Electric Pedals

Colin Tonks founded the company and runs it from South East London ⁵. Its Large and Small hire cinemas are built the same way, the riders' generators feeding projector and sound directly ^1,2; the single-bike OWL backpack kit instead puts an ultracapacitor buffer, not a battery, between the rider and an Optoma ML750e projector ³.

Specifications

What do these labels mean?

Field	Value	Confidence	Sources
Large cinema — bike count	18–20 adult and child bikes (advertised)The hire page states 20 bikes and a 6.2 m screen; the company's own projects page states 'up to 18 stations' and a 6 m screen. The research treats the figure as 18–20 — most plausibly a fleet-configuration change between page revisions, not two different products.	Manufacturer rating	^1,6
Large cinema — screen and audience	6–6.2 m screen; 500+ viewers (advertised)The hire page advertises 6.2 m, the projects page 6 m; both are carried here rather than one being resolved away.	Manufacturer rating	^1,6
Large cinema — projector	6,000 ANSI-lumen projector (advertised)Research correction:Advertised brightness on the operator's own hire page, labelled MFR by the research. Electric Pedals publishes no projector wattage at all, so this lumen figure says nothing about the electrical load the riders carry.The company's own hire-page advertising figure; no independent measurement exists.	Promotional / press-reported — not verified	¹
Large cinema — PA	2 × 3,500 W speakers (advertised)Research correction:An amplifier rating, not consumption. The research labels this MFR and warns it must not be read as a 7 kW electrical load; actual PA draw for this rig is not disclosed.The hire page gives the figure without qualification.	Promotional / press-reported — not verified	¹
Small cinema — bikes and audience	2–6 adult and child bikes; up to 50 viewers	Manufacturer rating	²
Small cinema — projector and PA	800 ANSI-lumen projector; 2 × 2,000 W speakers (advertised)Research correction:As on the Large tier, the speaker figure is an amplifier rating rather than consumption, and no projector wattage is published.Advertised on the Small cinema hire page.	Promotional / press-reported — not verified	²
Stored energy	No mains power. No stored battery energy.Stated verbatim on both the Large and Small hire pages.	Documented	¹
Buffering on the 20-bike rig	Ultracapacitor-class smoothing (implied, not stated)Ultracapacitor buffering is documented verbatim only for the single-bike OWL kit. It is plausible and consistent with the no-battery claim for the large hire rig, but no source states it for that system specifically.	Uncertain	^1,5
OWL backpack kit weight	18 kg, complete kit including projector	Documented	³
OWL kit buffering	Ultracapacitor (no batteries)Optoma's case study contrasts this explicitly with lithium batteries, which it says would deteriorate over time.	Documented	³
Backpack Cinemas built	14 kits, across Tanzania, Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Congo and Madagascar	Documented	³
Malawi (LWT) deployment year	not disclosedThe case study does not print a year. The timing is consistent with, but not proof of, c. 2015 — the launch year of the Optoma ML750e projector it uses.	Not disclosed	^3,7
Malawi roadshow reach	14,000+ people reached in six weeks	Documented	³
Optoma ML750e power draw	45 min / 65 max W (19 V / 3.42 A adapter, manufacturer datasheet)Lower wattage figures circulating elsewhere for this kit are estimates, not a published spec.	Manufacturer rating	⁷
Sustained rider output (Tonks assessment)	40–50 W, for one hour	Operator-stated	⁴
DJ Derby (2012) planning budget	~1,520 W continuous; 9,120 Wh over 6 hoursEvent-industry guide figures: operator planning averages (60 W/adult bike, 30 W/child bike, 10 W/hand-cycle), not logged telemetry. The source's own rider count is internally inconsistent (it lists 25 adult/9 child bikes in the roster, then computes the total from 20 adult/10 child).	Operator-stated	⁸
Most recent independently dated event	2023 Bristol Cycle Cinema (bikes supplied 'in-part')	Documented	⁹

History

In Malawi the OWL kit, built with Optoma and the British High Commission for the Lilongwe Wildlife Trust, opened a January roadshow on elephants and the ivory trade ³; Electric Pedals has since built further Backpack Cinemas on the same design ³. The technology was also licensed abroad: in 2017 Tonks counted "three of our big bicycle cinemas touring through South America with our partner Efecto Cine" ⁵. No source located prints a founding year.

Line diagram tracing power from up to twenty riders through Electric Pedals' generators to the projector and loudspeakers, with no battery stage — Riders → in-house generators → power management → projector and PA (no battery)^3,1,5 Image: BicycleCinema.org, drawn from the research corpus

Electric Pedals small bicycle cinema rig with two pedal stations — Photo: Electric Pedals (electricpedals.com) — via electricpedals.com

Technology

The hire pages give screen sizes — 2.3 m for the Small cinema — with lumen and speaker ratings but no projector wattage ^1,2; the OWL kit's Optoma ML750e is rated 45–65 W on its manufacturer datasheet ⁷. The one quantified power budget located for the company, for its 2012 "DJ Derby" charity event in the industry guide The Power Behind Festivals, was planned from 60 W per adult bike ⁸; Tonks's own estimate is that "an average human can maintain 40 to 50 watts for an hour" ⁴.

Fact card describing the eighteen-kilogram OWL backpack cinema kit with ultracapacitor buffering and its Malawi roadshow — OWL backpack kit fact card: 18 kg, ultracapacitor, Optoma ML750e, Malawi roadshow 14,000 people^3,1,5 Image: BicycleCinema.org, drawn from the research corpus

In their own words

"For over five years, we've been using the energy generated by people to power cinemas, music venues, radio stations, theatre productions, art installations and educational workshops—all of this without using a single battery." — Colin Tonks, 2017 ⁵

Tonks describes the operation as "a small company spearheaded by myself" whose "unique equipment is custom-built by our small team of inventors in South London" ⁵.