Kermit the Frog
Kermit was right. As far as a conservation ethic for cardio equipment goes, Milwaukee is green challenged.
A while back, NFM had an interesting conversation with an engineering friend. Given all the athletes in the area, pro & amateur, who use cardio equipment to keep fit; and all the heat that generates, we could be powering the grid with our collective heat energy. Giving back to mother nature while getting a killer workout. Engineer friend scoffed at the idea because according to his calculations, heat energy captured from cardio equipment just wasn’t worth the effort. And that seems to be the consensus for fitness operations in this city.
Having a green gym is not a new idea. In Portland Oregon, you have the choice of getting fit the green way. Portland’s facility called “The Green Microgym”, brands itself as the World’s First Electricity Generating Gym. All those recumbent bikes & elliptical trainers (we’ll talk about treadmills later) are generating electricity to the grid. To be sure, an electricity capture infrastructure must be in place for this to make sense. NewFitness Milwaukee was curious to see how our city was coming along in this area.
Short answer, not even close. All of the facilities we spoke with have energy neutral (self-powered) ellipticals and bikes in their gyms, but none have outfitted or retrofitted these machines to capture electricity. Electricity generating bikes do exist. visCycle is a piece of gear we liked. And if you don’t want to buy new, there’s Re Rev, a company that retrofits existing bikes & ellipticals to capture heat energy.
So, no bicycles or ellipticals in town that are 100% green…what about treadmills? Well, that’s an even thornier energy capture problem. Woodway, Inc., of Waukesha, a manufacturer of awesome energy efficient treadmills, has just come out with an electricity neutral treadmill, the EcoMill, and although technically it isn’t designed to return heat back to the grid, it can power it’s own battery.
Woodway, Inc.’s Associate Manager of Marketing and Communications, Michael Frank, explained that the electricity generating treadmill is green gear in its infancy. In fact, the EcoMill just came on the scene a little over a year ago. NFM found EcoMills in 1 or 2 facilities here in Milwaukee, but of that number, we found only 1 gym with any kind green vision.
UWM’s Klotsche Center, managed by Steve Mohar, was the standout facility for the new green aesthetic. From our short conversation, we discovered that management here strives to have a conservation ethic in their operations budgets. 20% of their treadmills were recently replaced with EcoMills.
WAC, no, Elite Sports Clubs, no, Marquette, no, MSOE (electricity generating cardio…quote ‘Not on our radar’…end quote) Get the picture? NFM understands that in order for the green gym concept to work, you have to have the capture infrastructure in place as well as a significant number of machines overall adding to the grid. One or 2 machines here or there does not a green gym make. It’s a nice selling point to your customer base though, as we were told at several for-profit facilities.
In all cases, the fitness facilities we surveyed are mostly using self-powered bicycles and ellipticals. But none that capture electricity. This is the crux of the issue. In fact, most management we spoke with, having recently attended the for profit industry trade show, IHRSA, are looking in Green’s direction, but find the return on investment is low, and are waiting until the technology is cost effective. Hey! It ain’t easy being green!
So fitness freaks, next time you’re at your local gym, look around, ask for bikes & elliptical retrofitted with the Re Rev capture system, Resource fitness’s visCycles, or Woodway’s EcoMill and let’s put our collective heat to work!
Disclaimer:
Time constraints restricted NFM survey to a small sample of Milwaukee’s total number of fitness facilities. We spoke with:
MSOE’s Kern Center, Marquette’s Rec Plex & Halfaer Center, Bally’s, Wisconsin Athletic Clubs, Elite Sports Clubs, UWM Department of Recreational Sports Facilities, & WoodWay, Inc.
