We're off for a week in Dorset soon. It's our longest trip so far (we really are novices) and we're camping solo for the first time. So given we're going to want to keep in touch with the outside world and also keep the kids entertained we're looking into how best to keep our phones, games consoles and netbook charged up while we're away. As the site we're going to doesn't offer electric hookup (and to be honest we don't really want to start relying on that in the future) plugging them into their respective mains chargers is not an option. So I've been looking into other means of charging everything up.

The most obvious option is to charge them from the car's powerful charging capability, but this has a few issues. Firstly it means using one of the car's cigarette lighter power sockets to charge the gadget concerned. This is not a huge issue for us as the car has three of these sockets, although two of them are already claimed on a long journey (one for the sat nav and one for the portable DVD player we're going to borrow to keep the kids quiet in the back). The third socket is in the boot so not that accessible. So some juggling of device being recharged will be required. Secondly this option means buying a lead for each of the gadgets that require charging. So one for each phone, one the DS and one the netbook. Which is a bit annoying. Thirdly I am not sure whether it's a sensible option to charge something large (like the netbook) while the car engine is not running as the last thing we want to do is flatten the car's battery, which I know is quite easy to do with for example one of those mini fridges. This obviously can be handled by charging things only when the engine's running.

The next option I am considering is a solar-powered charger. This looks like a good plan, leave the charger in the sun all-day charging away (that's doomed us to a week of rain hasn't it?) then use it to charge whichever gadget has run out of juice when required. One advantage to this is that you can get a solar-powered charger that comes with a whole array of adapters for all sorts of phones and gadgets. The solar charger I have homed in on is the Freeloader Globetrotter. It combines the Freeloader Solar Charger with an additional large solar panel and a little bag to keep the little bits in. I've read a few bad reviews of the Solar Charger although the good reviews give the impression that it's great as long as you follow the instructions. However the problems seem to be concerned with the small solar panels not charging the battery pack very well, which I think would not be an issue given the large additional solar panel that is included with the Globetrotter. The additional panel is waterproof and has clips and velcro that it says allows it to be attached to rucksacks. bike panniers and tents. One problem it that as far as I can tell it won't charge the netbook as it's just not powerful enough.

The next option is a wind-up charger. There are several of these around that combine a radio, light and phone charger. The charger seems to be an add-on rather than the main reason for these devices and as such I don't think they are a real contender. Also it looks like it'd take a serious amount of winding to fully charge a phone, which is not really sensible. Despite not being a sensible option for keeping everything charged it might be useful as an emergency boost if the phone was dead and it was desperately needed. Not something I can see happening to be honest.

Talking about the emergency use scenario comes to my final option, a booster charger. That's basically a battery pack with AA or AAA batteries in that you plug into your phone to charge the phone from the batteries. Useless for keeping everything charged but might be useful if phones were dead and needed in an emergency. On the plus side for this option these things are incredibly cheap (like under £5).

So what are we going to do? Well we're going to go with the simplest option, we're going to juggle the chargers in the car. The reason is that although the solar, wind-up and emergency chargers all seem useful in their place, they are all pretty pointless when you've got a powerful and easy charging system built into the car. If we were backpacking or camping away from the car (at a festival perhaps) then the solar charger looks like the next best option. So we've ordered car chargers for all the various gadgets and phones we want to keep charged while we're away. To ease the juggling issue we've also ordered a splitter so that we can plug 3 things into a single socket. The whole lot came to about £10. Lets hope they arrive in time.