The 17 pound laptop battery
I just got my new laptop battery in the mail. It’s 17 pounds. Believe it or not, this is a good thing. Here it is:
Why is this important? As part of the Student Loan Network’s efforts to continually improve our energy usage – our green-ness, such as it is – I bought this nifty device (with my own money, I should add). What’s neat about this battery is that it has both DC and solar inputs.
DC is, of course, what your car generates. A friend on Twitter, Daniel Ho, informed me that the alternator in a car more or less generates electricity whether or not you use it, as a byproduct of the engine running. This means that for every gallon of gas, if I’m not in some way using that electricity, it’s kind of wasted. So this battery jacks into the DC outlet of my car and can recharge from it, helping me to use more of the energy in a gallon of gas.
Even better, I can deploy the solar panel on this battery and let it charge from that as well from the dashboard of my car, claiming some incremental energy from it, too.
The battery pack will give my MacBook Pro an additional 3 hours of runtime, which isn’t a huge amount for a 17 pound battery (though the MacBook itself is power hungry), but if it also means being able to maximize the “free” energy around me, that’s power I don’t have to draw off the grid, and that’s as green as you can get.
This particular model is the Xantrex PowerPack Solar. I got mine from Amazon; here’s the link. (disclosure, affiliate link)
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“A friend on Twitter, Daniel Ho, informed me that the alternator in a car more or less generates electricity whether or not you use it, as a byproduct of the engine running. This means that for every gallon of gas, if I’m not in some way using that electricity, it’s kind of wasted.”
You friend is wrong. The more load you place on the alternator, the harder it is to turn, which in turn increases gas consumption. Sorry to burst your bubble.
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