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You may love your cat, but might you love your gadgets just that little bit more? You can never be too prepared if you find yourself in the path of a terrible storm, and instead of buying a backup generator next time, this online calculator will give you a rough estimate of how many animals you’d need to power your home.
Surprisingly your average 200 square metre home can be powered by just a single dog, or five felines if you’re a cat person. But if hamsters are your thing, unfortunately you’ll need to round up about 646 of them to keep your lights and other electronics powered. So you’ll need to ask yourself, is watching TV really worth the stench of a small mountain of rodent poop? [Movoto Blog]
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I suspect these figures are averages. Our 18 year old cat couldn’t power a single lightbulb, whereas I’m thinking of sending our new 6 Month old to restore power to New York.
My subterranean pool of electric eels will keep me in coulombic clover should the worst ever happen…..
Couldn’t you just burn the rodent poop & bedding to harvest the heat? Or ferment it and collect the gas for cooking and central heating?
Good idea, my two Savannah cats could probably power the whole city!
On a practical note, I just read on Yammer at work how during the hurricane Sandy power outage one bloke ran an extension cord out of the 150 watt A/C power outlet in his Ford Fusion Hybrid into his home. With the car left running so that the engine could come on occasionally to recharge the battery it burned 0.6 gallons over the 12 hour outage . At $4 an gallon of gas, that works out to about $1.30 per KWH.
Probably just easier to chuck them on the fire. It’s cold this time of year.