A dead battery means a loss of productivity and unhappy employees. Also, cords are messy and becoming a thing of the past. Fortunately, we have a way to keep your team and your devices charged and your work surfaces clear of cables.

The user experience is simple—just put your phone down! If you have an older iPhone (7 and below) use the white dongle. I’ve never seen the need for the black dongle.. but this is for non-apple devices that also don’t have Qi capability – more on that in a minute.

ChargeSpot is easy to install under your work-surface. Up to four transmitters can be connected to each power supply, and the chargeable work area on your surface is marked with a sticker. Conference tables, co-working spaces, workstations, private offices, hotels, airports, college campuses, coffee shops… wherever we spend time, wireless power makes a lot of sense. Even in our homes! The same technology used by ChargeSpot has been powering our toothbrushes for decades!

Wireless charging, and in our case here the Qi (or chee) standard of wireless charging, uses electromagnetic induction to power batteries. Thanks to the incredible minds of Michael Faraday and Nikola Tesla, we know that when you take a loop of wire and put it into a changing magnetic field a current in that wire is induced. So, with ChargeSpot there is a coiled wire and when we attached a power supply, alternating current, typically known as AC, it creates a changing magnetic field around the wire. Phones (or dongles) with this capability have their own coiled wire, and when placed within the changing magnetic field from the coil within ChargeSpot, the receiver’s wire gets its own alternating current. This gets converted to a direct current (DC) which then charges the battery.

But how does a battery actually work? This is where it gets really interesting.

There are three main sections of a battery, the anode on the negative side, the cathode on the positive side, and the electrolyte in the middle. When your battery is charged, there is an unbalance of electrons on the negative side of the battery. However, the electrons would prefer to be balanced in a state of equilibrium. As your phone requires power, your battery slowly releases electrons from one side to the other—creating electricity as the electrons move. When we add our DC charge, a charge flowing in one direction, we send the electrons back in the other direction to their useful, charged state and the cycle continues.

This is how we can power a phone without any transfer of electrons we’re basically just rearranging the electrons that are already in the battery so that they can be used again!

What’s even more exciting is that as this technology improves we might soon be able to charge our tablets, laptops and larger electronic devices through this same technology! Electric cars like Tesla are propelling these advancements faster than ever before.

If you think that ChargeSpot might be beneficial to your workspace, reach out to us today!