Here at FactoryTwoFour, we love the Power Practical Team. Their products continue to push new bounds and make our lives just a bit better. We’ve taken a look at their Practical Meter and the Luminoodle, and really dug both. Kickstarter products are always a dicy proposition, and that’s part of the fun, but Power Practical has repeatedly used the crowdfunding site not to raise funds but to gauge interest. They have the resources to build whatever they want, but they use Kickstarter to verify if the public indeed wants what they can build. This is the process that gave us the Luminoodle flexible LED light rope, and now Power Practical has sent us the Luminoodle XL Plus to kick around.
Packing all the features we liked before (the cool lantern mode, the easy-clean body) the XL Plus brings with it 2 crucial improvements that we were begging for last time we looked at this product. Firstly, the Plus ships with it’s own battery rather than relying on you to supply the USB power source of your choice. Sure, most outdoor enthusiasts have several battery packs laying around (I know we do!), but still I want to open a product and have everything it needs to work right there in the box! Much more importantly, the Plus now includes 3 additional magnets that allow you to hang the strand in almost any configuration. Let me explain…
The last Luminoodle we got came with two magnets – one on each extreme of its 5ft. This was convenient if you wanted to hang it up, but only if you wanted to do so in a straight line. Now with three additional magnets, each slidable down the length of the strand, allow for some really great applications. Our favorite was in the engine bay of our project car. With this 10ft rope light, we were able to completely surround the engine bay rather than a single directional light source. This made finding parts and adjusting connections a breeze, and is going to quickly become a feature I can’t remember how I lived without it.
The Luminoodle XL Plus picks up where its predecessor left off and runs it all the way to the goal line. This is the perfect trifecta of a great working product, a great looking product, and a great startup company that only you are cool enough to know about. All kudos to the Power Practical team, they are on a run and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
