Best bang for buck is a wind turbine, and the UK is the windiest place in europe. Photovoltaics are fantastic but a bit expensive. Either way if you aren't grid connected you'll need a battery bank. You could in theory connect your genercycle to the batteries as a little extra top up, especially useful in the winter months.
As Captain Blight says, LEDs and such are really helping to cut electrical usage. If you have to generate all your own energy you'll be a lot more frugal with it and the benefit from having a bike generating electricity will get effectively greater. If you live in a 1960's house with electric heating then you may as well not bother at all.
The average house is so inefficently designed with hightly inefficient appliances and lighting and heating systems. Basically everything is completely backwards. A correctly designed house will not even require a heating system, or at least an extremely small one.
http://www.lowcarbon.co.uk/
I went to visit this building here and on a freezing January morning it was warm and toasty inside. It has a wood pellet boiler that was donated to them but it hasn't needed to be used. All the heat is provided by the sun and absorbed by the walls and floor and then re-radiates back out into the living space at night.
As a side note, there are courses about for building your own wind turbine. These guys below used to do one but this appears not to be available any more. General renewables courses available though. http://www.lowimpact.org/courseoutlinewindandsolar.htm
Pedal powered generator course in London:
http://www.lowimpact.org/hackney_course_outline_pedal_power.htm
Best bang for buck is a wind turbine, and the UK is the windiest place in europe. Photovoltaics are fantastic but a bit expensive. Either way if you aren't grid connected you'll need a battery bank. You could in theory connect your genercycle to the batteries as a little extra top up, especially useful in the winter months.
As Captain Blight says, LEDs and such are really helping to cut electrical usage. If you have to generate all your own energy you'll be a lot more frugal with it and the benefit from having a bike generating electricity will get effectively greater. If you live in a 1960's house with electric heating then you may as well not bother at all.
The average house is so inefficently designed with hightly inefficient appliances and lighting and heating systems. Basically everything is completely backwards. A correctly designed house will not even require a heating system, or at least an extremely small one.
http://www.lowcarbon.co.uk/
I went to visit this building here and on a freezing January morning it was warm and toasty inside. It has a wood pellet boiler that was donated to them but it hasn't needed to be used. All the heat is provided by the sun and absorbed by the walls and floor and then re-radiates back out into the living space at night.
As a side note, there are courses about for building your own wind turbine. These guys below used to do one but this appears not to be available any more. General renewables courses available though.
http://www.lowimpact.org/courseoutlinewindandsolar.htm