North London Bike Power Workshop

A great collaboration between Transition Crouch End, Green Lens Studio and Magnificent Revolution led to the North London Bike Power Workshop being held on Saturday 11^th June, part of Haringey Sustainability Month . The event was well attended with fourteen people engaged in learning all about generating electricity through pedal power. There was an interesting assortment of reasons for attending and possible end uses for applying this knowledge. These included a teacher and a university lecturer wanting to involve their students in experiments with pedal power; desires to use this technology to enable an off-grid lifestyle or to power a theatre production, and as an awareness raising tool for demonstrating the considerable effort needed to produce energy.

The workshop begun with an explanation of the physics involved in electrical energy to explain what is required in order to achieve successful power generation. We then split into three groups to start putting theory into practice. There were three practical exercises demonstrating different end uses of the generated power and each group had the opportunity to try out each example. The three methods being:

· Generating power to charge a battery

· Generating DC electricity to directly power appliances

· Passing generated current through an inverter to produce AC power

The workshop also provided useful information on designing the generation system to be appropriate to what you want from it. It also considered the problems with batteries, the pros and cons of DC and AC power, as well as giving essential safety advice.

The day was packed with activity and knowledge sharing but was much enjoyed by all. Much praise goes to Adam and Simon from Magnificent Revolution for putting together and delivering such a fun and accessible workshop. Thanks also to Yev of Green Lens Studio for providing such a delightful venue and of course Gillian of Transition Crouch End for organising and promoting the event. 

If there is anyone out there interested in attending a future Bike Power Workshop please get in touch via transitioncrouchend@gmail.com and as soon as sufficient numbers show an interest, we shall arrange another workshop.