Powertraveller
Powertraveller
Startmonkey
A new category has been defined in the outdoor market – power. The possibilities in this brave new world are being defined largely by one company – Powertraveller.
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f you’re not stocking Powertraveller’s range, or even a small part of it, why the hell not? Attendees to ispo this year were knocked out by the range; at SGB we’re both big fans and constant users of the technology. Portable power, fully rechargeable from either the mains or a solar panel. Re-usable, sturdy, well designed, and bloody clever. The range can power just about any device you’d care to travel with, from phone through to laptop and beyond, and it’s growing. Powertraveller’s CEO Jerry Ranger spoke to SGB about what we think will be the next big thing in the great outdoors.
SGB: Where did the Powertraveller range begin?
Jerry Ranger: It all began during my time in the Royal Marines. I was in the Marines for eight years of my life, and power is a very big issue for people in that line of work, working and living outdoors – your life depends on power, in being able to communicate, call in a helicopter, all sorts of ways. The issue becomes, how do we supply power in a robust, reliable way? Everything you carry up a mountain, for example, has to be reliable, designed well, and lightweight. What we have essentially made is a battery, and the battery is the last thing that anybody thinks about. They’ve got their Garmin, or their mobile – power is secondary. We had to take the battery and make it robust, waterproof, and be able to show the customer how much power is left in it easily. We need something where they can take the battery
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SGB OUTDOOR MAY 2010
and not care about it, throw it in a rucksack and not worry that it will deliver what it needs to, when it needs to. We were the first company in the world to come up with that – but we also wanted to be able to recharge them off-grid. If you’re away from the ‘grid’ for weeks or months on end, you have to be able to generate power. In days gone by, people would take batteries with them and discard them once they were depleted, which is incredibly bad for the environment. That had to stop; so we came up with a way to recharge our battery with solar technology. This technology has come on massively in the last 10 years, so now it is a technology of its time, harnessing the most powerful energy source we have – the sun. So you can recharge your batteries and/or power your products directly. What then transpired, after we had developed our initial product, is that many devices work at lots of different voltages. Most lower-end devices work at around five volts, but as soon as you need power for say, a camcorder, that works at 8.4
Minigorilla Powerchimp
volts. You then go up to a Netbook, which runs at 19 volts. So what we had to do then was come up with products like the minigorilla, powergorilla, solargorilla… The gorilla range powers anything from 8v and up, and below is that the Monkey range for lower voltages.
We’re now developing a product called the silverback – and the name alone suggests it’s going to be the mother of all chargers! It will give users the ability to run a laptop, for example, 24/7 because it will be combined with something called a solargorilla-eXtreme.
20 years ago, technology was tied to the desk, office or home – but the digital revolution meant technology became mobile. So power has had to do the same, go through a revolution and become a mobile source which can be charged off-grid or from the mains. And that’s where we come in… The Powertraveller range really is designed and developed for the outdoor environment; by targeting the outdoor, so you actually get the halo effect. Just because you go and climb a mountain in Chamonix at the weekend, during the week you’re commuting to and from the office and you
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