Hard drive
Gooloo GT6000 jump-starter
Price: £179.99
I’ve kept an emergency jump-starter in my car ever since a gruelling incident in north London in 2016 when my car and mobile phone both died within minutes of each other, and getting help involved filling out a form to join Hendon library (a long story best left untold). Had I owned this particular device by Chinese car-tech firm Gooloo, I wouldn’t have had to loiter miserably by the A41 for hours – regardless of the size of my car’s engine. Its current (800A standard, 6,000A peak) is sufficient to jump-start boats, RVs, tractors and anything up to a 12-litre diesel engine, while its near-100W power bank can properly charge flagging smartphones and laptops. At around 23cm x 10cm x 8cm, it’s not much larger than my existing, comparatively feeble starter.
The packaging boasts 10 smart safety features, although most of them you’d take as read, such as short-circuit, overload and overcharge protection. But as someone who’s easily rattled in a crisis (and a dead battery counts as a crisis in my cossetted world), I appreciated the instructions being printed on the underside of the unit, the clearly labelled connectors (all at one end) and the 400-lumen flashlight. There’s a keyed connector for the jump cables so they only plug in one way, and reverse polarity protection so you can’t misattach the clamps.
