An article on human powered machines from Low-Tech Magazine.
It is important to recognize the scale of power required for many of our activities. Asking a person to produce 100 watts of output from their muscles for an extended period is a big deal. For reference an average adult's metabolism produces about 100 watts to run your body and muscle based activity tends to be 20 to 25% efficient. It is an excellent way to lose weight, but running a TV that needs 150 watts would be borderline for most people for more than an hour.
The article points out when you have so little power to offer, conversion and storage losses can make projects impractical.
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