Comments on: Exersize for a good cause, cold beer

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:15:00 +0000

I like my beer chilled by slave labor as much as anyone else, but I prefer naked Indonesian women packing ice on their heads down the side of a mountain. But that’s just me.

By: don

don — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:24:46 +0000

hey almost_there, I agree. who can get over the fact that they guy looks like jerry garcia!?

By: diymaker

diymaker — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 13:44:18 +0000

go green, cool beer waiting after exercise, but fruit juice would be better.

By: tbare

tbare — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:54:53 +0000

yeah.. until he started using this bike to chill his beer… then he lost a lot of weight!

By: RT (Panzer Time!)

RT (Panzer Time!) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:55:43 +0000

Nah, he was fatter.

By: Almost_There

Almost_There — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:14:17 +0000

Hey, ain’t that Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead?

I thought he liked heroin, not beer.

By: Christian

Christian — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:37:05 +0000

Hahaha

Roland Mösl is everywhere on the Internetz
(the guy on the bike)

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:07:58 +0000

Food calories on US labels are actually kilocalories. Also, the body is about 25% efficient. It’s better to compare Watt output and Joules. One Joule of output energy burns about 1 calorie (1/1000 food calories).

If a 12oz glass has 150 calories (typical), you would have to output 150kiloJoules. If you want to burn two beers per hour, that’s 83 Watts output for an hour (very easy for someone who can run a mile in under 10 minutes, takes walks daily, or does some form of regular exercise).

It is left as an exercise to reader to determine if this meets or exceeds the requirements for cooling a beer.

Also note that a bike chain is typically 97% efficient (wow!). I’m not sure how efficient this cooling process is.

By: TRAVIS

TRAVIS — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:50:29 +0000

“so easy, even a caveman can do it”

By: Matthias

Matthias — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:26:37 +0000

my suggestion as A/C technican would be to change the little compressor into a bigger four-step type, maybe a six-cylinder from york. So you could switch between different grades on your virtual ride.

By: jake

jake — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:55:47 +0000

Dirk, there is one problem with your numbers. In regards to food labels, I believe one food Calorie is actually is actually 1000 calories.

By: Taylor Alexander

Taylor Alexander — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:54:04 +0000

@dirk
“Food Calories” in the U.S. are actually kilocalories, so one beer that says it has 300 “calories”, actually has 300,000 scientific calories, so you’d have to heat up a LOT of water to break even.
-Taylor

By: F.

F. — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:33:20 +0000

Yeah, it’s spelled “exercise”. Don’t worry, had to look it up too. Being of the geeky persuasion, the word isn’t exactly part of our everyday vocabulary, understandably enough. :p

By: RT (Panzer Time!)

RT (Panzer Time!) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:18:59 +0000

What’s with the misspelling?

By: dirk

dirk — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:17:55 +0000

be nice if there were more details.

I wonder how many calories you’d burn chilling one beer? If you could make it come out even, this would be pretty sweet.

If a beer is approximately 336 grams of water, and one calorie will heat one gram of water by one degree celsius, and we assume that this process is 100 percent efficient backwards, that means you’d actually burn almost three times the caloric content of the beer cooling it (more if it’s light!).

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the fact that you’d have to submerge the can in water, providing a greater thermal mass and making it that much more difficult to cool the beer.

At any rate, we can assume that you burn more energy than you consume.

Unless I’m wrong.