On Sun, 07 Dec 2008 17:09:00 +0000, Andy Burns wrote:

Rod wrote:

But what mechanism have you got that would raise that four tonnes 100
metres straight up?

I haven't got one, I was just pointing out the scale of the problem

And all that for a measly 1 kWh.

Exactly.

The only place I've seen this work is in an LED standard lamp - you
manually lift a mildly heavy weight from floor to 5' off the ground, then
it falls slowly while running a generator (through a gearbox) for a
couple of hours.

If you're seriously looking at this sort of thing you need to get your
whole house consumption down from 1kW average (what ours is while
occupied, TV on etc.) to a few hundred watts at most.