I recently watched The Magic Faraway Tree, in which Andrew Garfield plays a dad with dreams about making homegrown tomato sauce in the country. I was particularly charmed by a scene in which Garfield generates enough electricity for his tween daughter to enjoy a shonky video call via pedalling a busted-up bike alone. Well, one YouTube creator has leveraged this thrifty approach to energy generation in a whole new way.
“Every year you’re spending thousands and thousands of watt-hours to simply power the fan that cools your CPU,” YouTube creator mryeester began in a recent video, “Which got me thinking, what if we could manually cool our computer with human grit and determination?” Opting to manually turn his CPU fan via the revolution of his bike wheels, you should probably add ‘buckets of sweat’ to that equation too.
So, how do you go about connecting a bike to a CPU fan? Mryeester first replaced his bike’s back tire with a V-belt, attached a sheath to the CPU fan, and then connected that to the bike via said belt. Simple, right? Weeell, let’s just say you won’t see this tinkerer’s experiment in our best CPU coolers guide.
For starters, ensuring the V-belt doesn’t hit any other PC components as it rotates is a challenge. The YouTuber decided to tilt his entire PC and open up the top to give more direct access to the CPU fan without smacking any other hardware guts.
Personally, I’m left wondering why mounting the 3D printed sheath indirectly to the CPU fan via, say, a short pole that could offer some clearance outside of the PC case isn’t explored—feel free to tell me in the comments why that’s a terrible idea. Is it to do with physics and tension? I feel like it’s to do with physics and tension.
After getting his CPU down to 39 °C, the glued-in-place sheath promptly popped off the fan cover, highlighting at least one point of failure in this human-powered CPU cooling contraption. The other, obviously, is the simple fact that even the fittest human can’t pedal forever. Add to that manually turning your CPU fan would only save you about three bucks a year at most, and it’s an idea that hardly seems worth refining.
Undeterred, mryeester jumped back into testing, this time booting up CS2 to see if he could pedal long enough to get in some kills. Despite some expectedly wobbly aiming and added resistance from the V-belt, he got a handful of kills in before becoming a puddle. When it comes to working up a sweat, though, I think I’ll follow our James’ suit and stick with the VR headset.
