You have 10 minutes to get out of your house. What do you grab? Your pets/kids, your wallet, any valuables you can find, and maybe a few irreplaceable pics, right? Or, on second thought, you might actually need your iPhone and something to keep it charged while you’re fending off disaster. Freeplay’s FreeCharge 12V, a human-powered charger, will keep whichever gadgets you grab powered when you’re away from your handy wall outlets.
Hand-cranking this charger gave us hand cramps.
The FreeCharge is an old-school generator that uses kinetic energy, a magnet, and a coil to produce the electric current needed to charge your new-school devices. In this case, you provide the movement by turning the crank on the side of the device. The harder you crank, the more power you generate. The FreeCharge has no internal battery, so the energy you produce feeds directly into your gadget, and with the 12 volts of energy generated, you should be able to juice just about any handheld gadget that can charge via a car charger (the FreeCharge sports a 12V outlet, just like your car’s dashboard).
A few minutes of human power will generate approximately 9 minutes of talk time, which will do in an emergency. If you do the math, however, you see that you would need to continuously crank for nearly 2 hours to fully charge your iPhone—and therein lies the rub, or, in this case, the crank. The FreeCharge is very difficult to crank for any length of time. You have to grip the sides of the device without impeding the lever—which means you can’t wrap your hand around to get a firm grip. And then, once you do get the lever going at a pace decent enough to get the LED light to register a charge (not so easy), the variability in resistance makes it very difficult to sustain a good rhythm. Even friends with more arm strength had difficulties cranking fast enough to create a charge for more than a minute or two at a time. While it is possible to coax a few minutes of use out of a dying device, getting a decent charge is an exhausting prospect.
Human-powered. LED charge level indicator. Freeplay Foundation provides LED lanterns to Rwandans in need of light.
Ergonomically challenging design. Adapters for specific devices not included.
stman1
October 10, 2009 at 9:11am
A few days ago I bought this generator and so far I'm happy I did so it is easy to use and the best thing: it's portable
I'm trying to be "green" and make energy at my home like described here: http://www.earth4energyrating.com/
