See post #6 above. He is envisioning deployment of hamsters on industrial scale, with massive hamster plantations, lined up in cages from horizon to horizon.
This, of course, is already done with other species, such as humans working in so-called “customer service” call centers. Nothing new here.
Si
The system will never pay for itself. Ignoring the energy cost of manufacturing the food (let’s say you have a source of something hamsters will eat that is otherwise going to waste), it still won’t pay for itself, or at least I don’t think so - because the amount of energy produced by the individual hamsters in homes still has to outweigh the amount of energy used to manufacture the generator equipment.
Let’s also ignore the difficulty of making use of a very small amount of electrical power and assume we’ve got a magical device that allows us to feed picowatts of power into the grid without just losing it. Let’s just look at the generator equipment:
The generator is going to be some kind of dynamo composed of magnets, metal wires, carbon brushes, metal casings, plastic or metal bearings, fittings, circuitry and other gubbins. Let’s simplify that to a 1 inch cube of copper, a similar cube of steel and another of plastic.
If you stored up the power produced by one hamster on a wheel, during the whole of its (18 month maximum, in my experience) life, would it be enough to smelt and form the copper and steel, and manufacture and mould the plastic? I really doubt it. That’s without even invoking thermodynamics - this is just economics.
Why? Rabbits aren’t rodents.
This will work if we can swing a Federal Hamster Subsidy.
Taken out of context, that’s a great quote.
Seriously, though – just supplying them with tiny black trench coats and sunglasses would probably eat up your subsidy.
looks around my cube farm
Awe. 
I don’t know of any research on the power capacity of rodents, but humans have been well studied.
A human on a bicycle, which is a pretty efficient way of extracting power, can sustain 200W…give or take. TdF riders may nearly double that, and couch spuds may struggle to do half. There were actually some early machines that used humans inside treadwheels for power, but these gave way to pedal power as soon as it became economical to build them…so we can suppose requiring that the hamsters support their weight will cut significantly into the efficiency.
As a pure WAG, I’d guess you could get perhaps 1/2W or so (mechanical) per hamster, and around 1/2-2/3 that by the time it was converted to electricity. Note that you will need to keep the cool enough that they don’t overheat.
SNAILS
are now producing electrical power!
Thermodynamics is a distracting non-issue.
Of course you’ll get less electrical energy out of a hamster-wheel than the energy contained in the hamster chow. But that’s true of any electrical generator; no electrical generation scheme is 100% efficient. If you burn the hamster chow to run a steam-turbine generator, you’ll also end up with less electrical energy than was in the hamster chow. We still produce electricity because it’s a lot more useful than other kinds of energy, and we’d rather have 1kW-hour of electricity than 2 kW-hr of, say, mechanical energy, or heat energy or whatever.
So the question is, can we make a hamster-generation system economically efficient enough to be worthwhile? That depends partly on how efficient the system is, and also on how much it costs to make, how valuable the electricity is, and how valuable the hamster chow input is.
I doubt hamsters are going to be very efficient right now. If nothing else, smaller animals generally have a higher overhead, metabolically speaking, so feeding horses would probably be a better deal.
But, trying hard, I can maybe barely imagine some scenario where, hamster generation might make sense. Obviously fossil carbon emissions are seriously restricted (so electricity is relatively more expensive). Then we need some widespread agricultural/industrial process that produces lots of byproduct that’s somehow uniquely suited to be hamster food (Hows this? It’s all contaminated with, oh, lead, and hamsters are the only animal that scientists have managed to genetically engineer to be lead-poisoning resistant and extra-efficient metabolically). Hey, in this weird future world, maybe vast hamster-wheel farms would be economically viable.
Realistically, you could use a hamster wheel generator to power a LED night-light, as this person did. Otherwise, it is too impractical.
Also, if you are keeping the hamster as a pet in the first place (as opposed to a vast hamster farm), there is no additional overhead from doing this; the hamster might eat some more due to generator resistance (but note in the link that they put ball bearings on the wheel, which otherwise don’t have any bearings and are cheaply made).
Look, you guys need to think outside the (hamster) box.
Hamsters are not going to endlessly run a cage endlessly. A better idea is to dangle a plate hooked to a flywheel that turns a generator.
Train the gerbil to run out onto the plate to eat a pellet of food and as the weight of the gerbil pulls the plate down the flywheel is turned.
As the plate reaches the bottom the pellet of food is consumed and the gerbil runs back up to the top to get another. The plate, meanwhile, sans the gerbils weight rises back up–another pellet drops and the cycle repeats.
Pesse (Use crack cocaine pellets and you can substituent people for gerbils) Mist
Ever tried to crank one of those old phone DC generators that could barely light a flash-light sized bulb? It isn’t easy for any period of time.
Hamster wheels work because they have very little friction. The basic energy comes from the Hamster climbing up the wheel and gravity pulling the critters mass back down. Not much potential / kinetic energy there. Hook up a generator and it becomes a stationary ladder, unless you are talking a very miniscule generator.
That is where the scale of a nations power consumption comes into play. Few people really understand the amount of power that is used. Anybody who wants to replace coal and nukes with something else needs to look up some numbers and do some basic math.
Burning the critters, or any life form ( Soylent Green ?) will get you into real trouble. Life as we know it, is carbon based. Burning it will just release carbon and cause global warming.
off-topic…
For us U.S. mid-westerners, the real problem of climate change is that if it is going to raise the sea levels, we have to make sure it happens fast enough that all those people who live on the coasts don’t get a chance to move inland first. Time to call up the local power plant and have them throw a few extra hamsters in the heater.
Forget hampsters.
Jack Russell terriers are where the energy is at.
They are on all the farking time.
OK, forget the hamsters. What if we hook up the gym down the street. All the stationary bicycles, treadmills, stair climbers and rowing machines. Surely we can generate enough juice to light the neon sign out front.
Then we do the gym down the street from that.
And if three gyms do it, three–can you imagine gyms with all their machines hooked up, powering the neon sign out front? They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty gyms a day, I said fifty gyms a day with all their machines hooked up, powering the neon sign out front? And friends they may think it’s a movement.
But if only two gyms hook up their machines, what will people think about the gym’s members?
That’s more or less carbon neutral, unless you’ve been feeding your hamsters coal - the carbon in their bodies comes from their food, which was taken out of the atmosphere by plants.
The way I read OP the food had no extra cost: these were pet hamsters to begin with, but instead of playing with them, the kid now just watches the hamsters generate electricity. Hamster pays his way. Kid learns life is tough. Win-Win.
Now you guys are burning the hamsters directly for electricity. Sheeeze. You sickos.
OK first of its so cool that my second thread ever is in the “threadspotting” section.
I kinda figured that feeding them and cleaning up after them would probably outweigh the energy they could generate however I still see the main question not answered.
Is there any small generator that something as lightweight as a hamster could even turn?
I have a hand held flashlight that has a crank that charges a battery and in turn powers 3 LED bulbs for a surprisingly long time. Its small enough to fit the needs but I suspect the turning is more than a hamster could muster. Is there anything on the market that takes little effort? Even if the payoff is minimal.
Thanks all for taking a silly post even a little seriously.
You would need to buy a lot of hamsters, and half of them would probably die from overwork, unless you buy a swarm and make them work in shifts.