want. And its got a lifespan of 200 years of used for 8 hours a day.
Read more about the gravity lamp here :
http://dvice.com/archives/2008/02/gravity_lamp_la.php
Thinking about this lamp gives me some other interesting ideas. What would happen if we applied something similar to weight lifting equipment? Charge your cell phone each day with your workout? How bout an LED gage that shows how much of a power-workout you’ve actually done? There MUST be other ways to make functional gadgets from this idea. What if you scaled this up to a larger weight that you carry up a staircase, with a slider that goes to the basement, and every time you go up the stairs, you take one of a few weights, to keep the cycle going. We’re always complaining that Americans are overweight. This would help us exercise, and could be a fun way to compete to see who can be “greenest.”
I almost want to try this on a huge scale. I can picture a conveyor belt, with hundreds of cups that could be filled with sand, and a hopper at the top and at the bottom. Put in in a busy office building, and get people to bring a cup of sand with them each time they go up in the building - be it via elevator, escalator, or stairs, and dump it into the hopper at the top. See how long the conveyor could spin, how much sand it could move, and maybe how much power it could develop.
I like the idea of the LED Lamp, but even I have to admit that there are some problems with the idea on a larger scale. Everything takes energy. Gravity may pull the weight down, but I need to eat food to burn the calories to raise the weight up. In an office building, the elevator needs to work harder to raise up that cup of sand. It may be only a little bit more power, but its a cost none the less.
Thinking about this idea, though, leads to another idea. One of the largest problems with wind energy and solar energy is that the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t always shine when we’re ready to use the power they generate. What if we started looking at mechanical means of storing energy, instead of chemical means like batteries? What if we used solar power to pump water during the day, running on extra power, then use the falling water to generate electricity during the night? It’s not the most efficient system, because theres loss of energy due to friction, heat, maintenance of the pumps, etc. But would it be cost effective? How simple could the system be? I don’t know that the idea is remotely plausible. But its a thought. If a grandfather clock ran run for decades with a simple winding of a key, or lifting of a weight, what else could we do with that little bit of power?
