Battery low! Please Charge your device. This is notification sends most of us into a state of incertitude. The next course of action is to quickly search for your device charger and look for the available charging slots and immediately plugging in. Thing is, not everyone in the world has this privileged to have access to power and even for those who have it, not all situations work out this way. There instances where we suffer power blackouts and have to contend with power banks, which also have to be charged. Its hectic!
A California startup is however working on an ingenious solution aimed at solving such situations using a century old concept and century old tools. Andrew Burn’s startup Stower is developing a candle charger using a simplistic design based on the principles of thermo-electrics, conceptualized in the early 1800s. The solution involves lighting a candle and filing their device with water and boom, you have a charger. Stower has since launched a campaign on Kickstarter which, has since raised $27,000 with 30 days left.
The thermo-electrics concept works in such a way that there is a hot plate and a cold plate and you smash these generators together creating a temperature difference. This leads to a diffusion of energy from the hot plate to the cold plate, which in turn outputs between 2-3 watts, about the same amount of power derived from a USB port – perfect for charging smartphones and tablets.
Source: Reuters
