This week’s Gadget Tuesday features PowerPot 5, a portable thermoelectric generator by Power Practical.
In case you haven’t heard of it before, it is a cooking pot that produces electricity so that you can use it as a USB charger while cooking in it. Bring it whenever you go camping or hiking. It’s also perfect to keep in your bunker if you’re planning for a zombie apocalypse.
How it works
Thermoelectric generators take a temperature difference and turn it into electrical power. It sounds woolly and like a scam but it actually has to do with how electrons move in a metal. When electrons are supplied with heat, it will move from the hot end towards the cold end.
This produces electrical current, which the device harnesses to charge USB devices like your smartphone. The larger the temperature difference we create, the more electrical current we will get and hence more power generated.
However, in order to maintain the temperature difference, it also need a way to dissipate the heat and this is done by heating water in the PowerPot. Water is a wonderful heatsink and it will effectively limit the maximum temperature of the ‘cold’ side to 100 degrees Celsius because that is the boiling temperature for water.
Therefore, remember that we must have something watery in the PowerPot or we may overheat the thermoelectric generator. It doesn’t have to be water. It can be a can of soup or beans; any kind of food we may want to heat up.
The product is amazing because as smartphones and the internet become more integrated into our daily lives, we become more dependent on them. And we started doing less activities in the nature like a canoe trip or jungle trekking because it’s very difficult to keep our battery life. We’d have to bring a powerful power bank and even that may only last us a couple of days.
That’s why this product is brilliant. Outdoor enthusiasts will appreciate its convenience. We can pack light since the pot is no more bulky than the normal cooking pot and take our smartphone on a nature hunt. But of course, the device can’t provide us with internet connection. Or at least, not yet.
How to use it
Simply place the pot over any heat source, including the stove and open flame, and pour in some water into the pot. It will start generating electricity within seconds. There is a high temperature cable at the back of the pot, which we can plug a USB into.
Don’t worry about overpowering our device because the PowerPot has a built-in regulator that insures we can safely charge our USB devices. We will also get the same charging time as we do from our wall outlet at home.
It also works in reverse! If we plug in the pot to a power outlet, it will turn into a mini fridge that can cool our drinks or food.
Check out the video to see how to use the PowerPot 5.
