Green Gadget challenge
Matthew Sparkes
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Oct 31, 2008 2:13 PM
Is it possible to run all your electronic gadgets - even your laptop - on renewable energy sources? PC Authority's eco-warrior Matthew Sparkes gets on his bike.
It’s not unheard of for an argument to break out in the PC Authority offices. All manner of topics have been hotly debated within our four walls, but until recently sustainable power had never wound us up (so to speak).
Reviewing a small solar-powered charger was all it took to kick off a debate over green electricity, one which saw me heavily outnumbered. Is it really possible to reliably run gadgets on solar or wind power, asked my incredulous colleagues, or are they just a gimmick? The general consensus was that the technology wasn’t ready, and that even an Australian winter was too grey and gloomy for a solar panel to keep a mobile phone running.
Nonsense, I protested. Not only was it possible, but I could take it even further: I could power all of my everyday gadgets with solar panels and other sustainable sources, I boldly claimed, not wasting a second to conduct any research to back up my claim. Unfortunately my bluff was called, and my colleagues began gaffer-taping my plug sockets. The eco-gauntlet had been laid down.
Charge of the bike brigade
I decided the best course of action was to ease into this challenge slowly, and concentrate on just my phone to begin with. A morning’s browsing revealed a bewildering range of sustainable chargers, but one product stood out as ideal for my needs.
The HYmini is a small wind turbine that attaches to your bike’s handlebar, but can also be plugged into a small solar panel when stationary. This would allow me to collect power with the fan as I cycled to work, and continue to harness free energy once I’d arrived by placing the device in the office window. Like most sustainable chargers, it contains an internal battery.
This is vital because the flow of energy you eke from the wind and sun is rather unpredictable, and needs regulating before most gadgets will charge. It comes equipped with power connectors that fit my phone and my iPod, and, as I ride between 25 and 30 kilometres a day, seemed like it could really work – as long as I kept up the exercise and stayed off the Tube.
The bright green device was quite conspicuous once clipped to my bike, but it didn’t get in the way and turned out to be quite the conversation starter at traffic lights. Best of all, it worked.
After only one trip to work (which is, bar any wrong-turns, around 10 kilometres), it had collected enough power to top up my mobile phone from empty to half-full. For the next couple of days it kept performing and supplied my Nokia E65 with enough power to do likewise, boosted slightly by solar power through the day.
I’ll confess I cheated slightly: I had scaled down the number of long calls I was making, but I was still sending texts and making the odd hurried call, all without having to plug my phone into the electricity grid. An impressive achievement for only one gadget, and a good start towards humiliating the office naysayers.
Before I had a chance to get too smug, though, I accidentally proved just how precarious the process was by forgetting to switch the HYmini to its charge setting on the way to work. All my furious pedalling that day was in vain, and I was forced to go cold-turkey on SMS for the day. A text-book error, you might say.
To protect against such mishaps, and to give me a little more power for longer calls (I had begun to rudely convey messages like a particularly enthusiastic auctioneer in order to save power), I would need another source of energy.
The green contenders:
HYmini
PRICE: $79; bike adapter an additional US$8.99
INTERNET: www.hymini.com
The HYmini offers the best of both worlds: it will charge via the optional external solar panel when it’s sunny, but should the weather take a turn for the worse the wind turbine will continue topping up its internal battery.
It supports an impressive range of gadgets: a standard powered-USB port and a range of power adapters mean that almost all popular devices are compatible.
Our favourite way to use it was with the optional bike adapter. This lets you bolt it to the handlebars of your bike, collecting wind power as you ride.
We found that a six-mile commute was enough to charge a Nokia E65 to half capacity. Of course, if you’re not feeling that energetic, placing it on a window ledge will let you harness the power of any passing breeze.
The plastic body is able to stand up to the scrapes of life spent between the handlebar and windowsill. Just steer clear of the green-coloured model: it’s a cliché.
Rating: 5/6 stars
Powermonkey-eXplorer
PRICE: $169
INTERNET: www.powermonkey-explorer.com
Unlike some of the more fragile solar chargers we’ve seen, the Powermonkey is built to withstand occasional rough handling – essential for a tool designed for use on the move. The soft rubber coating protects it from knocks and adds a certain amount of protection from moisture.
Its ruggedness isn’t the only area in which it excels. While most chargers simply inform you when they’re fully charged, the eXplorer has an indicator LED and an LCD showing the exact battery level. This makes it far easier to judge when certain devices can be charged. The detachable battery pack and solar panel also free you from carrying both when the battery is full and the panel isn’t needed.
Our only real criticism is that it comes bundled up in a lot of packaging, including a disposable box and a reusable nylon carry case. With a product as rugged as this it seems unnecessary, and adds to the price and environmental footprint of what would otherwise be a very green product.
Rating: 4/6 stars
The green contenders: (continued)
Sunlinq E-Sun (25W version)
Internet: N/A
PRICE: $599
Solar panels rely on efficiency and surface area, and while the former is improving all the time, you still need a healthy dose of the latter to power larger devices. The E-Sun takes 104 x 54cm to provide 25W, more than is available on even the largest window sill, although the panel is made of rubber and can fold up into a pouch smaller than an A4 document, making it very portable.
Its power output falls somewhere between small, handheld solar chargers and permanent installations, but offers greater convenience. You could easily take this camping, but it serves equally well in a garden or balcony. But the 25W measurement, as with so many marketing claims in the electronics industry, is a theoretical maximum and not what it will provide on an average day.
We managed to squeeze enough power out of a day’s sunshine to run a laptop for a couple of hours. And while this energy may be free, at $599 it will take some time to pay for itself.
Rating: 4/6 stars
Baylis Eco Media Player
PRICE $425
INTERNET Baylis
English inventor Trevor Baylis released his pioneering Freeplay wind-up radio in 1996, designed to improve communications in Africa and slow the spread of AIDS. Since then he’s gone on to develop a range of energy-producing products such as piezoelectric shoes, and this, the wind-up Eco Media player.
Things have certainly come a long way since the Freeplay; it supports MP3 and video, and sports a 1.8in TFT screen. It also has a built-in light, a feature that we’ve never seen before. 2GB of internal storage is supplied, but can be boosted with cheap and spacious SD cards.
We found that a few minutes’ frantic winding provided enough power for around half an album, and while this is an admirably sustainable power source, topping up the battery on a bus is sure to raise a few eyebrows.
The player lacks compactness, stylish design and an intuitive interface. If the company can improve on these features, then it could be a real turning point.
Rating: 2/6 starsIs this a wind up?
One gadget that looked promising was the Freeplay FreeCharge, a hand-cranked charger which can be plugged into any device with a car cigarette-lighter adapter. The 12V power output is surprisingly high, but is delivered in real-time rather than stored in a battery, so fully charging my mobile phone would require a Herculean amount of stamina and wrist-strength that the average technology journalist simply doesn’t possess.
Ten minutes of intense winding, done away from the mocking eyes of my colleagues, left me with no feeling below the elbow, and no perceptible change in my phone’s battery status indicator. This product may be a lifesaver in emergency situations, but in the office was about as much use as a pie cart to a vegan.
Not wanting to give up on the idea of human-generated power, I swapped my sleek and stylish iPod for a wind-up Eco Media Player from Baylis. As well as an LED light and a 1.8in TFT screen, it came with some serious flaws. The design of the bulky player had nothing on Apple’s efforts, and its confusing menu system neared incomprehensibility.
To its credit, the built-in hand-crank meant it could be easily wound up when needed, requiring no additional devices. It took only a few minutes of winding to generate enough power for a short bus journey, but the hefty size and poor sound quality let it down. I quickly came to two conclusions: passive power sources are better than human-powered ones, and I wanted my iPod back.
If the Eco Media Player was to be returned I would need alternative energy sources to keep my Apple player green.
The curiously named Powermonkey-eXplorer offered a solution. This well-designed and rugged solar charger provided an ideal backup for my phone on days when I didn’t ride to work, and the spare power could be used to charge up my MP3 player when I did. The small clamshell panel folds neatly in two and is well protected for travelling, but still very light.
Helpfully, the battery pack is removable too, so it can be carried as an emergency source of power once charged up. Although I only used my MP3 player for around an hour a day, the Explorer kept it charged, except on the rare occasions when my music had to be sacrificed for extra talktime.
After several days of avoiding plugging either my phone or MP3 player into the grid, I was still listening to my music, and was still making phone calls. Satisfyingly, I had been vindicated; it seems that it’s entirely possible to run (small) gadgets (most of the time) with sustainable power.
By now I had turned into an insufferable eco-bore, regularly lecturing my colleagues on the readily available, free and sustainable power that’s all around us, how easy it is to run gadgets entirely without help from power companies and generally exuding a smug sense of satisfaction at reducing my carbon footprint.
In reality, however, I was exhausted. No longer could I wake up and come straight to work: I had to prioritise which gadgets I needed that day, scrounge what power I could from the battery packs remaining at home, and ensure that the HYmini was ready for the ride to work. When I got there I had to make sure all of my solar panels were facing the right way, and that the batteries were charging properly. If I failed to do this, then I had no power that day – and a stroppy girlfriend wondering why I hadn’t returned her text messages.
Powering the MacBook
I had been telling anyone in the office who would listen about my success running handheld devices: now I was forced to ramp up my efforts. It was time to turn my attention to the most energy-hungry of all my gadgets, my MacBook.
Solar power seemed the most practical option, but to power a laptop with renewable energy I would need to bring out the big guns. The 25W E-Sun folding panel from Sunlinq was the largest I could find that didn’t require permanent mounting to a building’s roof (a project I imagined that both my editor and landlady would be reluctant to sign off).
The picnic blanket-sized panel requires a similarly powerful regulator and battery to clean up and store energy, which came in the form of the Xantrex Xpower 150 ($70). This is an additional kilogram of kit that can store enough power to run a laptop for several hours, and conveniently offers a standard three-pin plug socket for a power adapter. Admittedly, it was designed for in-car use rather than the office, but with just a couple of extra cables, costind.
The first problem I encountered was where to put the solar panel – at 104 x 54cm it isn’t the sort of thing you could leave basking in the sun on your windowsill, unlike the Powermonkey or HYmini. A makeshift solution came in the form of a handful of cable ties and my Hills hoist – it may not have been pretty, but it worked. I drained the battery ready for my first test and left it charging for one whole day. In the end it managed only a 50% charge, which nonetheless was enough to give me just under two hours’ use from my MacBook – not enough for a day’s work perhaps, but an encouraging start.
Over the next few days this temporary setup continued to give me around two hours of use a day, which would mean that at least four such devices would be required to cover the average day in the office. Considering that I was already deeply worried about leaving one $599 panel unattended while charging, this was a prospect I didn’t relish.
However, had the panel been on my roof, lying flat to get the most of the day’s sun, and high above the shadow of fences and shrubs, then I feel confident that its power output could have been extended significantly. Even the cheapest of permanent solar panels would hold an advantage here.
Challenge won (sort of)
So, my hunch was right; you can run devices on sustainable power, and green gadgets are far from gimmickry. To be honest, though, as much as it pains me to admit it, my colleagues were right on one point – not all sustainable power sources are reliable or advanced enough to be practical.
Hand-cranked devices, for example, are almost always chocolate teapots. Even if they’re efficient enough to be usable, which many aren’t, sustainable power will never reach the mainstream if people have to stop what they’re doing every half an hour to get sweaty winding up their laptop, phone or media player.
We all want to be environmentally friendly, but there are limits.
Solar power, on the other hand, is much easier, and produces great results. So why isn’t everyone doing it? The simple reason is that free power doesn’t come cheap.
The E-Sun panel costs a rather steep $599, and the battery pack is another $100. Add to this the fact that there’s still a certain amount of inconvenience involved, and you’ve already lost the interest of the vast majority of people.
However, there is a sustainably powered light at the end of the tunnel. Two things need to change in order to bring sustainable power to the average customer, and what I have seen in the past week or two leads me to believe that both will be – or are already – happening.
First, the cost of these devices needs to come down. Currently it’s not financially viable to buy these gadgets, so only enthusiastic environmentalists will take the plunge. As research churns out more efficient photovoltaic cells, the cost of commercial panels will fall, sales will increase and so will spending on research. Before we know it, we’ll have free and clean power for all, which will be just super.
My second point is that, even if these devices become affordable, the hassle needs to be designed out of sustainable-power products. Instead of collecting solar power with a panel, storing it in a separate battery pack and later transferring it to a separate mobile phone, we need a handset that charges itself simply when left on a window sill. The wide range of innovative products hitting the market gives me hope that designers are working on it, even if they’re not quite there yet.
Taking one small gadget off the grid may not seem like a big step, but it’s the thin end of the wedge. In five years’ time, let’s hope people look back and wonder why that bloke from PC Authority thought it was such an achievement to never plug a gadget into the wall.
