POWER TRIP

WASILLA — Chris Hunter looks the part of the mad inventor.

He showed up to a Tuesday afternoon meeting wearing wraparound, blue-tinted sunglasses and camouflage pants with his hair jutting every which way. But what he held in his hand — actually, both hands — was probably the best indication of his inventing bona fides.

“Pay to the order of Chris Hunter,” the oversize novelty check reads. The amount? $10,000.

Hunter won that prize during last year’s first Arctic Innovations Competition. The winning idea was designed for people who live off the electrical grid and rely on batteries to store electricity.

“It extends the life of lead-acid batteries 10-fold,” he said.

How it does that is kind of technical and complex. Perhaps it’s best just to listen to how Hunter came up with the idea one night at home in Wasilla.

“It all started in a power outage during our nice springtime hurricanes,” Hunter said.

When the power went out, Hunter went out to the garage and started grabbing batteries and testing them. One he tested was perfect when switched on but died soon after. He started flipping the tester on and off and noticed that spike of electricity kept coming back.

He figured if an essentially dead battery can put out that much juice, a device to “spike-discharge” a charged-up battery while keeping current to appliances constant could be very useful to off-grid power users.

Hunter said he’s gone through a number of iterations of the device. It took more than a dozen before he got one that worked. Size-wise, that first working prototype was somewhere between a pack of cigarettes and a paperback novel. His latest, Hunter said, is smaller than a credit card.

And how did he come by his knowledge? Hunter said his dad was an engineer, but he’s not.

“I am not an official engineering student. Never have been,” he said.

And he’s not done yet. On the heels of his win at the innovation competition Hunter has founded a company, ArcticTek.

He’s got ideas to draw heat and power from ambient air, and a number of others, the gist of which can be found at the company’s website, arctictek.com. Most of his time lately has been spent building an electric car of his own design. In fact, he plowed every penny of the $10,000 he won for his battery gadget into the project.

It isn’t a glorified golf cart, either. Hunter estimates his design will pump out 250 horsepower.

“We plan to go out to the drag strip in Palmer and burn some rubber and kick some gas,” he said.

The car itself, he said, is a 1993 Geo Storm he bought for $700. He’s already pulled out a whole pile of things he doesn’t need, including, obviously, the engine block. And the design he hopes will be a useful one. The plan is to have the batteries and the motor all sit in one module that can be pulled out and replaced if, for whatever reason, the motor gives out.

He hopes that will change a dubious trend in the car industry. Nowadays, he said, often “it costs less to replace the car than it does to fix it.”

He said building the car has been something of an odyssey during which he’s pulled apart and reconstructed the engine countless times. Which brings us to Hunter’s advice for anyone thinking of following in his path.

“You have to fail. You cannot succeed without failure. You have no measure of success without failure,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.