Phone Jack Night Light
You know these things. These LED night lights cost about $6 for the GE brand and about $2 for the dollar store brand. They use only .3 Watts, last 100,000 hours and only turn on when it’s dark for about 7 hours at night. They cost very very little to run. The clock on your oven consumes more power. But let’s pretend that we’re cheap. We’re really cheap and don’t want to even pay for that .3 Watts.
There is a constant power supply running into nearly every house that you don’t pay for directly and don’t get billed based on usage. While it wont power your stove or your lamps, it can power LED lamps or even a cell phone charger (I assume I could build this anyways…). This power supply? Your telephone jack. Most phone jacks officially put out 40 – 70 Volts but can surge up to 100 volts while the phone is ringing. If you draw too much power though the phone company thinks you’re on the phone and you won’t be able to receive phone calls.
I grabbed a telephone jack splitter I had on hand and popped the top of my night light off. I removed the electrical prongs from the night light, removed the front of the splitter, did some soldering and tested out my frankenstein. It worked! So now I have a .3 Watt night light that only turns on when it’s dark and I don’t even pay for the electricity. I don’t even have a home phone line in my house so I’m really truly not paying a cent for this electricity.
The best part of this, in my opinion, is that when there’s a storm and the power is knocked out, the phone line will most often continue supplying power because it uses a different power source. So in the storm when you most need it, your night lights will stay on keeping your home safe!
At the end of this I thought, surely someone has already done this… And I was right!
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/12-led-telephone-line-powered-desk-light-night-lamp-11969
http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/led-jack-light.html
And then I found this guy who makes just about everything:
http://www.sandman.com/telco.html
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Handmade Kids Products
About a month ago I began working on a project with two friends of mine. The project is a website called Style My Child which is an online sales website for selling high quality handmade kids clothing & toys and other stuff.
What makes this project unique is that Style My Child not only benefits the seller, not only the buyer and not only the operators, but it benefits children in need around the world. We take 20% of all our revenue at Style My Child and put it aside in our “giving department” until we reach a specific goal. At that point we donate that money to the cause we’ve chosen to benefit kids in other countries or sometimes even needy kids in our own country.
If you think this is a great idea like I do please check out Style My Child on Facebook and don’t forget to check out our kids clothing and toys products on the website!
If you make kids toys or clothes please sign up and check us out! And if you’re interested in shopping for handmade kids toys , handmade kids clothing or homemade educational toys please check back regularly to see the new products being listed!
Here’s one of the videos produced for us. Keep an out for it!
But seriously go like us on Facebook no matter what: https://www.facebook.com/pages/StyleMyChild/271721556200798
