One evening last week I charged my iPhone by boiling a pot of water. A camp stove aided in the process as well as a cable and an aluminum cooking pot.
No, this was not a science experiment with my kids. A new product from a Utah startup company, the PowerPot, uses heat from a fire to make electricity.
You cook over an open flame, be it with the pot set on a camp stove or on a small fire built with logs. A mechanism inside the base of the PowerPot transforms heat to usable electricity via an electromagnetic reaction.
In my test this past week, the little pot worked right away. Power icon bars on my phone began dancing almost immediately after plugging into the PowerPot.
A cable by the pot handle provided the hook-up, and as long as a flame licked the pot base my phone sucked in the juice.
Cameras, GPS devices, handheld radios, phones, and other devices will mate with the PowerPot. It comes with a universal cable and adapters to connect to common gadgets you might bring into the woods.
The PowerPot is a simple, solid product in the hand. It’s made of anodized aluminum and has capacity to heat about 45 liquid ounces of water. It weighs less than a pound (about 12 ounces) in a backpack hiking down the trail.
The pot is similar in concept to the BioLite stove, which we wrote about earlier this year, in that each is a cooking-oriented product that has the side benefit of generating power.
But the two products are different — the BioLite requires wood burning in its metal barrel to make electricity; you then place a normal cooking pot on top of it if you want water heated up.
