GadgetReview

The day we all go green is the day that I’m a happier man.  Although the Empower chair (or bench) won’t get us there tomorrow, it’s the small stuff that counts, right?

The design is simple: you rock back and forth and the kinetic energy is captured into a battery and transferred to the on board USB outlets. …Continue reading: Empower Chair Turns Rocking Chair Motion Into Usable Power

So sometimes, you’re out in the middle of nowhere, your car is dead and so is your cell phone.  At times like that you start to wish you were carrying a little lightning in your pocket.  But the next best thing just might be the Power HotSpot from Solis.

The Power HotSpot is, basically, what it says it is, like a WiFi hotspot, only for power.  It’s a portable solar panel attached to a base unit that comprises a twelve volt power supply.  Anything with a car cigarette lighter–from a cell phone charger to a portable car fridge–can draw power from the unit.

Anyone calling this a portable unit is clearly stretching the definition of the term “portable”–it’s portable in the same way a car’s spare tire is.  That is, it fits in your trunk and can actually be carried for a while, but I wouldn’t try a mile walk with one.

Anything that generates solar power is pricey, of course, but this one isn’t too bad at $375.

Read

If you’ve ever found yourself out hiking in the back end of beyond and come up against an emergency–a broken leg, a lost map, a witch chasing you and your friends, a family of inbred mountain people who think your girlfriend looks tastier than a twelve-course buffet, you know what I’m getting at–without a charged cell phone, then you’re going to love what I’ve got here.

It’s called the Solio Emergency Charger, and for $60, it’ll give you a little extra punch of power that fits in a backpack.  It’s a slightly downsized for travel version of the Solio charger, and though it takes twenty hours in direct sunlight to achieve maximum charge, it still offers that little extra spark of juice when you need it most.  It comes with USB adapter, charging cable, 12v adapter and universal tip cable to make sure all your gadgets get their bump.

It’s a pretty smart idea, even if twenty hours is a pretty long time and represents almost two full days you’d have to spend in the woods waiting for it to get full charge.  By then, the inbred mountain people will have already finished your girlfriend and have started wondering if you served with mint would make a better dessert or appetizer.

Read

Nowadays, saving energy is quickly becoming common sense as opposed to forward thinking.  More and more tech consumers are aware of vampire power and and there are plenty of products out there to combat this unnecessary use of energy.

Having recently been introduced to the TrickleStar products, I have found them to be easy to use as well as being relatively easy on the wallet.  What I can say right away is that you are not going to see a noticeable difference in your electric bill.  Not unless you are using a ton of them.  You’d really have to have your whole residence outfitted in order to see your bill go down. …Continue reading: TrickleStar PC TrickleSaver And PC TrickleSwitch Review

LG is coming out with an amazing new gadget that’ll quite possibly change the way you think about summer: the solar-powered e-reader.

This is actually a whole lot of amazing in one sentence, so I’ll try and break it down into more manageable chunklets for you.  One, an e-reader that runs entirely on solar power is an exciting development.  Reading a book outside in the spring–or in some cases, summer–sun has long been a popular activity, but now you can take a library outside with you and have your choice when you finally settle in under that tree and set out to read.

Two, this is one of the first e-readers to be powered by the sun, thus every other e-reader is now going to have a significant bit of competition on its hands.  None of the other e-readers are powered by free sunlight, you know.  And buying batteries over and over, or paying the power company to recharge batteries, will always lose out to free recharge.  Every time.

Three, a solar panel capable of powering a gadget by itself, and still be portable?  This might be the start of something new and different in the whole solar panel industry.  It might take an entire roof’s worth of solar panels to make a five thousand watt generator, but one panel running an e-reader?  That’s interesting.

The LG solar e-reader represents several significant strides forward, and hopefully, we can get our hands on them fairly soon.

Read

For those of you survivalists out there compiling your “apocalypse gear” collection, this may be the flashlight you have been dreaming about.  Harnessing an appropriately titled Flashpoint Power Technology, the flashlight uses environmentally friendly ultracapacitors to help manage the the flow of energy in terms of performance and run time.  So without the help of actual conventional batteries this 5.11 tactical flashlight can be fully charged in 90 seconds.

With that full charge you get 23.5 hours of continuous light.  Sounds freaking amazing to me and if there is any downside to this awesome technology it would have to be the $170 price tag.  Even so, check out the specs below if you’re still not sold.

• Recharges in 90 seconds
• No batteries – uses ultra-capacitors, no memory loss
• Made of a firearm-grade high-strength polymer
• Impact, abrasion, and water resistant
• Contains 3 LEDs rated for more than 50,000 hours
• Will charge and hold its charge 50,000 times
• 4 output options: Standard (90 lumens), Peak (270 lumens), Strobe and Standby
• 12 Volt DC Charger, Plastic Belt Ring with Nylon Strap, and a mounting bracket
• Size: 11.5″ x 1.75″ diameter

[via TheGreenHead]

Read

It might sound hard to believe, but one of the best sources on earth for solar power is located right in your backyard.  Or possibly your front yard.

It sounds outlandish, but the more you think about it, the more you realize it has more truth than you think.  The object in question? A tree.

Trees, as it turns out, generate as much as 200 mV of power and do so reliably.  This is, of course, orders of magnitude less than your standard double AA battery, meaning you’d need the equivalent of an entire old-growth forest to power up a small flashlight.

However, there is a device called a boost converter that collects these ultra small voltages, and converts them into usable power.  This isn’t a very efficient process, and it won’t run a household current anytime soon.  A few hundred trees might be able to continuously pump juice into, say, a battery while you sleep for use in the morning.  But it does represent significant possibilities, and maybe even a really good reason to cut back on some logging operations.

Read

If you’ve shelled out the several thousand dollars required these days to get a solar array installed at your house, then you know that it’s all about the light level that lets you figure out just how much power you’re generating.  But the old Mark One Eyeball isn’t exactly the best candidate for figuring out how much sun is shining at any given time.

Enter the Lightgauge, from Lighthouse Solar in Boulder, Colorado.  The Lightgauge is a wall-mounted device that tracks energy produced and energy used in real-time, showing if there’s a surplus or a deficit created at any time.  Lighthouse has recently started including the Lightgauge in all of its solar panel systems.

When they say real-time, they mean it, too–shutting off a light causes the graph to dip towards equilibrium, on screen.

This is a pretty cool idea, frankly, and hopefully, Lightgauges will be part of everybody’s solar system these days.

[via Daily-camera.com]

Read

It’s pretty few and far between that I hammer out a conference call while basking in the sun, but relaxing to some tunes poolside, that’s a whole different story.  Devotec’s solar powered Bluetooth speaker, the Solar Sound, houses a pair of 2 watt speakers, a rechargeable battery, a retractable 3.5mm headphone cord, a touch like display, a mic for calls and of course Bluetooth connectivity.  In the sun it takes about 12 hours or more to charge the battery, while an AC plug cuts that number into a third.  You can grab one now for $79.

What, no iPod dock?

[via ElectricPig]

Read

Talk about a fire hazard!  This would be a sweet scene for an action movie where a limp body gets thrown against it and catches on fire.  But seriously now, this concept comes to us from Ironic Sans and while it would be totally useful, is totally insane.  Would be a cool T-shirt as well.  What else can I think of…a cool DIY dartboard, good for teaching kids and midgets how to safely scale down walls, etc.  As I like to say, only in America!

Read