#Portable power station portable
A rugged and portable design: We assessed the quality of each portable power station’s exterior materials, as well as any extra features like wheels or handles.Anything heavier than that can be hard to load and unload from a car, or to carry around a house in a blackout. But even so, we set a weight limit at 50 pounds, a heft that one (strong) person or two people could reasonably carry. A maximum weight of 50 pounds: Most portable power stations are too big and heavy for the average person to carry them for long distances on foot.Lower outputs are fine for charging phones and most other electronics, but if you want to charge a few devices at a time (especially if one is a high-powered device like a laptop), you need 100 W or more. An output rating of at least 200 W: To separate the portable power stations from their smaller, less powerful counterparts ( USB power banks and portable laptop chargers) we required each of our main and budget contenders to be rated for at least 200 W, and we wanted the lightweight (under 5 pounds) contenders to be rated for at least 100 W.When it comes to batteries, capacity is king.
We made this a requirement for our main picks, and strongly preferred it for our budget and lightweight contenders. (For a variety of reasons, less than 100% of a battery’s designed capacity is actually available for use.) Put another way, that’s like running a 60 W device-such as a MacBook Pro, projector, or tabletop fan-for five hours.