Could I power my house by pedalling?

Short answer: no. Interesting answer: a medium British home needs 285 watts flowing without a break, for ever. You can make two hundred, for an hour, and then you want your tea.

## The number that settles it

A medium British home gets through 2,500 kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. That is Ofgem's own figure, the Typical Domestic Consumption Value they use to work out the price cap, revised in July 2026.

Spread across a year, 2,500 kWh is 285 watts, flowing continuously, day and night, awake and asleep, for ever.

Hold that number in your head, because everything else follows from it.

## What a person actually makes

A healthy adult who does not ride a bike can hold somewhere around 100 to 150 watts for an hour before it stops being fun. Somebody who rides regularly will sit at 200 to 250. A quick amateur does 300. The highest figure anybody has recorded for a full hour is about 500 watts, set by Eddy Merckx on a laboratory ergometer in 1975, and nobody has been comfortable since.

Measured properly, in watts per kilogram, the ladder goes roughly: 2.2 W/kg for an average untrained man, 3.0 for someone in fair to good shape, about 5.0 for an excellent amateur, and 6.6 for a professional at the very top.

So: the house wants 285 watts without stopping. You can make 200 for an hour, and then you want your tea.

## So, no. And not by a little

Here is the arithmetic that makes it vivid. Say you are fit, you hold 200 watts, and you ride for a full hour every single day. A bicycle generator is not perfect, so call it 75 per cent efficient once the alternator and the rectifier have taken their cut, which is generous. That gives you:

200 W × 0.75 × 1 hour = 0.15 kWh

The house wants 6.85 kWh a day. You have made just over two per cent of it — and that hour was the hardest hour of your day.

To actually keep the lights on you would need about forty-six people, each doing an hour a day, because the house does not stop drawing power at bedtime and you cannot pedal while you sleep. Put them on two-hour shifts and it is still twenty-three. A cycling club could just about run one house, and nothing else.

## The kettle is the thing that really gets you

An electric kettle draws about 3,000 watts. That is fifteen fit cyclists, all going flat out, to boil one kettle — and it takes three minutes, so they are producing a pot of tea between them and nothing else at all.

An electric shower is nearer 8,500 watts. That is forty-two riders. You would need a small club to wash.

This is the thing people underestimate, and it is not really about cycling. It is that anything which makes heat eats power on a completely different scale from anything that makes light or sound or computation. An LED bulb is eight watts. A laptop is fifty. A television is a hundred. You can personally power all three at once, comfortably, while holding a conversation. Then somebody fills the kettle and you would need your entire road club.

## You are, however, a very good radiator

Here is the part that is genuinely useful if you train indoors.

Human muscle is somewhere between 18 and 26 per cent efficient at turning food into mechanical work. Call it 22. So when you are putting 200 watts through the pedals, your body is burning close to 900 watts to do it — and the roughly 700 watts that do not reach the chain leave as heat.

Seven hundred watts. That is a small fan heater, running in your spare room, for as long as you are on the bike.

That is why indoor training feels so much harder than the same effort outdoors, why you sweat in ways you never do on the road, and why a fan is not a luxury. On the road you are moving through air at twenty miles an hour and it carries the heat away as fast as you make it. Indoors, you are sitting still inside your own heat, and the room gets warmer, and so do you.

So the honest answer to "could I power my house" is: not the electricity, no. But you could heat a room, and you are doing it already.

## What the slider is actually telling you

Move it and watch where the list of devices stops. That cut-off is the useful part of this page. Everything above the line is something a human being can genuinely run under their own steam. Everything below it needs a power station, and always did.

It is not a reason to feel small. Two hundred watts for an hour is a real, hard-won thing, and your body does it while also keeping you alive at thirty-seven degrees. It is just that the grid is an extraordinary piece of infrastructure, and most of us only notice it when the arithmetic is laid out like this.