Back in the early 1980s, when the idea of powering your toaster by riding a bike seemed like something out of The Jetsons, David Butcher, then a restaurant worker in his late 20s, built his first power-pedaler. Now he spends each morning in his garage, riding away to turn a 36-inch wooden circular tabletop beneath the seat. Butcher’s contraption sends a jolt of electricity into a bank of 13 batteries that he took out of his old electric car and five smaller, rechargeable ones. During the hour-long ride, he uses that energy to read headlines on his laptop and to host a webcast about pedal power—and he uses it throughout the day to juice his electric razor, his Roomba, and his washing machine.

While Butcher, now a website manager in San Jose, has been slogging away in his garage, the idea of the electricity-generating bicycle has quietly been gaining traction in the mainstream, from local bike-powered festivals to a PR event kicking off last year’s Earth Hour. And now, just up the road from Butcher’s house, the engineering company High Tide Associates is taking this eco-boon to the masses with its new RollerGen, a $495 generator–battery kit that allows any bicycle, stationary or moving, to create electricity. It produces much less power than Butcher’s machine—it’s for iPhones, iPods, and small laptops—but if it catches on, the company has plans to make bigger and better versions. We talked to Butcher to find out why this is a trend worth applauding.

How did you start down this path? I was living in Santa Barbara in 1969, during the massive oil spill in the channel there, and it changed my whole view of society’s relationship to the environment. It made me think we needed alternative sources of power.

What made you decide to use a stationary bicycle as the platform? Something as silly as seeing Gilligan pedaling the washing machine on Gilligan’s Island. I started just experimenting and realized pedaling generated the most power.

So now you sell the plans for your pedal generator? Yes. My motto is: Build it yourself, power it yourself, repair it yourself; so I sell the plans and step-by-step pictures on a CD. And each time I sell a CD, I pedal an extra 10 watt-hours to offset the energy I used to burn it.

Are you optimistic that this will catch on? People are interested, but we live in a spoiled society—if you want to work out, you go down to Gold’s Gym. It’s all cooked and packaged. Still, if the RollerGen is as easy as “I pedal, I have a USB port, and I plug in my iPod, and it charges”—which the company says it is—it will.

Do people think you’re nuts when they hear about this? They think it’s a waste of time, but I haven’t been sick in four years and I generate my own electricity. What’s to argue about?

It’s cold in here, and you don’t have the heat on. Right now, it’s off all the time just because I’m insane.