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If you’re asking yourself, “How do I choose a battery, or portable power station for camping?” You’ve come to the right place. When we first became curious about portable power stations, we had no idea what we needed. We didn’t even know what we should ask. “How do I choose the right battery, or portable power station for me?”, we asked.
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, you’ve come to the right place.
Table of Contents (Choosing a Portable Power Station)
- Batteries: Why Should We Trust You?
- Batteries: How do I Know How Much Power I Need?
- Batteries: Capacity
- Batteries: Chemistry
- Batteries: Expandability
- Batteries: Solar Panels
- Batteries: App Connectivity
- Brands And Products We Like
- Conclusion
There are important things to consider when thinking about how to choose your camping Battery, or portable power station. When we started looking, we were pretty quickly overwhelmed – we didn’t know the terms, or what they meant in practical, everyday usage.
We were thinking something like: “We think we’d like a battery, but how do I choose a battery, or portable power station?”
What are Some good questions to ask about Batteries: Portable Power Stations?
That’s a big question, and when we started, we didn’t even know what questions to ask. To put it in a nutshell, here’s what we learned:
When considering a battery or portable power station we learned that you have to think about factors like brand, capacity (how much power can be stored), the unit’s charging time (the time it takes to charge completely – sometimes that could make a difference to some people), output capability (how much power can be used at any given time), the available output options (Both DC -USB, USB-C – and AC – appliances that you’d plug into the wall at home), chemistry (We know that’s not exactly sexy, but you’d be surprised how important it is to us), expandability (the ability to add extra batteries), charging capability (both AC -wall socket- and solar), app connectivity (many units have an app you can use on your phone to control the unit – less valuable for us, truth be told, but this ain’t about us, and YMMV), and of course, cost.
Why Should I Trust You Loonies with Batteries?
Good question. If you’ve read any of our articles or blog pages, you know that we call balls and strikes. We got interested in batteries a few years ago and were a little frustrated with the information that we found.
What we found, after what we considered to be quite a bit of research, was a little frustrating. Either we needed a PhD in electrical engineering to follow along, or it didn’t come close to answering our questions.
What we needed was a Goldilocks solution. Right in the sweet spot.
Easier said than done, our long-suffering friends. Easier said than done.
In any event, we’ve come a long way and learned a lot, and we’ve decided to try to share what we’ve learned with our friends and readers, in a sincere effort to be useful. Well, we figured, what the hell?
Marty McFly:
What about all that talk about screwing up future events, the space-time continuum?Dr. Emmett Brown:
Back to the Future 1985 Film
Well, I figured, what the hell.
So, long story short, for the past few years, we have been studying and researching batteries or portable power stations and we’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to.
Of course, we’re not the one-stop-shop of battery research, and it wouldn’t hurt you to look elsewhere, but we’d love to end your search right here and now with what we believe is good, accessible information. That is what we honestly hope to do.
So, let’s jump on in. (See what we did, there? Heh, heh, heh. “Jump”.)
How Much Power Do I Need?
That’s another great question. Our friend Dave used to make commercials for people. They’d inevitably ask, “How much is this gonna cost?”, to which Dave would say “How deep is a hole?”, or “How long is a rope?”.
Now, you may think that those are not useful questions. But, if that’s what you thought, you’d be wrong. What he meant is that everyone’s needs are going to be different. We can’t tell you exactly how much rope you’re gonna need. How the hell should we know? It would be dumb, at best, and dishonest at worst, if we pretended otherwise.
If we’re gonna be at all useful, we need to know exactly what the rope or hole is gonna be used for. The right tool for the job, and so forth. Only you know that.
What we can do is help you to figure out how much battery, or portable power station you need, as long as you’re prepared to do a little back-of-the-napkin math.
Let’s take a simple example: We’d like to charge an iPhone.
How Do We Calculate Our Device’s Needs?
Our iPhone’s charger has a teeny-tiny font on it. It says 20W. That means 20 Watts. It’s pretty hard to see. It’s just to the left of the left prong. Almost all electrical devices will list the amount of power that they need. Watts measure the amount of power your device needs in a second of use. Watts are easy, but by themselves? Not so useful. To get information we can use we need to find the Watt hours:
Watts X time = Watt hours. (W X time of use = Wh.)
Relax. It’s not that hard.
Let’s say our phone takes 2 hours to charge. That’s our time. (We don’t even think you’re gonna need the napkin for this one.)
20 watts(W) X 2 hours = 40 watt hours. (Wh)
So, we’re gonna need at least 40Wh to completely charge that iPhone. That’s the amount of Wh that will come out of the battery or portable power station. So, if for example, we have a battery that is rated for 529Wh, we’re gonna need 40 of those watt hours to charge our phone.
(So now we have one fully charged phone, and 489Wh left over for other stuff. It’s not that difficult. 529-40 = 489Wh left. For some reason that’s never been made clear to us, some people like to make this more complicated than it needs to be.)
By the way, it may be tricky to find your device’s power needs. As we said, usually it’s on the device itself; but If you can’t find it, it’ll be in the manual. If it’s not in the manual, there’s a good chance you can find a table of power needs for common appliances online. Or, if for whatever reason you can’t get access to the web you can figure it out like so:
Batteries: Watt’s Law:
We don’t want to get too far into the weeds, but this is important: Watt’s Law. Stated simply, it’s :
Watts = Amps X Volts. (Sometimes expressed as Power = I X V.)
(“Hey!”, we hear you shout. “Why the heck is Amps expressed as a capital I?” This is not gonna be on the test, but we had the same question. It comes from a French phrase from the 1800s, “Intensité du courant”, which loosely translates as “The intensity of the current”. You’re welcome.)
Let’s take a real-world example:
Our battery charger for our camera takes 100 -200 Volts of input. (That’s the AC from the wall socket. Where we are, it’s 120 V.) The charger changes that down and outputs 4.7 V to charge the battery. We didn’t know that at first, because our battery charger didn’t list the Volts. It only lists mA. It says “200 mA”. This isn’t a difficult idea, but it’s often not easy to find a simple explanation. Stick with us.
Sometimes we talk about big numbers as multiples of smaller numbers. For example, your house measures electricity in Kilo-watt hours. That’s a gi-normous amount of power. (That’s the technical term of art.) But we’re talking about portable power stations, here. We don’t want to run The Rolling Stones live stage. We digress.
The point is: One kilowatt hour is 1000Wh. (1KWh = 1000Wh) It’s easier to wrangle the numbers if they’re smaller.
Similarly, a milliampere (also spoken of as a milliamp or mA) is 1/1000 of an Ampere. We’ll call ’em Amps (A, forget about the French stuff.) An Amp (ampere) is the basic unit for measuring electrical current.
To get the Amps, the formula is:
mA (milliAmps) / 1000 = Amps. (Not to toot our own horn, but, we’re like, experts at Google.)
If we divide 200mA by 1000 we get .2. (You can go ahead and use a calculator for that one. No sense in ruining a perfectly good napkin, and you’re gonna need it. Tonight’s chili night.)
Now, if you can recall your elementary school math, (we’re Canadians, that’s how we knew about Intensité du courant) you’ll agree with us that if Watts = Amps X Volts, that must mean that Amps = Watts divided by Volts, right? Of course it is. (2 X 3 = 6, 6 / 3 = 2, and 6 / 2 = 3.) So if we get any two of these, we can figure out the third.
If you can’t find the information on your device, or it’s too small to read, there are lots of appliance power lists on the web. Here is one appliance power list.
Figuring Watts (W) and Total Watt Hours (Wh):
Now, with our camera charger, we’ve got the volts (4.7V) and we’ve got the amps (.2A). Taking Watt’s Law, we can figure out the Watts. Cool, huh? So, we take the Amps (.2) and multiply it by the Volts (4.7) and we get the watts. (.94W) Walla. (Bows with a flourish.)
Okay. Good to know. But, that’s just like a snapshot. Bam. A snap of the fingers. A blink of an eye. That’s not gonna charge our battery. Not even a single percent. Not that useful. But put a pin in that, we’ll come back to it later. (Later it’s gonna come in useful to know when we’re trying to decide how much maximum battery capacity we need. Right now, it’s just gonna confuse us, and that’s not at all helpful.)
For now, we’re just gonna measure power over time. Hang on, hang on. It’s important. We’re getting there.
But back to the phone:
Once again, we were about to figure out the amount of power needed for 2 hours of charging time. So, we used this formula: Power (watts) X Time of use:
20W X 2 hours = 40Wh. (Wh = watt hours.)
(Ok. We see your eyes glazing over. – Think of a light bulb. Let’s say it’s 40 watts. It says so right on it. At any given moment, it needs 40 watts to do its job. If we use it for an hour, that’s 40-watt hours.) Additionally, if we used it for 2 hours, it would be 80Wh. We bet your napkin is still untouched. Are we right?
AND…(drumroll, please) Here’s the math: (Battery capacity in Watt hours divided by your Wh needs. Let’s say our battery or portable power station’s rated capacity is 1000Wh.)
1000Wh/40Wh = 25.
As a matter of fact, if we take our hypothetical 1000Wh portable power station, we could charge that phone 25 times. That’s it.
It’s no more complicated than that. The numbers will change, but the formula won’t, so you just scale up or down as needed. ( Fun Fact: We sometimes use a calculator. You can too. We have one on our iPhone. Dead convenient.)
Once again, you likely didn’t need to refer to the napkin. Great. Let’s really get fancy. Say we want to use another device. We have our device, but we can’t find the wattage. It happens. Most devices have their power needs marked on them somewhere. (Remember the light bulb?) But, sometimes it’s hard to (a) find them, or (b) read them. (Our iPhone charger falls into that category.) Fire up Google and type “Average power consumption for appliances”. (We listed one up above. )
Batteries: Let There Be Light!
Additionally, we can simply google a particular appliance for power needs. Let’s choose one, and add it in. For this example, we’ll use an LED lantern. Google says it needs 5W.
Next, we have to consider how long we’ll need it. We’ll just call that time. Let’s say we’ll probably use it for 4-5 hours. Once again, for the purposes of this blog, let’s say 5, for simplicity’s sake. (And to keep that pristine napkin pristine!) It uses 5W.
We want to use it at the same time as our phone is charging, at night. So, we need to add the total power requirements together. We use the same basic formula (wattage multiplied by time.)
In our example – 5W X 5 hours = 25Wh. (Watt hours) Add in the phone (40Wh) and we’re gonna need 65Wh to run them both at the same time. That’s not so bad, right? (phone – 40Wh + lantern – 25Wh =65Wh.)
And so how is that napkin? Is it still looking okay? Great.
Batteries: Hey, What About The Camera Charger, You Loons?
Oh, you remembered that. Yes. Well, we’re gonna need that napkin.
So we’ve got the iPhone (40Wh), and the lantern (25Wh), and if you recall correctly, to charge the camera battery, we need to calculate the watt hours. (Wh) So we take our watts that we worked out earlier, (.94W) and we multiply by the time. It usually takes about 5 hours to fully charge. (It’s an antique.) So we multiply the watts by the time.
.94 x 5 = 4.7Wh. (Watts X hours = Watt hours). (Yeah, we used the calculator for that one too. We don’t mind fractions, especially when it comes to pizza, but decimal points? See ya. “Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya“.)
Now, here’s where the rubber meets the road:
- iPhone = 40Wh
- Camera Charger = 4.7Wh
- LED Lamp = 25Wh
It’s decision time. With our hypothetical 1000 Wh portable power station, we can charge the iPhone 25 times. (1000 / 40 = 25.) Or we can charge the camera battery 212.765957 times. (1000/ 4.7 = 213 -We’re just gonna round that up to 213.) Or we can run the lamp for 40 hours. But that’s not usually how it works for people.
Back to the real world:
Let’s say we want to charge the iPhone twice on a weekend camping trip. (Friday and Saturday nights, break camp, and load out Sunday after brunch.) Time (2 nights) X Watt-hours (40Wh) = 80Wh. That’s the phone sorted. (This is just an example. We can’t imagine camping and using the whole battery in two days.)
The camera has to be charged likely 3 or 4 times. That, sadly, actually is true. This is especially true if we’re taking video. (It’s really time for a new battery, this is embarrassing. We think we’ll get one right now. It’s a replacement battery – we told you it was an antique – called the GD Living Replacement Battery for Nikon EN-EL10 Olympus LI-40B )
(This reminds us that we need to write a blog on battery life and degradation, though we’ll talk a little about “cycles” when we get to the chemistry section.) But since we’re here anyway, let’s take a look at this sucker: Li-ion means Lithium-ion which is the type of battery we need for our camera. As we’ve said, it’s an antique, and there are newer battery technologies that will come with cameras that aren’t 20 years old. There are good reasons to use this Li-ion battery – Our big reason is that this one is compatible with this camera – Which still works great!
But, there are good reasons not to use this older battery technology. (We’ll talk about that in the chemistry section, too.) We digress.
If you look at this battery, you can see it’s 1200mAh ( remember? That’s the power in milliAmpere hours), 3.7Volts, and 4.4 Wh. Cool! Our old one doesn’t list all that information. Awesome.
Look at you! You’ve learned a lot already, haven’t you? Give yourself a little pat on the back.)
Anyway, back to our current battery. (Ha! See what we did there? Current? Ah hahaaha. Ahem. Sorry.)
So let’s say we’ll charge it 4 times. (YOLO).
4.7Wh X 4 = 18.8Wh. (Round that up to 20Wh. Always round up when you are calculating power consumption.)
(It’s the same formula. Watt hours X time will give us the total Wh we need.)
Next, the lamp. We’ll likely run the lamp for about 5 hours for 2 nights. That’s 10 hours time. ( It’s often a good idea to build in a little extra, just because.) So that’s 25Wh x 2 nights. 50Wh. Let’s add 10% because we might stay up late one night. (50 x 1.1 = 55Wh. If you’ve ever eaten at a restaurant, you can probably do that in your head. Except you should leave 15% at the restaurant. 10% + half again.)
Add ’em all up and Bob’s Yer Uncle, right?
iPhone | 80Wh |
Camera | 20Wh |
LED Lamp | 55Wh |
Total | 155Wh |
Well, no. Not yet.
One other thing we like to do, just for yucks, is add another 10% to the total. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to wear a life jacket in a canoe, either. But, because “One just never knows”, ask yourself what your mother would have you do.
If you listen to your mother, the easiest way to do that is to multiply our total (155Wh) by 1.1, which in this case, gives us 170.5Wh. Let’s say 171Wh. (You could probably do that in your head, too, but there’s no shame in using a calculator.)
We’re not out of the woods, yet. We need to talk about a few other things when estimating our battery needs: One thing is Surge power.
Batteries: Surge (or Peak) Power:
Any electrical appliance with a motor requires a little extra juice when it’s first fired up to start up said motor. After (at most) a few seconds it will drop back down to the power it needs to run, (continuous W) but you need to consider that initial surge because if you don’t have the juice to cover it, that’s not good.
Let’s say we have a fan. We check the manual to find out. (Always check the manual. Just do it. Save yourself the grief.) The continuous power is 50W, but the surge power is 60W. (Watts, not Wh, it’s just a second, right?)
So, we need to factor that in. If we’re going to charge the phone and the camera, have the lantern on, and run the fan at the same time, We have to do a little more math.
First things first. Time. We reckon we’ll run the fan about 8 hours, but for 2 nights. So we’re at 16 hours. The fan needs 50W so we have to multiply time by power. (16 X 50W = 800 Wh) Add that to our total (150 Wh + 800Wh = 950 Wh.) Add the surge power. 950Wh + 20 = 970Wh. (Recall that the fan needs 50wh to run, and an extra 10W for the surge, but we’re gonna start it up twice.)
Uh- oh. We’re either gonna need more power, or lower our expectations. Relax. That’s why we’re doing all this math.
In our experience, more power is always the best solution, because you’d be surprised how often you want to power something else. Higher capacity is almost always better, because these portable power stations are not cheap, and you don’t want to end up buying two when one makes more sense. We like to spend a little more to get a product that will do more.
We’ve found it cheaper in the long run. Of course, that’s just us.
For now, we’re either gonna need a little more capacity, or learn to live without some of our devices. Say we drop the fan. We’re back at 150Wh and Bob’s our Mother’s Brother, again. (Or, we could just run the fan on one night, 400Wh + 60W surge. Or, we could run the fan for a shorter time both nights.)
We’re pretty confident that you could do your own math, by now.
But, let’s stick with the one night. 150Wh + 460Wh = 610. We’d still be okay.
Batteries: Output Level:
We also need to consider the rate at which to run our battery. Like anything else, you don’t want to run it at the top of its possible output. That’s not at all good for the battery. (Batteries are our friends. Don’t you want to be kind to your friends?) Usually, a good rule of thumb is to run at between 50 – 70% of your battery’s rated output capacity. (You can figure that by multiplying rated capacity by .5 – .7 respectively.) Most batteries or portable power stations will show a read-out of how much power they are serving up at a given time, but we’ve found that it’s good to work this out ahead of time.
Since half of 1000 is 500, and 70% is 700Wh, at 610Wh we fit nicely into that range. But wait. Remember we said “theoretical” capacity?
Batteries: Theoretical Vs Usable Power:
Here’s the skinny on that: portable power stations never make their full-rated capacity available to us. As a general rule, we only have access to 80-85% of the stated capacity that is usable.
This isn’t tricky marketing or anything underhanded. All batteries have a battery management system, (BMS) which protects them from damage. And so some power is reserved for that. In addition, the conversion process (DC to AC) can be quite lossy, so we have to do a little more math. (Batteries store power as DC, which is what your laptop, tablet, camera, or phone batteries use. If you charge them in the house, you need a “brick” or adaptor that will adapt the AC to DC so it can be stored in the battery of your phone or tablet.
Since all batteries are DC, all of those devices can use the DC straight out of your battery, or portable power station. You’ll use the USB, USB-C or DC 5521 ports to charge those things. (You know all of those things. USB is a memory stick, or mouse input to your computer. USB-C is just a fancier USB protocol that is more efficient than it’s older brother. If you’ve ever used a stomp box for your guitar, you know what a DC 5521 port is. There are other types of input ports, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.)
In any event, our camera is old, so we need the charger. USB takes forever! The charger plugs into the wall socket. (That means our portable power station needs to output AC, which is what comes out of the wall socket. This means we have to change the power. DC to AC requires an inverter . I’m doing the same thing right now, only in reverse, with my magsafe brick which changes the AC power from the wall to DC power for this MacBook. AC to DC requires a converter. Don’t worry. That’s not gonna be on the test. It could make you the hero of trivia night, though.)
If you want to run any appliance that you would plug into the wall in a house, that power has to be AC. Portable power stations are the opposite. They will use an inverter to change that power from DC to AC, but the process is lossy – Long story short: We’re not going to have access to 100% of that rated capacity.)
In general, we will only have access to 80 – 85% of the rated capacity. It may be a little more, it may be a little less, but that’s in the ballpark.
Got your napkin? We take the capacity (let’s just say 1000Wh) and multiply by 0.80 which will give us 800Wh. That’s our usability. That’s 80%, which is a good safe number for us. 50% of 800Wh is 400, and 70% is 560Wh. At our needs of 610Wh, we’re gonna need more battery. (This is just how you figure things out. Be safe. Much better to know that you need more battery now.)
To find out exactly how much rated capacity we need, we’ll have to take our needs of 610Wh (usable) and multiply by 1.2 to get 732Wh. That gives us the minimum power capacity we need. (which will give us that 80% we can expect to use due to the BMS and lossy conversion. We’re pretty close to the end of the math to find the rated capacity of our needs.)
Remember that we want to run between 50% and 70% to preserve our battery life. We like to just double our needs. It’s easy and effective. 732 x 2 = 1464Wh is what we need for rated capacity.
(Some folks like to add 10% to be safe. We’re folks like that.)
So, for us, we’d take our 1464Wh and multiply it by 1.1.
Our calculator tells us that’s 1610.4Wh. (Since we’ve already factored in for margin of error, we’re just going to look for a battery or portable power station with a rated capacity of at least 1610Wh.
As long as you remember that rated capacity has to be multiplied by .8 to get to 80%.
1610 X .8 = 1288Wh.
That’s your usability.
Multiply that by .5 to get 50%, and by .7 to get to 70%. Stay in that range, and you’ll be fine.
We’ve already started thinking about getting a drone and a goPro. (See Expandability.)
Batteries: Capacity:
Now that we know how to figure out how much battery we need, it’s time to talk about capacity. As you probably have guessed, capacity refers to the amount of power in Wh we can store in our Portable Power Station.
So, if you’ve looked at some Portable Power Stations you know that there is a relationship between capacity and price. Obviously, more capacity is better. But there is also a relationship between capacity and weight. As you may know, Gentle Reader, we are primarily interested in camping. We aren’t really excited about schlepping a heavy box around just to charge up a couple of camera batteries, and phones.
The good news is that there absolutely is a sweet spot. Quite a few companies offer a great product that you actually can use. There are a lot of products with a smaller capacity that are new for 2024. This STORCUBE Portable Power Station S600M – is a 600W, 529Wh LiFePO4 Battery Backup w/ 3 Pure Sine Wave AC Outlets (1000W Peak), 100W Type-C, (USB-C). This is an example of a new company that has really ticked a lot of boxes for us.
True, it’s not a lot of power. It’s not enough for our example. Here is something that is good to know:
We were surprised to see the Pure Sine Wave Inverter. Now, don’t get us wrong, these are great. What they do is a really good job of mimicking the smooth flow of your AC wall socket, but the main benefit is for sophisticated, sensitive items like medical equipment. We generally don’t go camping with stuff like that. That’s a feature designed for home emergencies. We’re not sure how much of a benefit this would provide for our examples. So it adds cost, but no benefit for us.
So you have to weigh that in.
Someone who is certain that their needs would be just cameras and phones could be very happy with a cheaper device (or a lot more power) where you don’t necessarily need to pay for a feature like that. (We can’t help you with everything, but we can tell you that we’d opt for more power. Every time.)
Still, that’s the right portable power station for someone!
The point is that there are a lot of great choices. We’ll list some below.
Batteries: Chemistry:
There are basically two kinds of chemistry used in modern batteries: Lithium – Ion (Li-ion – Remember the camera battery?) and Lithium Iron Phosphate. (That kind of battery is often referred to as a “LiFePO4” battery. If you remember your periodic table, you can probably see why. The Storcube above has a LiFePO4 battery at it’s core.)
Lithium – Ion breaks down into three separate flavours of metals: lithium nickel oxide, lithium manganese oxide (LMO), and lithium cobalt oxide (LiCoO2). These have a larger energy density, and are often slightly lighter. They are an older technology, and are often cheaper. We have concerns about how nickel is sourced, and also cobalt. Manganese seems okay. They also have a life span of about 500-800 cycles. (A single cycle is a full charge – discharge. In practice, this means 100% down to about 20%. We try not to run any batteries down below 20% – once again, it’s not good for the battery. You probably know this, you get a nag message when your phone gets down to 20%, right? It’s the same principle.)
The LiFePO4 batteries are usually rated for 3000-4000 cycles or about 6 X longer and are generally agreed to be a superior technology.
We’ve actually done kind of a deep dive into chemistry with our article on Batteries: LiFePO4 vs Lithium – Ion.
We certainly did our best to make it readable and informative. We hope you enjoy it and find it useful.
Expandability:
In years past we didn’t give enough thought to expandability. We confess. We’ve since come to reconsider. This is the reason why: If you have the option for expandability then you can add batteries. That means more capacity. If you don’t, then if you decide you need more capacity, (and this happens more often than you might imagine,) you have to start over with a new Portable Power Station that does have the option for expansion. It’s just a great idea to have it as an option, and if the cost is not prohibitive we like the idea, even if you don’t think you’ll use it. We feel the same way about solar panel inputs. (Once again, we have an article on solar power, and choosing the right panels for your portable power station. We’d be happy if you found that useful, too.)
We prefer the options unless the cost is prohibitive. Even then, you might save a lot of money in the long run by spending a little more in the short term.
In addition, the cost of batteries is falling every year. Just be careful with the compatibility. Some companies restrict you to their products. (This is especially true if you’re thinking about Solar panels, although you can often find adaptor cables. It’s nice when everything just plays nice right out of the box. Just a heads-up.)
Again, read your manual carefully. (Most manuals are online, so you can read about devices you might like before you commit.)
Still, we’re big believers in the “better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.” YMMV.
Maximum Solar Input:
Here’s another option that we would rather have than not. When we first started to look at Portable Power Stations, we thought Solar? Meh. Who needs it? We’ll just plug it into the wall and charge it that way. And that’s a great way to go. It’s reliable and quicker. But, if you ever have a power outage of more than a few hours, it’s a great option to have another way to charge your portable power station. (We live in the land of typhoons, landslides, earthquakes, and tsunamis, so it makes sense to us. We also have bottled water, a camping stove and oh, about 6 months worth of ramen.)
Solar panels are becoming much more affordable and we make the same argument we made for the expandability. It can be very useful in time of need.
Just bear in mind that your panels output should match pretty closely to portable power station’s Max power input.
As with the expandability, you have to check your manual carefully for compatibility so as to not limit your choices. Once again, it’s cool to have it, even if you never use it. And you never know. We’ll do an article on Solar Panels, too.
App Connectivity:
More and more manufacturers are offering apps for your smartphone. For us, it’s nice to have, and certain apps for Portable Power Stations offer some useful features. One app we saw was kind of cool in that it allowed more control over the input rate which could be useful. For example, in a power outage in bad weather where you couldn’t use solar, you could adjust the flow down to the rate output of a gasoline generator. But other than that, it’s difficult to imagine how it would really improve our experience. That’s just us, though. We’d rather have more capacity than the app.
On the other hand, if it doesn’t cost that much, it probably falls into the “better to have it than not.” Most of the Portable Power Stations we’ve seen have pretty useable interfaces, but often the apps provide more options.
Some Companies (And Products) We Like:
In Conclusion:
When we started on this journey of research, we focused on the specific uses for camping. It’s great to have a portable power station to charge your phones and your camera. But as we got more interested in the possibilities we began to see the practical advantages of these units. We are currently intrigued by the possibilities of solar. The idea of power from the sun is fascinating to us.
If you have any questions, or we got something wrong, drop us a line.
Some Other Power Related Articles:
- Batteries: LiFePO4 vs Lithium – Ion.
- Our Latest Articles
Special Portable Power Station Deals For Lone Loon Song Readers:
From time to time, we will have the opportunity to pass along great deals from companies we like. This is one of those times.
Bluetti AC500 Series Regular Price: $4799 Pre-Prime Day Price: $3325 Discount Code: power5 for an additional 5% off |  |
Bluetti AC300+2*B300 Regular Price: $5298 Pre-Prime Day Price: $4198 Discount Code: AFF100 for an additional $100 off |  |
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Here are our recommended deals for the US region (Aug 12th – Aug 25th):
Anker SOLIX F3800 3840Wh | 6000W
Discount: 33% off
Landing Page: https://www.anker.com/products/a1790
Anker SOLIX F2000 2048Wh Portable Power Station
Discount: 40% off
Landing Page: https://www.anker.com/products/a1780
Anker SOLIX F2000 Solar Generator + 400W Solar Panel
Discount: 45% OFF
Landing Page: https://www.anker.com/products/b178011g
Anker SOLIX C1000 Portable Power Station 1056Wh | 1800W
Discount: 45% OFF
Landing Page: https://www.anker.com/products/a1761
Anker EverFrost Portable Cooler 30 with 299Wh Battery
Discount: 38% OFF
Landing Page: https://www.anker.com/products/a17a0
