How will you power your gadgets when the lights go out? We consume more energy than ever these days, and with that comes the potential for brown-outs and black-outs, plunging us into darkness and making our gadgets worse than useless.
And while running your own home turbine may make you immune to power cuts, it only makes issues of energy conservation are ever more important. Every minute of listening to a mains-powered radio on the electricity you produced yourself could mean ten minutes less of light at night.
So it’s fortunate that clockwork technology, made popular by the introduction of the Baygen wind-up radio, is coming on in leaps and bounds, and it’s now possible to power all but the most esoteric of everyday gadgets with a quick burst of hand cranking. Here, we’ve rounded up five essential clockwork add-ons to keep close at hand.
The Cyba-Lite Wind-Up Lantern is a powerful, bright lantern that’s perfect for camping or lighting up the greenhouse when you’re doing some after-work planting. There are two intensity settings – low and high – allowing you to maximise either running time or illumination, with a minute of winding giving up to 10 minutes of light. A bundled adaptor lets you charge it from a car cigarette lighter, to passively feed the batteries as you drive to wherever you’ll use it. When not in use, the lamp part retracts into the base, keeping it safe from knocks and bumps. Expect to pay around £30.
There are more wind-up radios than trash tracks in the charts these days, but with features and prices to suit every pocket and need, there’s sure to be one that meets your requirements. You want digital? Check out the £99 Freeplay Devo Portable. Too expensive? Then how about the budget, FM-only Solar Wind-up Radio, which as you’ll guess from the name includes a solar panel. It costs £10.99. The best looking, though, has to be the Eton FR200 (right), which comes in a choice of red or blue, costs £24.99 and includes a built-in torch.
At £4.95, this wind-up mobile phone charger is nothing short of a bargain. It comes with five different adaptors that should happily interface with 99.9% of current phones and PDAs (there’s a list on the retailer’s website). It’ll also charge an iPod, with the addition of a £1.50 adaptor, which is truly impressive. So how long does it run for? Well, according to the specs, a 60-second crank will give you two minutes’ talktime or an hour’s-worth of standby, so while it’s not a replacement for proper socket-and-plug charging it’s great for emergency breakdowns.
You’d have to have a pretty big car to fit the Cyba-Lite in your glove box, but a wind-up torch, like this handy £3.99 one from Robert Dyas (which comes bundled with a free keyring light) should be small enough to fit just about anywhere. A minute of winding should provide enough power for 30 minutes of illumination from its three built-in LEDs. With no need for batteries, though, we have to wonder why Robert Dyas is trying to sell Duracells alongside it.
Finally, a wind-up watch is a total no-brainer. There’s something special about tending to it, caring for it and feeding it with a little twist of the winder each morning. Wind-up watches cost next to nothing when bought second hand (no pun intended) and you can pick up a nice one on eBay for less than £10. They’re usually older, and have a little bit of history, but that all adds to the charm. The history of mine? It’s an old Soviet propaganda watch, complete with hammer and sickle, shipped straight from Siberia, for £10.50 all in. It looks and feels cheap, but that’s half the fun.
What are your favourite clockwork or wind-up gadgets? Leave a comment below.
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electricity+generation, energy+efficiency, energy+saving, home+generation, freeplay, radio, cyba-lite, self+sufficiency
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