If you’ve been to London or have seen it in movies then you must have thought that the iconic red phone booths have become quite useless now. Isn’t that the case? However, they are seeing a new use in green revolution; Solarbox is the name of the project that will be transforming these phone booths into charging stations that make use of solar energy and can subsequently charge your gadgets.
Kirsty Kenney, co-founder of Solarbox, said, “The idea for Solarbox came about through three reasons really. So, the first thing was that the phone boxes aren’t used anymore and they’ve become sites of anti-social behavior. The second thing is that modern phone battery life can’t keep up with the pace of our lives, everyone’s being caught out. And the third thing was there is nowhere really to charge your phones in the public realm. So we did some research, we held some focus groups and brought these three things together and this is the end product.”
Once the three variable were considered, she along with her partner, Harold Craston, designed Solarbox. Both partners are Geography graduates from London’s School of Economics. Hundreds of these cabins have been removed from London once they became of no use. The project shall bring them to life again. A solar panel measuring 86cm shall be installed on top of the booths and a 3-hour sun time a day is enough to keep Solarbox operational for all year long thanks to the integrated battery that is capable of storing the energy to be used later.
Cabins will sport connectors for all sorts of mobile devices such as tablets, cameras and of course the smartphones and regular phones (if anyone still uses them, that is). A 10 minutes charge shall increase your phone’s battery by about 20%. While the users wait for their devices to charge, advertisements are played to them thus rendering this project free of cost (the finances are being generated via these advertisements).
A single unit of Solarbox can charge about 100 devices a day and can cater to 6 users at a time. The unit is open to public from 5.30am till 11.30 pm. The very first cabin was installed back in October 2014 and as per plans 5 more shall be installed in London this year.
