There are plenty of recommendations online for charging the battery in your mobile devices more efficiently and extending its life, but whenever the madmen over at the Kreosan channel show up, you know any sensible strategy is about to go out the window. In one of their older experiments, they combined a TV antenna, a spark plug, a flyback, a car-lighter adapter, and a simple diode to build a wireless charger that pulls power from a high-voltage line...
The neighborhood where I live suffers frequent power cuts, and that has forced us to improvise. My usual approach for keeping the bare minimum of devices alive (those that let me publish articles in total darkness) is to take a charged car battery, hook it to a generic 150-watt inverter, and get the right voltage that way.
That's more than enough for the modem's power supply, the laptop, and of course, smartphone chargers. It's a logical and relatively safe way to get out of a pinch, but what do you do when you're in the middle of nowhere and your phone absolutely has to keep working?
The madmen at Kreosan have an extreme solution for you: build a wireless phone charger that works with high-voltage lines. It all starts with an antenna from an old TV, a flyback (probably from another discarded TV), a spark plug, a diode, and a basic car charger using the lighter connector.
The device works by bringing the antenna close to the high-voltage line. The current passes through the spark plug to the flyback, and they look for a compatible voltage in its coils, which is rectified with the diode. That voltage feeds the car charger, thereby obtaining the 5 volts your phone needs.
Kreosan's video indicates that not all high-voltage lines work, and they suggest a minimum of 110 kilovolts (...). Yes, it is extremely dangerous. Yes, it is most likely illegal. No, the concept is not exactly new.
And yes, in the past more "safe" alternatives have been developed, like the RAPS system designed for rescue and special operations teams, which goes one step further and hooks directly onto the high-voltage line.
