Right before leaving in South America, while thinking of my trip I realised that if I want to use the phone and/or the tablet for recording the track of my trip or as a cyclo-computer I will need a way to charge them when I’m not in the town or, even better, while I am cycling.
After a lot of research on the Internet, I had four possibilities in mind:
1. a windmill – good if I were going to Ushuaia – a very strong location candidate for my trip
2. a solar panel, that would charge the devices
3. a power bank.
4.a dynamo for the bicycle.
Each of them had advantages and disadvantages, let’s talk about them.
The windmill:
– is cheap (the Mini Kin Wind Powered Charger sells for 3 GBP on Amazon Uk) and it should work in an area with a lot of wind, like Patagonia (that was a strong candidate, I would’ve gone to Patagonia if there was an easy way to go there).
– is smaller and lighter (it only weights 200 g) than the other devices, that was a very important factor for my trip. I’m a weigh freak when it comes to biking or hiking, however i always end up carrying more stuff than I really need (I cannot give up the photo camera and the tripod, for example)
– is also works during the night, when I sleep
– is supposed to work while I’m biking, supposed that I can reach a little more than 5 km/h (if I cannot I do not deserve to charge my phone/tablet)
The problem is that I need to find a way to fix it on the bike. Another problem is that the product description doesn’t mention too much about it’s battery capacity, the charging speed, etc.
I will definitely try this one out, for that money is really worth giving it a chance. If it doesn’t work on the bike at least I will put it on my window, get the cable indoor and charge the phone from there while feeling better that I save some conventional energy 🙂
Another product I was looking at was the Uniross U0184700 Wind Charger, but a negative review on Amazon kept me away from it. The fact that it needs to be charged to 20% before you can start charging it from wind is a no-go for me (if that is true).
2. Solar panels
For a solar panel I was looking at a product like
It has a large area, that means it charges fast. And it tranfers the “juice” to the devices pretty fast. The drawback for big solar panels was that they only store little energy.