This Solar-Powered Generator Could Power Your Light Tools On Site

November 25, 2016

An Alberta inventor has come up with a solar-powered generator that she hopes will make the world a greener place. As reported in the St. Albert Gazette, Connie Stacey, owner of Edmonton’s Growing Greener Innovations, has launched an Indiegogo campaign to market the Grengine 1000, a lightweight, modular, solar-powered battery-operated generator.

“People will usually make a green choice when it’s an easy choice,” she says, and this device is an easy-to-use alternative to noisy, polluting gasoline generators. While it won’t replace all generators, Stacey says this device should be of interest to many people, including workers who need power in the field. The roughly $2,000 device provides up to 1.2 kWh of electricity.

Electrical engineer and renewable power advocate Gordon Howell, who is not affiliated with Stacey or her company, says this device would likely provide enough power for a day of light power-tool use. “It sounds like a good product for the objectives that it is wanting to meet,” he says.

The idea came to Stacey while walking her twin boys in a stroller three years ago. “We passed by some construction going on,” including a noisy gasoline generator, blasting CO2 and noise into the air and their faces. “It was just so loud and noisy with this generator, I was like, ‘Shut up, you’re going to wake the kids!’” she recalls, laughing.

The experience got her thinking about the battery-operated backup systems she’d worked with in the IT industry for 20 years. “I thought to myself, ‘Why on earth don’t we use a battery?’”

Stacey assembled a prototype using pre-existing technologies, and hired industrial designer Brad Madu to create a sleek, marketable version. The finished device resembles a tackle box with electrical sockets and an LCD display. The device is similar to an uninterrupted power supply system and is classified as a solar generator. It uses 12-pound rechargeable bricks that contain the lithium ion cells and an inverter to provide up to 1.2 kWh of power, which is enough to run a computer for 12 hours or a circular saw for two. You plug it into any outlet or solar panel to charge it.

While there are battery-powered generators on the market, they take forever to recharge and use 80-lb. lead acid batteries. “The solution was to make the batteries interchangeable and stackable.”

The device lets users stack bricks together like Lego and secure them with lunch-box clips. This patent-pending system enables people to refuel the generator more quickly than a gasoline one and gives it a theoretically unlimited capacity. She hopes to raise $40,000 through her crowd-funding campaign to finalize development of the device and create sales.

Find out more about the Grengine by emailing info@growinggreener.ca.

Read the full article: www.stalbertgazette.com/article/Bright-idea-from-city-inventor-20161119.