Gerbil Power

[JackN]

I know this may sound inhumane but do you think that you could power a home on gerbils in those wheels. It would probably be less expensive then petroleum. You could use other animals but gerbils are small, cheap, easy to feed and able to run very far.

[sciguy125]

I wanted to do something similar. But I wanted to use hamsters in a car. My first goal was to figure out how much power one hamsterpower (like horsepower) is. But alas, I am hamster-less and don't know how to go about this.

[Enterprize]

It would probably be possible but it would be fairly unreliable as a source of power. (unless you could get large surplus and store it in batteries) You would need a large number of gerbils and the animal rights groups would beat you down with a large blunt object though.

[Billfred]

Well apparently gerbils are somewhat reliable, otherwise FIRST wouldn't have mentioned them in the parts flowchart. (Go ahead. Look at the robot section of the 2005 manual.)

[Conor Ryan]

Hmm, I like your thinking. Maybe we could get a genetically engineered gerbil to run longer, faster, and with less food.

Oh it reminded me of this the Gerbilgway which we discussed here

[Enterprize]

That guy reminds me of the white ninja. And venn diagrams do suck.

But on topic. Lets be generous, and say any given gerbil spends 50% of his time running on the wheel. This would mean that to keep a house powered at all times, you would need twice the number of gerbils that wouuld be enough to power the house at full capacity. This is already a very large number of gerbils. Keeping them fed and watered would in itself be a tedious task. The main problem, however, is to coordinate their schedules so that every time one gerbil gets off to sleep/eat/drink, another gets on the wheel from said activities. This alone would be nigh impossible to accomplish. Also note that hampsters are biological life forms and thus can succum to nasty things like illness, injury, and death.

[mechanicalbrain]

Not gerbils but ive been thinking of using a crate of lemons (exact size determined by experimentation) to substitute for the 12 volt battery.