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Actually can some bored nerd do the maths on how many miles you'd need to ride with dynamo lights to offset the electricity used to charge battery lights? I'm guess a lot.
OK.
On the TCR I was typically using about half of a 10Ah battery per day for my lights. That was basically for a slow 300km ride each day.
A bit of googling tells me that it takes about .25kWh to recharge a 5Ah batttery (actual leccy needed taking into account losses, not theoretical 100% efficiency).
Electricity costs about 12p per kWh, depending on your tariff (obviously if you do it in a hotel it is free to you), or 3p for a day's lighting.
Dynamos cost lots of money. SJS says a Son Delux hub costs £180.
Assume your lights cost the same whether they are battery or dynamo (mine are actually really cheap but ignore that). Also ignore the cost of all the wire and other bits of crap that you need for a dyanmo setup. And value all the time that it takes you to faff around setting it up, and solder it and all that, at £0 per hour.
In that case, to recoup the cost of your dynamo hub, you would need to do 33.33 x 180 rides of 300km.
That is 6,000 rides or 16.4 years, riding 300km every day - or 1.8 million km in total.
Do dynamo hubs last that long?
frank9755-
Nice.
Whats better when they both die and you cant use either of them anymore.
Can you re-use certain parts of each again for something else? or do they both go in the ground?
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Unfortunately you didn't answer the question. I just wanted to know if a battery requires 0.5kwH or whatever to charge from your home supply and that costs 2p or whatever, how far you'd need to ride to generate the same money's worth of electricity. Nothing to do with cost of either device - clearly the Li-Ions have leaked into your food supply :P
The convenience of my dynamo power is worth far more to me than £s. For that, you'd have to ask "how expensive would a dynamo setup need to be before I wouldn't use one?".
Thrasher
hippy
Depends. There's cheap battery lights and there's cheap dynamo lights. If you've killed a light or killed a wheel then that's a good time to think about going the dynamo route. It's a pain if you want to swap out a perfectly functional wheel and light combo with dynamo stuff.
Actually can some bored nerd do the maths on how many miles you'd need to ride with dynamo lights to offset the electricity used to charge battery lights? I'm guess a lot.