Our very own electric supply - toys everywhere!


The pedal generator - we have now changed it to a hand-operated rowing system - age and damaged knees actually!

Our power for LED lighting, fiber-UTP media converter for the Internet broad-band connection and the WLL phone comes from:

It seems that the solar panel is necessary - it is always better to keep a small trickle charge on for battery protection. We have tried with the pedal generator alone, but the batterys seem to lose a lot and get damaged easily.

For the WLL phone, which runs on 5 Volts, we have used the buck-converter IC from Recom, R7805-0.5. It will fail above 34 V input - so we use a LM317 to reduce the voltage to a safe 30 V before the buck-converter stage. The original battery of the phone has been replaced by a 4700 μF capacitor which is charged by the buck converter. It seems to work just fine with very little loss.