When a natural disaster like a hurricane, flood or earthquake strikes, the first thing that usually happens is that the power goes out. We can also have a scheduled blackout in the neighborhood or suffer a power outage at home due to a breakdown. In any of these situations, or even if we go camping in the mountains or similar, we may find ourselves in need of charge our mobile phone. How can we do it without using the wall plug or an ordinary outlet?
How to recharge a mobile phone in the middle of a power outage
In these cases of "electrical disconnection" what we need is an alternative energy source that allows us to charge the mobile enough to make an emergency call, send a WhatsApp or SMS.
Required materials
To do this, we will use a series of utensils that we can get, in principle, without too many difficulties.
- A 9V cell or battery.
- A metal clip.
- A USB car charger (cigarette lighter).
- The USB cable of our smartphone.
Once we have all these objects in our possession, we will carry out the emergency charge following these 3 simple steps.
1 # Open the clip and screw it to the negative pole of the battery
All batteries have 2 terminals, one positive and one negative. When we bridge these two poles, the electrons flow rapidly from the negative pole to the positive pole. Therefore, what we will do to generate electricity is to use a metal clip (metal is a good electrical conductor), we will open the two “legs” and we will use one of them to screw it onto the negative battery terminal (see image below).
Image: YouTube (Top World)As we can see in the photo above, one of the ends of the clip should be facing upwards, and the other facing outwards.
2 # Put the car USB charger into the positive pole
The second step is to place the metal tip of the USB car charger in contact with the positive terminal of the battery. All this in such a way that the USB port of the charger is facing outwards.
Image: YouTube (Top World)With this we would be ready to close the circuit and for the current to start flowing.
3 # Make contact between the clip and the metal edge of the USB charger
To finish, all we have to do is move one of the legs of the clip until it makes contact with the metal edge that protrudes from the side of the USB car charger. In this way, we will establish the connection between the negative and positive pole of the battery and the electrons will begin to flow, generating the electricity necessary to charge the mobile.
Image: YouTube (Top World)Once we have all the "invention" assembled, we connect the USB cable to the charger and plug it into our smartphone. If we have followed the steps correctly, we will see how the mobile begins to charge the battery.
Other methods to charge a phone battery without using the charger
If we do not have a clip at hand we can always use other types of metal objects to make contact between the battery and the USB car charger. In this video, for example, we see how the author uses the same method that we just discussed, but using a common key.
Can you charge a mobile by connecting the charger to a lemon?
There is another widespread trick that says that we can charge our phone by connecting the charger to a lemon instead of an electrical outlet. Are we talking about a myth or does it really work?
Deep down we could say that it is an urban legend, but with certain shades of reality. Yes, you can charge a mobile using lemons, but one is not enough. Let's see…
Each lemon provides a voltage of 0.95V, and a standard charger requires a 5V power supply. Therefore, if we cut a lemon in half and plug in a charger, we will get absolutely nothing. The voltage is too small.
However, the trick could work if instead of a single lemon we use 6. You can see the detailed process through this video.
In this other video, we see how to achieve a similar solution using a few potatoes.
Do you know any other method to charge a phone during a blackout or power outage? Have you ever tried the lemon trick? And the one with the potato?
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