I'm looking for a silent generator, or at least a very quiet one. There are a few quiet ones around, but in the main these devices are big and noisy and very unpopular with your neighbors, or your campground and RV'ing mates, so they're best not used except in emergencies. Even then, they're smelly and can be dangerous at the very cheap end of the market, and you have to carry a fair amount of gas, and so on.

So the Humless Generator range should have a huge market. It's expensive, at just under $500, but not that expensive compared with the competition. It doesn't provide much power, and it doesn't provide it for long, but it's small and portable and yes, it's silent.

The only problem is that it's not a generator, though it seems that US law allows it to be called such anyway. It's a lithium battery in a box, with output sockets. So it doesn't generate anything on its own, and has to be charged up when the power runs out. Is this your definition of a generator? It's not mine, I'm afraid, making this a wasted trip because that's what I was looking for.

The range has some useful qualities: the 'generators' may be recharged by solar panel, or car lighter socket, or hand-crank (15 minutes of cranking gets you enough power to light an LED), or virtually any other 12v supply. And if you're in full sunshine, the charging is fast, too. But you still need an external source of power, which of course costs extra in one way or another.

The battery itself is impressive, as it keeps a full charge for months on end and recharges very fast. If you need a quick source of around 400w for a fairly short time, and you're away from your vehicle and/or don't already have an inverter, this could be a good choice.

But off the top of my head, I can only see one situation in which this would really score, and that's somewhere out in the equatorial regions where there is constant sunshine to recharge it with an external solar panel. It's a pretty narrow niche though, and if you're looking for a genuine generator, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

Amazon has this at the "Sale Price" of $495, identical to the full retail price of $495. Buy.com was the cheapest deal I found, at $449. I couldn't find any user reviews. A lot of sites are listing this with the same promotional text, so my guess is that they haven't actually seen a real one to review.