Eco Gadget Series (1st Issue)

These days it seems that virtually every manufacturer on the market is making a very deliberate push to fabricate environmentally-friendly products in keeping with our more acute sense of “greenness”. During the last few days a couple of products have caught my eye, here they are:

1. The Freeplay Indigo Lantern is one of those genius ideas that makes you sit back and think “I wish I had thought of that”. Building on the brand’s experience and know-how in clean energy production, Freeplay engineers have made a very dependable and modern lantern able to provide (fully charged) up to 2 ½ hours of continuous ultra bright light, and 70 hours of night-light. With a quick 60 second wind you get an hour of brilliant white light. It has no bulbs to burn out, nor disposable batteries to replace, and you can power it yourself when needed. It retails at around 20 GBP.

2. The Standby Buster. We often talk about how much power our appliances consume on stand-by and we know that there are people out there who find it hard work to turn theirs off, this gadget is for you. Standby Buster is a remote controlled electrical socket that lets you switch appliances off completely so that they use no electricity. Leaving them on standby unnecessarily uses electricity costing you money and contributing to Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions. The unit requires no installation, you plug it into an existing socket to convert it to remote control. Standby Buster is the only consumer electronics mains switch to be recommended by the Energy Saving Trust. It retails at around 10 GBP and will save you on average 40 GBP a year.