I love my gadgets and knowing that there's a risk of power cuts this winter in the UK I just wanted to make sure I could keep the essentials running for the few hours there's no electricity.
Well, after looking around on Amazon I quickly came across the Jackery. A seemingly popular brand in America by all the accounts of people on YouTube, although I'd never heard of it until a couple of months ago and I'm certain no one else I know has either. But they will. I'll make sure of that🤣
This is a lithium battery with USBs, a 3-pin plug and car charging socket. Already sounds good right? Well, it gets better, not only can you charge it from the mains power, but you can also use a 12V car charger and, in my case the best bit, is you can use a solar panel too.
I have a 100w foldable solar panel and this should be able to charge my Jackery explorer 500 in about 8 hours apparently. However, the Jackery box it came in says to expect 14 hours. Considering that at the time of writing this it is October and the nights are drawing in, not to mention cloud cover has a serious impact on my solar panel (reducing 54 watts to 6 watts), I'm inclined to agree with the box. Expect 14 hours, anything better than that and you're laughing.
The capacity of the 500 is 518 watt hours (wh), which in simple terms means if you have a 1w device, it would run for 518 hours. A 100w item would run for about 5 hours. I've also learnt from YouTube that if you use an appliance greater that the wattage of the Jackery you bought it'll just turn off, so don't do that. At the time of purchasing mine, they only have the smaller explorer 240, the explorer 500 and the larger explorer 1000. So that's basically it. I've actually seen on YouTube they do have to 2000, but that seems American only for now.
While we're stuck in this energy crisis here in the UK, more commonly known as the "Cost of Living Crisis," I wanted to aim to use the free energy of the sun to power as many of our chargeable items as I could, as well as have the power to run my wife's work laptop and the router if we have a power cuts through the winter. I haven't tested that part yet, but I will. I did, however just test my 120w electric blanket spread over both my wife and I as we lay top to toe on the sofa watching tv last night. It didn't heat up as quickly as it does on the mains, but it worked well set to medium heat. I've found that if you run it until you're warm, say 20 minutes, with another blanket over the top, you can retain the heat for ages without using more power. We were so toasty last night I fell straight to sleep on the sofa!
So, in conclusion, I think this is a great addition to shoring up the house this winter along with our wonderfully warm hot water bottles and electric blankets. It's not cheap, though. They cost nearly £1 per 1w. So £240ish for the 240, £500ish for the 500, and yes, you've guessed it, £1000ish for the 1000. Like I said, not cheap. But it will last us for years I'm sure and I plan on taking it camping with us next too.
Just a little aside, this isn't a sponsored blog post, and all thoughts and comments are my own. I just love this thing enough to write about it 🤗
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