Wireless Charging

I just saw this; http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_GB/coming-soon/wireless-charging/index.html

Select Smartphone devices can now be wirelessly recharged with certain Ikea furniture.


We need this tech with wireless charging to be mainstream in laptops. Imagine if every surface of your home had wireless charging for your laptop. no more cumbersome plugging in every night!

 

I love wireless charging and the efficiency is getting better with every generation. I even wirelessly charge my Chevy Volt with the "Plugless" system and that is at 3300 Watts and only a 12% loss in efficiency.

Even at CES they demoed a new style of wireless power that charges your devices while in your pocket. (This one does not provide much power yet)

 

I'm not sure if I want to be exposed to strong electromagnetic fields everywhere, including next to my furniture and somehow plugging laptop into AC doesn't seem to be more cumbersome to me than pressing that tiny power button to start it up, but maybe it's just me.

 

Exactly, I have the small little qi chargers that work with the nexus 5, but being surrounded by EMF that gets pumped from huge coils that can charge from a distance does not sound healthy to me.

 

Except... EMF doesn't do anything to the human body. There's a *massive* difference between ionizing radiation (x-rays, nuclear bombs, etc.) and non-ionizing (WiFi, cell phones, wireless charging) radiation... You'll be just fine talking on a cell phone all day or using a wireless charger. It's quite different from holding a chunk of plutonium in your hand.

 

If you really want to know whether it can be harmful or not, go check out the scientific literature on the subject and that should alleviate your fears. The whole EMF thing has been blown out of proportions.

As far as wirelessly charging laptops, that's a whole other story, the amount of power required for wirelessly charging a cell phone is highly different than what it would take for a laptop and it could maybe end up in stronger magnetic fields that what is approved by various governments.

 

I read few papers claiming some type of electromagnetic radiation is harmful to cell tissue and the level required to charge device is orders of magnitude higher than what we had before and long term or even short term effects are still poorly understood. There is a difference between some small casual exposure and sitting on the sofa emitting enough power to charge my laptop etc. and therefore I'm not sure if I want those devices all over my house 24/7. Strong electromagnetic field will damage living tissue, the question is how strong and for how long and I wouldn't want to experiment this on my kids.

 

We could debate this topic all day long, My professors at Purdue always talked about how an EMF is non-ionizing and is safe. Everything I have learned tells me they are safe but it is not what my research is/was in so I will take their words for it but honestly I never went farther to research it. EMF's are around us at all times. You know the things you drive over to activate a stop light. That's an EMF field that your car is disrupting. Your computer produces an EMF, your microwave does and many other things in our day to day lives. They are around us at all times.

 

Yeah, EMF is pretty much everywhere, and it always has been (both natural and, as of the last few decades if not more, artificial). However, I've yet to see a reputable source (expert in the fields involved, medical experts, etc). make any sort of sound scientific claim that non-ionizing radiation has a negative effect on our health. Of course, some claim that it does, but pretty much every source of that claim I've seen are people who have no idea what they're talking about. It'd be like taking a former actor's beliefs of vaccines causing mental illness seriously (because of course she knows what she's talking about, right?).

You want to worry about radiation hurting you? Keep sunscreen on anytime you're outdoors, don't fly, and try not to eat so many bananas.

 

It would be so great to wirelessly charge all my cell phones, tablets, handheld video games, etc. Between my personal cell, work cell, personal tablet, both kids' tablets, their 2DS, Xbox game controllers, not to mention a number of other rechargable devices like camera, etc, this would be great.

 

Just a 12% loss? That's quite a bit better than I realized was currently available. The top reason I wouldn't go with wireless charging had always been the inefficiency of it - it seemed wasteful when the power loss was considerably higher than 12%.
Whether it's really that much easier than plugging in a power or USB cable though, I'm not sure. It's pretty easy to use those, and they're easily portable if I'm, for example, visiting a friend and my laptop or phone is low on battery. Though I can see where they'd be useful for, say, 360 controllers where you don't always realize the battery charge is low. Definitely preferable to non-rechargeables and realizing you don't have any left in the house mid-LAN.