How do you charge your cell phone without electrical wall power? Whether it is an emergency situation or a typical day, we can’t live without our mobile phones. In the normal conditions, you can easily charge your smartphones using the wall charger adapters. What if you are trapped in some situations? Think of the condition you are ambushed with some calamities like flood, hurricane, etc. or even in a place alone where there is no electricity at all. It may happen.
Well, here are some most efficient methods to charge your smartphone without even electric power.
Editor’s Note:Â Don’t perform this DIY solution by yourself if you are not a technical guy or familiar with the battery polarity. The wrong polarity connection may lead to fire malfunction of the smartphone.
Your TV Remote Battery can Charge your Phone.
In the case that your smartphone ran out of battery and you do not have any alternative power source to charge up the battery, the three battery wiring (DIY) is a great approach to survive until power restores. This DIY Charger need only a couple of wires, a USB connector and three battery to provide balanced voltage delivery.
As shown in the above diagram, you can simply connect three 1.5V AA battery in series (one behind another) to make the temporary power source. You can get this AA Battery from the grocery store or from Amazon. If not, this will work with AAA Battery too that is available on TV remotes. Since this AAA battery has a very low capacity, it may not be capable to charge the phone for a long time.
You can remove the USB head from the Phone Charger USB cable and take out a little of the wires from the insulation. Check for the power transfer wires (Black – Negative pole, Red – Positive pole) and connect them to the battery poles accordingly. Make sure you connect the right end to the right pole of the battery to avoid malfunction and smartphone battery damage. Do not try to increase the number of batteries, which will change the charging voltage so the life of the smartphone battery.
To make your life easy, and avoid any confusion in battery settings and wire connection, we recommend you to use the battery holders. They have the slot for three batteries and output wires which you can connect externally to the charger wires. You can also buy the ones with an inbuilt USB port so that you can connect your smartphone charger directly into the box after inserting three AA batteries. Get a 3-battery cell holder from Amazon for 7 bucks.
Use Hand Dynamo Charger
Are you not having a sunny day to use the solar chargers? No battery to make a DIY charger? You can use this Hand dynamo charger which uses the mechanical power to make some electricity. This tiny gadget comes with a small hand lever that lets you rotate to produce some current. The same crank technology is available without a lever, but a push button that rotates the mechanical components within.
When you are off the grid, connect a USB cable to the hand dynamo charger and start rotating to charge the smartphone up. The maximum output voltage for this kind of chargers are 6V and 300 Milli Amp of current output, which will take up a lot of time to charge your smartphone. However, it is a good option to choose when you have no other source to recharge the smartphone battery. You can get a Hand Dynamo Charger from Amazon at $16.
Charge Phone While You Drive
When you are planning for a long drive and running out of battery charge, you can easily boost up the smartphone battery without pulling over the vehicle to any buildings. Every car comes with Cigarette Lighter Ports, that can supply 12V DC. The car chargers can convert this power to 5V to charge your electronic gadgets.
If you have a Car USB Car charger that suits and additional USB cable for your smartphone, you can simply charge your phone while you driving the car. The device will start charging immediately and you can use your phone at the same time too. You can get the Anker 24W Dual USB Charger for under 10 bucks from Amazon.
Also Read:Â 5 Best Smart Car Chargers.
Keep Battery Pack Full Charged
Portable battery pack, aka power bank, is a great tool for everyday usage just to prevent your smartphone from ending up dead with no charge by the end of the day. Whether your smartphone supports typically 1A charger or a powerful fast charger, you can use the power banks to boost up the battery of your device. Most of these battery packs come these days support both outputs current for regular charging (1A) and fast charging (2.1A typically).
Typically, you can buy power packs with the capacity of 10,000/10,400mAh, 12,000mAh, 14,000mAh, 20,000mAh at cheaper rates. A standard pack could recharge your smartphone from 0-to-100% at least 2 to 3 times. The power charger listed bellow can charger iPhone X 2.7 times and Galaxy S8 2.4 times within one cycle. This is more than enough to bring up your phone for two to three days.
These portable power packs have become much ubiquitous and cheaper than ever. You can get a typical power bank starting from $20 or even lesser. Most of the battery packs have twice or thrice charge storage capacity of a typical Android smartphone. The RAVPower Battery Pack is coming with Wireless Charging and 10400mAH internal battery that cast less than 50 bucks from Amazon.
Also Read: 10 Best Portable Power Banks with Wireless Charging
Use Laptop as the Power Source
In case you do not have a portable charger or power backup pack, you can use your laptops or similar electronic gadgets as the power source to charge your smartphone. Most of us carry our laptops on a long journey so that it would be easier to use our lappy in critical situations.
You can simply connect the smartphone to laptop USB with the compatible cable and choose to charge the phone. You may get a popup from the laptop for file sharing, just cancel it and focus on recharging the mobile battery.
In order to minimize the resource utilization by laptops such as screen power or OS power draining, you can enter the bios mode while booting which also will save some power from the laptop’s battery in an emergency.
Car Battery Charger can Power up Mobile
Portable car charger or a jump starter is an essential addon equipment that we must keep in our cars. The jump starters are simply a sort of larger battery packs with the potential to brace up the dead battery in your car.
You can recharge the car’s battery or jump-start a dead car with these Jump Starters. The multifunctional jump starter battery for the cars come with USB ports that can help your smartphone battery to breath back.
As most of the jump starters or car battery chargers come with USB charging ports, you can utilize them to keep your smartphone running. Since the internal recharging battery of these jump starters can store a lot of power.
This can supply enough power to charge your iPhone or Android phone multiple times. Since this is huge battery saved a lot of power, that can also be utilized for powering up your laptop, stereo or other gadgets. This DBPower Portable Jumpstarter is coming with 18000mAh battery and cost under 50 bucks at Amazon
Also Read: 8 Best Car Battery Chargers & Jump Starters.
Use Solar Charger to Charge Phone
The most renewable free source of energy is the solar power which can power your smartphone charger to your household appliances. Not only the big solar panels but also the portable chargers for smartphones are capable of producing a substantial amount of energy and charge your mobile phones.
Solar power chargers come with or without the inbuilt battery packs. But it is highly recommended to use the charger with an inbuilt backup (Solar power banks) so you can use them later.
This Feelley Outdoor portable Solar Power is offering a 24000mAh Li-Polymer battery to store the power. The three solar panels to recharge the battery is capable to provide 5W of recharging power. The device can provide up to 5V/2.1A power. You can get this high capacity Freelley battery Solar power packs from Amazon just below 50 bucks.
Also Read: Best Solar Chargers for Cell Phones & Tablets to Recharge
Apart from the above-mentioned charging methods, there are many experimental ways that you can charge your smartphone — such as the portable windmill, cooking heat to electricity converter, etc. However, you may find out these solutions to charge your phone while you are running out of power at home.