Solar Charged TV Remote

in #science4 years ago

How often do you change your batteries in your TV remote? Probably once or twice a year. Thus, you probably don’t consider this to be a problem. But Samsung thinks differently and wants you to use solar-charged remotes.

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

The base idea behind a solar-charged TV remote is quite simple and well explained purely by its name: Samsung Eco. From your point of view, it will be just as simple as using batteries but instead, you’ll have a small solar panel just like the one you have on your old trusty calculator.

The power to the remote is provided by an integrated battery with a proclaimed lifespan of seven years. But that’s not the only way Samsung is striving for being green. The South Korean electronics maker also says that thanks to optimizing the hardware of the remote it should be capable of running up to two years on a single charge.

And it shouldn’t need direct sunlight to power the remote. Interior lights should also be enough – all you need to remember is to put the remote the right side up. And if you’re the type of person who will forget to do that, in emergencies there’s also a USB type C port that can be used.

The remote itself weighs just 31 grams and 24 % of it is made from recycled plastic. To be more precise, PET with a surface made from black metal. Samsung claims this should reduce the amount of plastic waste by several tons every single year.

From an individual's point of view using solar charging, might seems like a small little thing that amounts to nothing. But when you take into consideration the size of Samsung’s client base this will be a significant addition to ecology. The estimate is that in just seven years we should see more than 99 million batteries saved because of this effort.

The motivation to create the solar-powered TV remote is to reduce or ideally completely eliminate the use of batteries. And it's not the only ecological activity coming from Samsung as – for example, this April, it introduced ecological packaging of electronics that allows you to build different things from their packaging. For example, the TV box can be made into a little house for your cat.

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