Road Bike Versus Hybrid

In the English speaking world cycling is mainly a sporting subculture, dominated by fast moving, lycra clad young men on road bikes. I read several cycling forums on the Web and I have read many threads where someone asks for advise about a commuting bike. This will immediately draw a chorus of posters dismissing hybrid bikes as worthless and advising a road bike as the only worthwhile option.

The Raleigh Oakland

For my own information I decided to test the difference in a hybrid and road bike. My hybrid is an inexpensive, steel framed Raleigh Oakland. It weights about 15.5 kg and runs on 700 x 28 c tyres. My road bike is an inexpensive, aluminum framed Carrera TDF. It weights about 11.7 kgs and runs on 700 x 23 c tyres.

The course I choose was flat and gently rolling, valley and bogland. On both runs there was a cross wind. I decided to measure the distance I could travel in an hour, doing a sustainable pace, a pace that I could keep going at all day. A pace at which I did not break a sweat.

On the road bike I traveled 19.95 km (12.4 miles) in one hour, on the hybrid I covered 18.99 km (11.8) miles in one hour. Over the course of one hour the difference was just over 1 km. In a race this would be a huge margin, but in a commute it's nothing. The lycra clad commuter would probably loose more time changing out of their cycling clothes than I would cycling that last kilometre.

The Carrera TDF

The hybrid is a more comfortable, rugged and stable bike to ride. I much prefer the upright riding position. It is equipped with a chain guard, mud guards, mud flaps, a rear rack and a handlebar bag. Best of all you can comfortably ride it in ordinary clothes. It is practical everyday transport. If I wanted a bike to commute to work every day I would go with the hybrid rather than the road bike.

Now if I wanted to go racing the road bike and the lycra would be best.

Carrera TDF

Frame - 6061 aluminum

Tyres - 700 x 23c Kenda road tyres

Number of Gears - 16

Approximate Weight (KG) - 11.7

Raleigh Oakland

Frame - Chromoly Steel

Tyres - 700 x 28c trekking tyres

Number of Gears - 18

Approximate Weight (KG) – 16.5 kg (including accessories)

DIY Bike Servicing

I am slowly teaching myself to be a bike mechanic. In the seven months since I bought my Raleigh Oakland I have done all the servicing. I have been learning the rudiments of servicing bikes. If you have no experience in working with hand tools it will take a while to master bike maintenance but if you have any aptitude for manual labour you will soon get it.

Raleigh Oakland

I studied diesel engines in college, bikes are much easier than engined vehicles. The working parts (with a few exceptions, like hub gears) are all open. Unlike an engined vehicle it’s usually easy to figure out what is wrong with a bike and how to fix it.

After that you need a good reference book, a basic set of tools, decent workspace, lots of practice, a willingness to get your hands dirty and a desire to learn. YouTube is an invaluable resource for the apprentice bike mechanic. If you only service your own bike you only need to master the components on one machine, a professional mechanic must master a vast range of  different bike components.

In my local bike shop a full service costs a minimum of 175 euros. Parts and extra labour will cost more. It has to be booked a week in advance, left in the shop and collected. I do about 1000 km a month on my Oakland, on rough rural roads, in all weathers. To keep it running in top form, would need at least two services as year. I am saving around 400 euros in labour every year.

Because I can do all the little ongoing servicing jobs my bike is always running in tip top condition. In the event of a breakdown, with a modest tool kit and a few spare parts I can do most roadside repairs and make it home under my own steam.

The Haynes Manual

My Bible

Halford' Tool Kit

The Signal to Noise Ratio

When I was a child in rural Ireland in the late 1960s one thing I learned very young was to shut up when adults were listening to the news, on TV or radio. Adults would listen attentively and without comment until the news was over. Then they would discuss the stories, both national and international. It was part of the ritual of daily life in that society.

My uncle told me a story about my maternal grandfather, a Cavan farmer. In 1937 my uncle asked him about the rising tensions between Japan and the USA. My grandfather had a very clear grasp of the strategic significance of the Japanese carrier fleet and its likely impact in any future war. As things turned out this Cavan farmer had a better grasp of the matter than the commander of the US Pacific fleet.

In modern Ireland we have access to a bewildering array of information, multiple radio channels, newspapers, twenty four hour news feeds and the internet. We have a much higher standard of education and yet many adults are so distracted by all the worthless noise that they have no idea what is going on in the world. As Neil Postman once wrote they are “amusing themselves to death”.

Until Irish television was launched in 1961 (a few months after this community first got mains electricity) news came from  the radio. Radio news went back to the mid 1920s. By the 1930s battery powered valve radios were common household items. To conserve power they were switched on for the news and then switched off. The only exception to this rule was when the Cavan football team were in a big match.

Radio batteries were imported into Ireland and the outbreak of the Battle of the Atlantic in September 1939 cut off the supply. A local man Patrick McCabe developed a radio battery and made them in a small workshop. His battery used a readily available sauce bottle to make the individual cells. He mounted a collection of cells in a shallow wooden box.

No one can tell me how he charged them but he must have had some kind of hand or pedal powered generator. It was primitive but it worked and it kept the communities radios working until 1945 when batteries were again available in the shops.

In the future we are going to need people like Patrick McCabe, creative technicians and mechanics to improvise things like batteries and keep essential communications systems running. Who knows what kind of communications we will be able to maintain in the coming decades but radio will almost certainly continue to play a key role.

I often wonder about the enormous amounts of energy consumed by the modern Internet, by the huge server farms that keep Facebook and YouTube running. When we are several decades past peak oil will we have the power to spare to run servers full of worthless photos and banal videos. Or will we have to scale back our communications systems and decide what is important information and what is useless noise.

When the Lights Go Out

If you are completely dependent on mains electricity to run your house and have made absolutely no preparations for coping without it, a power cut can be a very difficult time. It's no fun to sit in the dark, without any entertainment, no way to cook, trying to stay warm and thinking about how the present sucks. But with a little preparations a power cut, even an extended one is nothing to fear.

The single greatest asset in a power cut is a solid fuel heating system. It will allow you to cook simple meals like soups and stews, to boil water and to space heat. A fireplace will do the job but any kind of stove is a lot better. If your house has no solid fuel option, think strongly about retro-fitting it, if you can. If an external metal fluepipe can be fitted to the house, this may make it possible to install a stove. Obviously always keep a supply of fuel in reserve for power cuts.

Candles are good for light, and produce about 80 watts of heat each. They are however expensive and are a serious fire risk, especially around children. For light the easiest, cheapest and more reliable option are wind-up LED camping lanterns. If you make sure to keep them charged you have a ready source of light once the power goes out. If you forget to keep them charged you have to do some work, but the work will warm you and you will have light. An LED head torch for everyone in the house would also be good. Very easy on power and puts the light right where you need it.

The ultimate accessory to get through a short power cut is a power pack, usually used by motorists for emergency power and compressor. They will supply a small amount of DC current. For household back up buy one with an inverter which will also produce the AC current used by household appliances. The more you spend the more powerful an inverter you get. But a power pack is a very small reserve and it’s best used for running small appliances like a coffee grinder or small TV. Do a lot of heavy work with it and you will have no power very quickly.

To get through a power cut in style requires more than meeting your physical needs, you must also boost morale. Keeps books and board games in stock. In many modern households PC, consoles and TV often mean entertainment is a solitary pursuit. In a power cut most of these entertainment systems are dead. Learn how to play a musical instrument or tell a good story. Have some of your favourite chemical stimulant in stock, in my case whiskey. It's amazing the way a good source of heat, a bowl of soup, a few shots of whiskey and a singsong can lift morale.

The last time we had a power cut it lasted about 3 hours. We got the backup lights going, threw more logs on the stove, cracked open a bottle of whiskey, got the guitars out and ended up telling the kids stories about their great grand parents. It was a great night and I still remember it fondly. In fact I was sorry when the power came back and the kids went back to their xboxs and TVs. There is a kind of magic telling stories in a dimly lit room.





Wind up Lamp

Head lamp

Power Pack

You Don’t Miss Your Water

My mother was almost 30 years of age when my community was connected to the national grid. I once asked her what she would miss most if mains electricity were to disappear, she replied without hesitation pumping water.

Pedal Powered Water Pump

Before electric water pumps many rural Irish women spent a lot of time carrying water in buckets. Water was needed for drinking, cooking, cleaning and washing clothes and bodies. Those who were lucky has a good source of water nearby, usually a well. But even if the well was nearby keeping the households water requirements met was an endless round of drudgery.

The thing is that pumping water on a domestic scale is one of those jobs that does not need electricity. A little equipment and some imagination can eliminate a lot of tedious work, as this video demonstrates.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-UvhiNb1as&feature=player_embedded

Maybe We Are Not Doomed

I sometimes despair when talking to the unconverted about peak oil and the long emergency we are now entering, many people refuse to think about any other way of living but the modern way. It’s like we either have automatic washing machines or we have to beat our clothes on rocks down by the river. But recently I came across the James Washer, a simple, well made manual washing machine that would take all the drudgery out of clothes washing.

The James Washer

The biggest problem is getting people to think about other ways we could live. We waste enormous amounts of resources in madcap ways. We use two tons cars to travel a mile, when we could easily use a bike or walk. The Dutch do 25% of all journeys on bikes and they build bikes that last 100 years. The Swedes build houses that can be heated through arctic winters with little more than the body heat of the inhabitants.

We waste huge amounts of resources making short lived, useless crap, when we could make things like James Washers, and dutch bikes, and pedal powered power tools, and solar buildings etc, etc. The real necessities of human life are actually quite modest and can be met without the huge waste that we have right now.

The things that make life really worthwhile are not crap you can buy in a shopping mall, but things like a happy family, good neighbours and good health. Before we got rich in Ireland in the 1990s there was a great old tradition of a ceile house, a house in the neighbourhood where musicians were always welcome and a music session might start any time of the day or night. A few musicians, and dancers and a few bottles of whiskey and beer, and everyone would have a great party and forget their troubles. It got us through some very bad times and put a smile on our collective faces.

Dutch Bike

We are all doomed in the long run, the sun will eventually fry the earth, but the idea that there is no use in trying right now is one I reject. Who knows how it will play out, but when I hear some people who are peak oil aware saying there is no use in trying because we are all doomed, it reminds me of listening to peak oil deniers. When I try to discuss peak oil with the deniers they parody what I am saying by proclaiming “We are all doomed”. In both cases the reasoning leads to the same result, paralysis.

Dutch Bikes in Ireland

Dutch Cargo Bike

The True Value of Electricity

The average Irish home uses 5300 kWh of electricity a year (1) an increase of 21% since 1990. Irish households are profligate users compared to other western countries, in 2006 we used 21% more than UK households, and 31% more than our continental neighbours(2). We used more than our trans Atlantic cousins in the USA where average household use in 2009 was 4800 kWh (3).

Electricity is a miracle of the age and yet like so many modern miracles people take it for granted and waste it on an epic scale without thinking. So for this post I am going to try and put some perspective on the real value of electrical power. For this I turn to Lieutenant Colonel Fleming’s U.S. Army War College thesis on Peak Oil (4)

Fleming wrote
“A gallon of gasoline energy content is about 33 kilowatt-hours. In perspective, 33 kilowatt-hours is the equivalent of a healthy male pedaling a stationary bike for 330 hours – if he can maintain 100 watts per hour. If he pedals 40 hours per week, he will generate the same amount of energy as in one gallon of gasoline in about eight weeks”

So one gallon of petrol (as we call gasoline in Ireland) has 33 kWh of potential energy. Average household electrical use is 5300 kWh a year, the equivalent of 160.6 gallons of petrol. Typically up to 60% of potential energy is lost in the generation and transmission of electricity. So to produce the 5300 kWh used by our average household requires the burning of the equivalent of 401.5 gallons of petrol in a power station.

If it takes an adult male 330 hours of pedaling a stationary bike to produce the power in one gallon of petrol. It will take the same male 132500 hours of pedaling to produce the kind of power an average Irish household burns in electricity every year. If we asked our male to cycle 40 hours a week, that would take him 3312.5 weeks (no weeks off) or 63.7 years.

If we paid him a modest 10 euro an hour (and remember that 100 watts is lively cycling) it would cost over 1.3 million Euros in human labour. Right now you can buy this much electrical power in Ireland for 800 Euros. It can be bought for 800 Euros because it is produced with cheap fossil fuels. But the days of cheap fossil fuels are rapidly running out and very soon we will have to start paying the true cost of electricity.

Sustainable Energy Ireland’s booklet “Your Guide to Electricity in Your Home” is packed with electricity saving tips.
http://www.seai.ie/Publications/Your_Home_Publications/Your_guide_to_electricity_in_the_home.pdf

References
(1) The Electricity Supply Board  http://www.esb.ie
(2) http://www.finfacts.ie/irishfinancenews/article_1013935.shtml
(3) http://www.carbonindependent.org/sources_home_energy.htm
(4) http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a545047.pdf