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SALT LAKE CITY — If you’ve ever struggled to start a fire in less-than-ideal conditions, a Utah team’s new plasma lighter could make things easier.
Power Practical, the Salt Lake City-based team behind the Luminoodle and PowerPot, recently released two plasma lighters called the Sparkr and Sparkr Mini on Kickstarter. Instead of a normal flame, plasma lighters spark fires by creating an arc of electricity between two points on the devices.
While there are other plasma lighters available on the market, Power Practical’s director of sales Wafiq Ali said the team decided to build their own to improve safety. Since other plasma lighters use a traditional metal body, users are sometimes shocked by the electricity because it can spark onto the metal body in windy conditions.
“That was a terrible user experience I had personally, so we built ours from the ground up,” Ali said. “We took the Zippo-style, but made it a high-temperature plastic material. It will feel rubbery, almost, and the electric sparks won’t couple with it.”
Like all of Power Practical’s products, both Sparkr models are USB rechargeable. The larger Sparkr doubles as a 150-lumen flashlight that can hang as a lantern, while the smaller Sparkr mini includes a 15-lumen light and looks more like a traditional, pocket-sized lighter.
There are about nine people — all University of Utah alumni — on the Power Practical team, which recently expanded its office near West High School. The idea for Sparkr came from the company’s engineers, who Ali described as being the team’s “crazy scientists.”
They built a 6-foot Tesla coil, which creates large sparks and makes music, in a garage as a personal side-project. They enjoyed the project so much that they even ended up taking the coil to a music festival to play the “Star Wars” theme song.
The plasma lighter uses the same concept, a spark between two points, so Power Practical’s team thought it would fun for them and useful for customers to improve the technology.
This is the seventh time Power Practical has successfully used Kickstarter to launch a new product. The Sparkr campaign, which runs through Dec. 7, had raised more than $218,000 as of Monday morning. When the team launched its Luminoodle sequel in March, it only took two hours to pass its funding goal.
Ali attributes some of the company's success to the 100-or-so loyal customers who have signed up to be part of a product influence group. The PIGs, as the team calls group members, help pick which ideas Power Practical pursues. They even selected the two color options — silver and black — available for the Sparkr.
“We were born on Kickstarter,” Ali said. “We’re a crowdfunding company, so now we’re just crowdsourcing the stuff people want to see."
