We did 20 years of shows where we went to real public places and event spaces and asked people to power a band, a DJ, or some other kind of a fun demo. And we experienced that people loved powering something in real time, especially when it was happening as a team. We initially built systems to support this that were based on ultra capacitor storage, and these boxes held only small amounts of energy. This worked well for us when we were a small group of friends going around San Francisco by bike and deploying these instant parties. We were fit cyclists and we always had a little more to offer. If the crowd wasn't as fit as we were, we would cover the difference. But once we started working with real event clients, and especially at family friendly events, we started noticing that kids were both our biggest fans and our biggest challenge. Kids wanted to be on every single bike alongside their friends and siblings. That meant we were getting fewer Watts per person. We knew we needed to redesign our system to accept the kid power without interruption.
None of us wanted to kick the kids off -- it felt wrong in our hearts -- but sometimes we felt like we needed to, in order to prevent outages. We found ourselves making rules like "only those three bikes could be for kids." Next we started bringing a few fully charged lithium e-bike batteries and connecting them to our system at critical moments when an outage was about to happen. It was crude and created a dynamic where we found ourselves playing god, deciding that one band could 'handle' an outage while another really shouldn’t have to face an outage. We were on a slippery slope towards using a bigger and bigger battery at our events, and we worried that this would mean that our events lost their soul, that kids and adults no longer felt needed, that community power had failed as an experiment. The feeling of being needed was what we had found to be so impactful early on when we were biking around San Francisco with our loudspeakers doing impromptu street performances.
You can imagine how uplifting it was when we deployed the prototypes of our digital Wattage displays and started seeing a new type of participation. Rather than people pedaling to prevent the next outage, which was fun during the 1st decade, people were now pedaling just for the joy of seeing how much they could give back. That's when we decided: we're going for it. We’re going to embrace this and make these systems as reliable and scalable as we can. This is our new way of doing pedal powered shows: the Event Power Box.
We use the Event Power Box to create a guilt-free zone of learning and contribution at events. People get to give what they want to give. If they want to go all out, our system is ready to collect their efforts. If they want to casually pedal while holding their kid in their laps, it’s all good! We don’t need them to save the show, or prevent something bad from happening (the outage). We encourage them to have fun and explore the amazing machines that are their own bodies.
The event box can power many activities including:
- Concert speakers
- DJ equipment
- LED/Stage lighting
- Bounce houses
- Charging stations
See our event power box in action – we partnered with UCLA students to power an all-day concert and made dog food for our beloved bulldog mix Cairo!
This clean and green powering option allowed us to process food and power big speakers using power generated with our legs, no electricity or gas generators involved! Eco-friendly, low-profile and easy to use, the event power box can be compatible with all of your event activities.