Nifty
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July 6th, 2011 at 2:13 pm
I can’t believe it takes $300 to make and sell a basic thermocouple.
As for the $4 African bike-dynamo charger, good price, but you have to actually RIDE that bike (for an hour) to charge your cell up. In a country where there are plenty of sunny days, photo-voltaic is the best way.
There are many crank-lanterns and radios which have a cell-phone charger outlet on them, so you can put in your hour of cranking while sitting peacefully on your butt doing nothing but cranking.
July 6th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
There are probably ways around having to actually ride for an hour to charge the phone.
Energy output of a fit male on a bicycle can be in the 180-220 watt/hour range. A cell phone battery (assuming 3.3V and 1300mAh) holds roughly 4 watts of energy. Assume the battery is only 50% efficient during recharge (which is probably grossly low) so we’ll say we need 8 watts of energy to charge it.
That means one person, on a bike that doesn’t do anything but generate power, could charge about 25 phones at once. Kinda neat. You could have cell phone charging shops pop up where all they do is ride bikes all day. Maybe store extra energy (when you’re not charging 25 phones) into lead acid battery banks so they don’t have to pedal all day unless there is a constant stream of customers.
It could be cheaper than photovoltaic I suppose.
Granted, the Tour de France is going to start looking like the Boston marathon, but that’s cool.