back to article Researchers take the piss with pee-powered liquid energy project

Boffins in Bristol have the perfect solution to the two most common late-night problems: finding somewhere to urinate and keeping your phone charged. Liquid lab techs at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory have figured out a way to take power from your pee, using an array of cylinders containing electro-active micro-organisms to …

  1. frank ly

    Thank goodness for that!

    "Sadly, our vision of Terminator-style urine-powered killbots menacing humanity or hanging around toilets begging for a drink never came to fruition."

  2. Anonymous Blowhard

    The main problem is the cost of keeping the power flowing; beer prices at festivals being what they are.

    Crack this and urine the money though...

  3. Your alien overlord - fear me

    You're drunk, the mobile battery is low and you vaguely remember an article on el Reg about pissing to recharge your phone. Let's hope yours is waterproof :-)

    1. Pen-y-gors

      So in future, accidentally dropping your £900 iPhone down the loo will be a good thing?

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        Take a dumb phone to a festival - battery will last ages, SMS and calls sufficient for finding mates, no tears if you lose it.

        That said, last festival I went to had an oversubscribed cell, so SMS messages took 5 minutes to send.

        I lost my smartphone several times, but always found it the next day in a dance tent (honest people), and being on a lighting crew, I had access to 13 A sockets around the site. Having two 5000 mAH power banks (one left on charge, one in use) works well.

        Top tip: a 12 V solar panel of the type used to trickle-charge car batteries, and a couple of computer cooling fans - when the sun comes up the fans kick in and delay your tent becoming an oven for an hour or so, giving you more time to sleep off the hangover.

        1. FrogsAndChips Silver badge
          Pint

          "Take a dumb phone to a festival"

          That's not the way you're supposed to enjoy a festival these days.

          If you can't live stream the concert to your followers, blocking your neighbours' view for 2 hours by holding your phone above your head, post useless comments on antisocial networks instead of, I don't know, JUST WATCH THE F***ING SHOW!!, you might as well stay at home.

          1. mosw

            Re: "Take a dumb phone to a festival"

            > If you can't live stream the concert

            "Live streaming" and "pee charger" sound like concepts that just go together. There is a new product in there somewhere.

  4. Andy 73 Silver badge

    40mW????

    So it would take two weeks to charge my phone? Hmm...

    1. inmypjs Silver badge

      Re: 40mW????

      "So it would take two weeks to charge my phone?"

      Yes and about 3 years to generate 12p worth of electricity.

      1. MrDamage Silver badge

        Re: 40mW????

        I would have thought it was about 15 pints to generate 12pees worth of electricity.

  5. John H Woods Silver badge

    like pavement power...

    ... this is nonsense. Max solids in healthy urine 40g per litre, maybe 60g per day. Max calorific value of those solids is 2000kcal per kg. If you can get them all out ofsolution for free (you can't) and you can oxidise them 100 percent efficiently (ditto) you are looking at am absolute max of 5W per person.

    You'd probably be better off with a nice clean baseball hat with a solar panel in the peak than messing about with stinky sticky solids and unreliable bioactive films.

    1. Pen-y-gors

      Re: like pavement power...

      You'd probably be better off with a nice clean baseball hat

      I read that at first at a nice clean baseball bat .... possibly an odd way to recharge a phone, but possibly a permanent way of removing the need for daily recharging.

      Must go to specsavers...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: like pavement power...you are looking at am absolute max of 5W per person.

      Watts is indeed power but what matters for charging batteries is energy, and your number is picked out of empty air anyway.

      40g at about 8MJ/kg is about 300kJ. A phone battery holds around 36kJ. It's feasible, even at an efficiency of conversion of around 12-15%.

      Intuitively, the quantity of urea in a day's production of urine is much larger than the amount of lithium in a phone battery.

      1. John H Woods Silver badge

        Re: like pavement power...you are looking at am absolute max of 5W per person.

        Voyna, I took it for granted that we all know the relationship between energy and power.

        You are right, of course, that with my max. 5W and your entirely reasonable 10% efficiency, you could power a moderately busy smartphone all day. But I still think that unless you are processing vast quantities of urine a day, you are going to struggle to get enough energy out to do more than manage the material handling and bioculture maintenaince.

        There's better, and less sticky and smelly, ways of getting a few kJ of energy when you are off grid.

        BTW, according to this urine solids are about 1700 kcal/kg so the 2000 max I "picked from empty air" doesn't look too shabby.

        1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
          Coat

          Re: like pavement power...you are looking at am absolute max of 5W per person.

          I presume the idea is to power the toilet, rather than phones. I know that one of the Gates Foundation's things is to try and get better toilets, as an easy way to improve drinking water supplies, by keeping the human waste out of them.

          So I'm guessing they're looking at enough power to operate pumps or filters. Though I'd have thought solar (with batteries for night time obviously) was just going to be cheaper and easier.

          Of all the bad puns on display from El Reg and the commentards, I'd like to give particular praise to whiz kids. I think that's my number one. After that, I'm sure the writer was flushed with success.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: like pavement power...you are looking at am absolute max of 5W per person.

          It's no good stating a wattage without the period. If you had said "continuous" then I wouldn't have quibbled. But in any case 5W continuous is 430kJ/day, which is more than average pee power at 100% efficiency.

          Even if only 10% efficiency can be achieved from a fiddly bacterial process, it might have applications in remote Third World villages where the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow - a communal latrine for 100 people at 10% could provide around 40W continuous power, and that's a useful amount.

          1. TheElder
            Mushroom

            Re: It's no good stating a wattage without the period.

            Exactly. I had this same problem recently when describing how much power the brain consumes. 20 watt hours is the average. Somebody said "Did you really mean that?" and got four upvotes too. If we could do a full hour of thinking in just one nanosecond it would be 72,000,000,000,000 watts per hour. That is very similar to fusion power, period.

  6. Wiltshire

    Giving a whole new meaning to the UPS we keep in the server room?

    Urine-powered servers.

  7. SimonL

    Better Solution

    Just charge your phone before you go out...... :D lol

  8. Chris G

    Sustainable Parliamentary Power

    It should suit Westminster, it's full of piss and wind!

    1. Pen-y-gors

      Re: Sustainable Parliamentary Power

      Good thought - are the boffins working on a rear-mounted micro wind-turbine and methane fuel cell to harness other wasted energy?

  9. Roger Greenwood

    "charge a commercially available Samsung mobile"

    I bet that will piss off Bill G.

  10. Rich 11

    Ethanol resistance

    Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) fed with real neat urine

    In the real world those microbes are going to have to evolve a pretty good tolerance to alcohol.

    1. John H Woods Silver badge

      Re: Ethanol resistance

      oh, microbes are pretty good at evolving ... and once you have a mutation with a small reproductive advantage (usually because they've found a way to reduce production of the product (including electrical energy) you're interested in, a tiny advantage of <1% will result in the less productive strain overwhelming your bioreactor within days (at the outside) and you'll have to flush the lot, resterilise, and start again.

  11. TRT Silver badge

    Commercial harvesting

    Domestos etc aren't going to be too chuffed about this drop off in sales of shit you throw down the bog.

  12. hatti

    Never mind

    I was going to put someone on fire out, but my phone is nearly flat.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Never mind

      I had a great humorous response to that, but in the light of events in West London, now is not the time for my gay riposte.

      1. MrDamage Silver badge

        Re: Never mind

        > "now is not the time for my gay riposte."

        What has cock fighting got to do with it?

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Waste of effort

    The energy used by the people developing this, for lights, computers, etc. will never be paid back by any possible use of this ridiculous technology. Surely they're going for an IgNoble, and don't think this really has a chance of anyone ever using it in the real world?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  14. Mike Moyle

    I can see the advertising now: "POWER starts with P!"

    1. TRT Silver badge

      How about simply...

      "You're in charge"

    2. magickmark
      Coat

      POWER starts with P!

      How about this?

      "How to Charge your Phone" by I.P. Daily

      Mines the one with the damp pocket!!

  15. TRT Silver badge

    Power over IP.

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