The Human Energy Converter (HEC) at CCAT
Project by Bart Orlando and HSU Students, written by Ben Erickson

The Human Energy Converter has gone through at least three incarnations since its invention in the early nineties by our pedal power engineer, Bart Orlando, and Todd King, a former co-director of CCAT. The first design did not succeed, leading to our second effort, a flat bed trailer with bike gearing a pedals that powered two generators at the end of the trailer. We used an early type of invertor and powered lots of local concerts and rallies. It's design can be seen below.

Unfortunately the seats on our design were made with milk crates that were borrowed from our local dairy--an employee had given us the OK, but a manager later demanded the crates back. Without seats, we decided to scrap this HEC and begin anew.

The HEC in its current incarnation is actually a series of "Pedal Power Generators" that is described at the bottom of this page. It is, in essence, a series of exercise bikes that are individually hooked up to small 12V generators that are about the size of a car alternator. They each put out about 50-100 Watts, depending on who's pedalling, and we connect them in series and in parallel to make a 24V charge. We have eight matching Schwinn bikes mounted to a flat bed or just lined up on a lawn, and people line up to pedal the power for the event! It's a great hit among all party-goers, usually affording a great view of the stage as well as fun for kids and the kid within the adults.

The electricity made by the bikes is run through a 4024 Trace inverter to make clean AC electricity appropriate for sound systems, but we have the option of feeding excess electricity into the "grid" or into batteries. We often also wire in solar panels to the HEC set-up to provide extra power, but that is not necessary. It's just nice to say we made more electricity than we used.