John McBride is an outdoors enthusiast who chooses to live environmentally friendly.
As a West Australian I've spent beautiful days and nights in coastal areas like Denmark, one of the most beautiful places in Australia. It is a popular tourist town in the Southwestern corner of Western Australia. Travel further north and inland for a couple of days and you will experience the stark contrasts of the inland deserts, with days engulfed by the heat of the sun followed by biting cold at night. West Australia is a vast state.
Until now a limitation on safe travel has been a reliance on electrical power, but with the advent of portable solar powered devices and hand powered dynamo chargers this is no longer the case. On my last trip walking the famous Bibbulmun track for a week I had a backpack with an inbuilt solar panel and charger that has connections for a mobile phone and even an MP4 player. With the increased power capabilities of solar panels and rare earth magnets for the dynamos, the units have become smaller and more portable so you can have a supply of power on hand night and day. It certainly has made my life more comfortable. I am a greenie by choice and will always try to minimize my ecological footprint by using alternate power and so have embraced these new technologies.
There are amazing little gadgets like dynamo powered lights and lanterns, radios and handheld GPS trackers using inbuilt solar chargers. The larger briefcase sized solar generators will provide enough power for a notebook computer and can be used to recharge a flat car battery.
If you would like more information on these and other products you can check out my shop online, I’ve called it Ecopia the outback eco shop , the name reflects my general philosophy.
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