Alternate power generation methods

[CosmicKobal]

I was thinking that we need more ways to generate power; Preferably SILENT methods.

then I happen on this:

A Potato Battery Can Light Up a Room For Over a Month

It got me started thinking…

Potato Generator

Tools Required - Tool with 1 boiling

Time Required - 1 hour

Skills Required - Primary skill Electronics -Secondary Skill Cooking

Materials Required - 1 Potato , 2 Copper Wires, , 2 nails, 1 water, Some kind of scrap Metal/wire/ etc

Provides enough power for 5 in-game days of light (simplified down from '3 months Real time equal 15 game days. 1 month Real time equals 5 in game days. the potato can provide just over a month of usable power)

This little home science experiment provides enough power to charge small mobile devices or power an LED light.

I know it isn’t perfect, but it’s midnight and my first attempt at an actual recipe. I initially was working on a chemistry recipe for my other thread, but it evolved into this.

Any thoughts?

Any other ideas for power generation?

What about a bicycle crank powered generator? near totally silent, wouldn’t require a whole lot of skills… I suppose it WOULD need to actually be MANNED though and would make you hungry and thirsty to use it.

What about a wind turbine? wind speed is a thing now right? so put that wind to work making power for you!

[kevin.granade]

From a game design point of view, silent and cheap power supplies must remain inferior to noisy and or expensive ones, otherwise you ‘win’ by avoiding conflict and holing up somewhere avoiding conflict, which is boring.
This can work, but in a “scraping by” sort of way that you would want to work your way out of as soon as possible.

“Provides enough power for 5 in-game days of light” assumes it’s a hyper-efficient LED bulb, which you need to go out and harvest independently of the more common flashlight or headlight bulbs in use now. If you used a typical lamp you’d have a few hours of light at most. Similarly in the cataclysm, if you had the LEDs, you could just use regular batteries, a single car battery could run a LED lamp for a month easily.

I’m also very skeptical of the article’s claims in general, the main thing I don’t like is it has ZERO actual claims about the performance of the device:
“wanted to prove that a system that can be used to provide rooms with LED-powered lighting for as long as 40 days”, it never says they did do.
“Compared to kerosene lamps used in many developing parts of the world, the system can provide equivalent lighting at one-sixth the cost”, what’s the cost? How many potato to project light equivalent to a kerosene lamp?

[Azrad]

For a silly method, make it so that sticking some jumper cables on a shocker brute zlave can actually generate electricity.

[troll_from_behind]

So you could go anal with your powerconsumption?

[Kadian]

To the whole Potato Battery thing:
I looked around online if I could find some kind of power output/time for a potato battery but couldn’t find anything really useful. However, I stumbled upon something which is apparently from the Berkeley University, a little ‘Teacher Guide’ which speaks about the Potato Battery. It states the following:

One LED should fire with 2 potatoes in series (this barely produces the needed 1.6 V), but you may need 3.

It also states that the used LED lights are low current LED's, which are supposed to work with 1.8V and 1mA ; they do light up with 1.6V and .2 mA though, at least that's what it states there, so I'm assuming that a potato also has between .2 and 1 mA...that's not a lot. Not at all in fact. And you can't really use those LEDs to light up a ROOM either, you might be able to use it as a flashlight of sorts, but not for a whole room. Its also pretty useless for anything else, the power output feels way too weak, you'd need centuries - or a farm full with potatoes - in order to get anything running/have a battery filling up.

Another Website if found gave a power output between 1V and 1.5V per fruit, which obviously isn’t enough to light up a regular lamp, and it’s apparently low enough that analog multimeter can’t even show the value correctly.

On another note, you would need Zinc and Copper for those batteries, and both will have a finite lifetime. The zinc gets dissolved, and the copper can react with the potato/lemon/whatever as well, so you’d need to check both metal strips/wires every once in a while.

With that said, you could potentially use a potato battery as some kind of Lightstrip. But Using it to power >anything< else? Extremely unlikely.

Sources:
http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/DEMOS/Potato_Power/Potato_Teacher.html
http://www.miniscience.com/projects/PotatoElectricity/