Wind up/eco charger for laptop and mobiles?

Preplexed

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Dec 15, 2008
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I am wanting to get hold of some sort of charger that I can use for my laptop and mobile phone, but it obviously must have green credentials.

Can anyone on suggest one please!
 
There are solar and crank-style battery chargers out there. Most for cellphones are affordable ($50 range), but the ones for the laptops ar not.

Avoid the crank style for laptops, as you'll die from exhaustion before the laptop gets anything decent.

As for the cellphones, it's probably a better use of your time to plug it into an outlet - faster and more reliable. Solar chargers are great, but not a good ROI and you need reliably heavy duty sun to get a decent charge.

BTW, shame on you if you burn through your cellphone charge daily. With a 7-day standby life, you may never get the return on investment on your "green" chargers. Spending your money burning through minutes and then burning through your charge is a bit self-defeating.

As for laptops, you might need to re-evaluate your compute usage profile, as the netbooks are meant to be power frugal, but compute underpowered. If you can live with a reduced mobile computing lifestyle, the solar chargers and crank chargers may be worth getting.

In summary, having green chargers is not as good as having green equipment to begin with.

Hope you already are and I'm just preaching to the choir.
 
I am just thinking the same and I have been trying to find out if the solio solar chargers are any good (see link at bottom). I read a couple of consumer feedbacks and am now confused, some people say they are great, others say they it doesn't work well. They are expensive enough that while I am willing to pay for one if it works but not if it doesn't...

Otherwise there are emergency radios which also are supposed to be able to charge/run cell phone and most have a windup function some have an additional solar panel. Strangely NPR seems to have a selection of them:
http://shop.npr.org/catalog/Emergency_Safety-41-1.html?mode=families
There it's the same, I can't quite figure out how good they are.

I doubt there are any which produce enough current for a laptop though. You would have to check how many Ampere your laptop needs for running and what the output of a charging device is.
 
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