Dawn Picken: Unplug and recharge the batteries

We could all recharge with the right adaptor, Dawn Picken writes.

I need to recharge. This should be simple, because squirrelled away in each corner of our home are chargers: three kinds for phones; three for computers; another set for the two-year-old Bose speaker I'm told is likely "munted" (munted sounds droll, better than "broken").

Then, the one-offs: for the electric air pump; e-reader; GPS watch; anti-bark collar (no shock, just vibration and noise); chargers for power tools and toothbrushes. Also, we hoard boxes of old chargers – for phones, cameras and other gadgets whose buttons attract nothing but dust. Because – you never know.

Once, when the dog chewed the cord on my old mini netbook, my husband bought a three-in-one or five-in-one convertible thingamabob (aka universal charger). It worked okay but was soon tossed into a crate when the tiny, memory-poor netbook developed the equivalent of computer Alzheimer's and forgot how to find things like the internet.

Chargers are symptomatic of modern life. Too much tech, too many systems, too little time. Even the act of recharging can cause morbidity, even mortality – fully charged phone batteries (left plugged in overnight) get stressed and lose oomph over time. Kind of like over-stretched humans. A good recharge demands unplugging – for machines and for us.

Experts say times are a-changing: newer USB chargers can re-juice nearly anything with a standard output voltage spec of 5V (though amperage matters, too). Unfortunately, they can't fix the cheap dog collar that's – wait for it – munted.

USB connectors also can't compensate for the fact you bought a knockoff Samsung charger on Trade Me and didn't know it was a fake until it failed to work (hint: the USB port and QR code are on the side of the fakes, which are made in Vietnam; the real deal has the port and code on the bottom, and it's made in China).

I could get a wireless charger – if only I knew what the Qi standard was and whether it were compatible with three different models of iPhones and Androids. That would trigger the study of video tutorials and the purchase of another device. Surely it would get munted three weeks after the warranty had lapsed. Gadgets and their accessories breed like black field crickets in the Bay of Plenty, emerging at night to hop, chirp, and blink.

A survey from website Statista in 2016 showed nearly a quarter of Kiwis used five or more connected devices like smartphones and tablets. No doubt the number's higher today, requiring the average New Zealander to own about 486 chargers, only five of which work.

We're saving useless electronic appendages because we don't want their componentry leaching into landfills. That's what I tell myself as I slide the "obsolete" box into the wardrobe.

Ever left home without a charger? No worries, buy another for the stack.

I've read you can hotwire a laptop directly to a car battery, though the manoeuvre risks frying the battery and the laptop like an egg on asphalt during a sizzling summer day. It means buying yet another thing – an inverter, which allows charging from a car's cigarette lighter to your laptop.

I prefer to stash a pen and notebook in my car. When tech's too tricky, it's comforting to return to my Luddite roots, in the spirit of English textile workers who burned down mills two centuries ago (though in fairness to the workers, they were hostile to technology for fear it would cut their wages; my techno-lag is due to apathy and reticence to continue replacing items ad infinitum). Being a laggard has advantages – early adopters were first to buy 8-tracks, Betamax and HD-DVDs.

Even those of us without a byte of nostalgia for rotary phones or fax machines yearn for days gone by, before all the plastic and metal must-haves with USB/micro-USB/pin/wide-mouth adaptors started breaking or growing legs and walking away.

Solution: a 10-in-one universal USB charger cable. For sale online, just $3.50. Maybe I'll get two.

The tangled tech web of chargers could lead me to hit the bottle. But after draining it, I'd have another glass object unacceptable to the waste removal company to whom I pay ever-increasing sums. Chateau Cardboard awaits. No power cord required.