Our first product, GravityLight, enables people to break free from the economic, health and environmental hazards of kerosene by providing affordable, reliable light, anytime.
This approach led Martin and Jim to create GravityLight. Faced with the charity SolarAid’s challenge to create a low-cost LED lantern to replace damaging & ubiquitous kerosene lamps, Martin & Jim quickly realized the need to look beyond solar and battery power.
Starting from the users’ perspective, they took a different approach to benchmarking the amount of power and light needed asking “is it better than a kerosene lamp?” This led them to explore what much lower levels of power could deliver.
GravityLight only generates a deciwatt or two of power but has a superior light to the open-wick kerosene lamps used by those without electricity, as well as being significantly more sustainable, safe and healthy. With no running costs, a GravityLight would pay for itself within a few months, or even weeks, freeing people from fuel poverty and the increasing cost of kerosene.
LEDs continue to rapidly increase their lumens per watt. This has huge implications for low cost, off grid lighting as well as computing and communication equipment. GravityLight continues to apply these developments in order to do more with less.
Martin Riddiford has been working in product design consultancy for 30 years. Martin’s role as the technical director of the company ensures that he is fundamentally involved in all key aspects of development work across all projects and his intuitive engineering ability and broad design expertise provides a progressive and inspiring climate within which the team of 30 employees thrive.
Co-inventor of GravityLight; Jim loves a challenge, looking at problems in a different way and reconsidering the ground rules. Inspired by the question of how to do more with less energy, whilst balancing performance, cost and quality, he’s dedicated to developing GravityLight and Deciwatt’s future range of devices.
