Eco-Friendly Charging Technology: Charging Technologies Articles: Eco20/20

Eco-Friendly Charging Technology

Charging our electronic devices - whether traditional batteries, cell phones, mp3 players, and other mobile devices - is an everyday part of our lives that doesn't really take up a lot of our thought process. You plug your device into the wall and you charge it, that's about all there is to it, right? That is actually far from reality. There are so many different types of chargers, all with varying ranges of efficient that can lull us into thinking we are doing our part to reduce our energy usage. But this is often not the case. If all your devices are plugged into standard chargers that are powered by the general electricity grid, then all that charging can cause immense pressure on an already unstable environment. However, with each passing year, more and more eco-friendly and high efficiency chargers are flooding the marketplace, giving you a variety of conscious choices to choose from.

For a long time, most of us only considered charging time when it came to choosing the charger that would work best for us. These days, we have to put far more consideration into our choices if we wish to reduce our impact on the environment. And as consumers continue to become more aware of the problems associated with the inefficiency the standard chargers, more options are being made available.

Even at this very moment, there are a number of technologies available, both old and new, and many new ideas are in the works for the future, Smart chargers are an excellent first step, these chargers contain a chip within them that allows them to monitor the voltage of your battery, so that your batteries are only charged until they are full. Most standard battery chargers on the market today will either charge for a pre-set amount of time, or just keep on charging, which is highly wasteful and could damage your device.

Gone are the days when wired choices for chargers were all that were available. From hand cranked, to hybrid wind-solar, to the traditional solar charger, these are excellent options for the person on the go. These do not require you to be tethered to a wall outlet and can be used pretty much whenever you need it. As long as you can turn the crank shaft, have a bit of sun, or even a little wind, you can charge a huge variety of electronic devices without ever plugging into the electrical grid to do it.

There are even chargers that allow you to get in shape while charging that iPod! A number of companies have come out with bike powered chargers that use the kinetic energy from the spin of the wheels to generate electricity to power your devices! When you use people-power to charge your gadgets and you get a win-win outcome, you get to use your device without the guilt of using yet more coal power (or other non-renewable source), and you can take inches off your waistline all the while.

For nearly every gadget you can think of, there is an eco-friendly charging solution out there for it. There is no longer any need for one-time-use or standard rechargeable batteries or charging units that continue to suck power even when they aren't charging a device. We can have our cake and eat it too with the new generation of charging devices. We can have our toys, without the guilt or the negative impact on the environment that arises from more traditional methods of charging. In the future, we'll look back in wonder that we ever used something so inefficient as a "non-smart" charger or a single-use battery.