Some of you have a swimming pool at home, while others are architects or contractors who are very likely to deal with one at some point. Now, surely most of you agree that a pool at night looks way better with submersed lights on than in the dark. And since pools are rather large objects, serious lighting is mandatory, which means quite a lot of pain when it comes to installing these lights, not to mention maintenance costs and the rest. And then there's the electricity bill, with the burden large energy consumption places on our already troubled environment close behind.

 

It's designers like Lysandre Follet we must thank to, for being able to see things differently and come with unexpected solutions to some of our problems, and one of these solutions is the EcoLight.

 

What Follet learned was that in a swimming pool water has to travel by means of pumps and drains, and water traveling means a lot of energy. The main goal was to design a gadget capable to harness this energy and put it to good use, which is how the EcoLight, a simple piece of tech that attaches to any of the flows linked to a pump and uses the stream of water running through them, was born.

 

The principle is as simple as it gets: the device contains a water turbine that rotates as water rushes through the pipe. The magnets in the EcoLight and the metal parts of the turbine generate electricity as they rotate, thanks to the phenomenon discovered by Faraday; the current powers up the ring LED lights as long as the pump is on and the water circulates.

 

Nothing groundbreaking and nothing too fancy, but simple physics put to work, which enabled us to extract energy from where few people thought possible. Now, it's obvious that the EcoLight will not half your energy bill, but in this case anything that's free is good; especially as you're using green energy. You can save the money for a larger pool or for more EcoLights.

 

 

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