How to charge 300 cell phones per day!

When the power goes out in your neighborhood due to a fire or flood, here's a way that you can keep everyone's cell phones charged...

A few months ago there was a tornado in a Texas town which did a huge amount of destruction to the homes and businesses there. And it took out the local power grid as well. But to add insult to injury, the tornado also blew down the tower with the tornado warning sirens. Wow!

The next day there was a reporter doing interviews with the survivors and he noted that even though the tornado warning siren was destroyed, not to worry since eveyone would be getting text messages on their phones with any weather alerts and disaster updates.

Say What!

The local person being interviewed gave the reporter a sad look and said “on what”? He then noted that all their cell phones were running out of battery charge and since the local power wouldn’t be up for at least a week, they now were out of communication with the outside world. What if there was another tornado coming?

What to do?

That’s when I got an idea for a simple and affordable bulk cell phone charging system that could be deployed from a house porch or under a popup tent on a table. All it takes is a Solar Generator (like one from Southwire, Jackery, Bluetti or many other manufacturers) and a high-power charging station like this one. I also bought some extra charging cables for USB-C , USB-Mini and Lightning powered cell phones.

How does it work?

Here’s my backyard experiment using a Southwire Elite 1100 Power Station to charge up to 10 cells at once. In theory this could charge up to 100 cell phones in a 10-hour day. This system should also work with any 500 to 1000 watt-hr Solar Generator from Jackery, Bluetti or many others.

What about recharging the power station?

If you had a single 100-watt solar panel charging the Solar Generator (and the sun was shining) this should be able to recharge 100 cell phones per day for weeks. All without any gasoline or other form of power.

Can it go bigger?

Oh yes, a single power station like the Elite 1100 could easily power three of these cell phone charging stations at a time. Add a second or third 100-watt solar panel to your power station and you could recharge up to 30 phones at a time over a 10-hour time span which could be 300 cell phones per day. And you should have enough extra power to run a bunch of LED lighting around your charging station all night long.

Here’s what I bought for my cell phone charging experiment. Click on the picture below for an Amazon link.

Who should do this?

I think that your local fire station or police department should purchase a backup cell phone charging system and be ready to deploy it the next day. Or if you already have a Solar Generator and Solar Panels, for $100 or so you could buy a 10 position fast charger like I used. This would make you the neighborhood hero while helping your neighborhood stay in contact with the outside world.

Put me on coach…

I’m willing to demonstrate how this works on any television or youtube news show. For example, Al Roker from the Today Show should be interested in an interview with me showing how this works. I think that local municipalities need to help themselves rather than waiting for FEMA to show up. FEMA is already overloaded with the heavy lifting of disaster recovery.

Let’s play safe out there - Mike