i haven't done any sponsored video in years but when i was approached by ecoflow curiosity got
the better of me so this is the ecoflow delta max with an extra battery pack for more capacity
and it essentially does what a gas generator does but it's a battery pack and i'll be doing
most of my tests without the extra battery pack because that way the tests won't take
as long this thing is a bit heavy the capacity is 2016 watt hours so about 2 kilowatt hours
and the maximum output is 2400 watts surging up to 5000 watts and the extra battery pack
essentially doubles the capacity so now with just the unit and three space heaters
plugged in with a kill a watt meter on the back just to keep it honest and right now
it says it's putting out 120 volts and we have zero watts so let's turn on this one full power
and it says it's putting out uh 1496 watts let's turn on this one that's a thousand watt heater
and now we're at 2200 watts the beeping on the back is actually
my kill a watt meter because uh it's saying overload overload it's saying 2300 watts
and let's add a little bit more load i'll turn this one on low and now we're at 28.95 watts
and the fans are starting to go because this thing is working hard
so that's over capacity let's check on the back
it says 2800 watts but this is actually overloaded and we're still at 120 volts
actually a little bit more than we had before more power okay set this to two
and oh and it just quit so that was overloaded and it cut the power but
this thing has something called xboost which you can turn on using the app and that does
the opposite of what you think it does it just drops the voltage when there's too much load
max max on and we're at 24 17 watts let's
bump this a bit and we're still at 2400 watts let's turn this to max
now we're at 26 10 watts so it's putting out less power than it did before and checking on here the
voltage has dropped to 107 volts to compensate for that so x boost just drops the voltage when
there's too much load which really is only useful for temporary sort of things because of course
these heaters are heating a lot less now but you wouldn't use this thing for a heater anyways
powering heaters of course is pointless so let's try it with a handheld circular saw
that was cutting a thick chunk of maple and these handheld circular saws they draw as
much power as a portable table saw next test my 26 inch bandsaw running off of this thing
my bandsaw was struggling a little bit with that maple but not for lack of electrical power
it's because it's only got a two-third horsepower motor on it let's try it with my inch bandsaw
so that tripped the overload before this thing was able to get up to speed xboost could help with
that a little bit but i already had the x boost turned on now i plugged most of my extension cords
into this and the saw into that that reduces the power available to the saw but this way
it starts up just barely but i wouldn't recommend doing this
i can also pre-spin up the saw but that's another bad idea that i don't recommend
but at least this way the saw is plugged straight into the unit without all these
extension cords wasting power so spinning up induction motors for stationary machines
is a bit of a weak spot of this thing it won't power up this bandsaw this dust collector
or this dust collector but it will power up the grinders here drill presses my belt sanders
won't power up this table saw or this band saw but it will this belt sander this drill press
and this dust collector of course once that induction motor is up and running it's no
problem it's just that startup that's a problem it works much better for machines with universal
motors like portable table saws or this planer and this planer actually anybody who's got one knows
they often pop the circuit breaker because they use so much power
this was maximum depth of cut but it's not full width and it's not even hardwood but even so this
peaked out at 2400 watts on here it's no wonder these things often pop the circuit breaker i'm
curious what sort of current surges this thing can handle and the only way i can measure those surges
fast enough is with a clamp on current transformer a little bit of circuitry and a d converter and a
raspberry pi computer and a script that i wrote so this measures current 20 times per second
let's turn this on and it stopped so that's surged up to 24 amperes and after eight readings here
or about 0.4 seconds it gave up and cut the power let's try this bandsaw which does start
so this one surged almost as high but more importantly it started dropping off right away
so that was enough to satisfy this thing to not trip the breaker and now with this bandsaw again
plugged into all these extension cords which makes it just barely start up
and with those cords uh there's still a big surge but a tiny bit less and it drops below
20 amperes relatively soon which is probably the threshold where this guy decides to call it quits
if it's more than about half a second now with the cell plugged into the wall let's try again
and with that i'm getting up to 29 amperes on the startup but after about half a second
it's fully up to speed and why doesn't that pop the 15 amp breaker in my house circuit panel
easy breakers are there to protect the wire it takes the wires quite a while to get hot so the
breaker gives it grace period before it pops but if you're over 15 amperes for a long time
then it will pop eventually this can also act as a ups right now i've got the bandsaw and
the light plugged in there and if i unplug the light that blinked just briefly as i cut over
from mains power to using the battery power let's try it again with a bandsaw running
examining the 400 frames per second clip it looks like there's about
seven or so blinks of the lights missing that's a bit too slow so let's measure
a different way so i modified my program to just print out the raw samples and there's the
waveform of the current picked up by my current probe here
so this is where i cut power and it was at one point nine seven three on the time scale
came back at 2.048 that's over 60 milliseconds between cutting power and coming back
mind you that waviness there that's from the induction motor actually
generating a little bit of power while it was off let's try it with a heater
scrolling back in here the cutover happened right here and we're actually missing less than
160 hertz cycle so that's a really fast cut over so if you want to use this thing as a ups with
your computer don't run a bandsaw at the same time because that'll slow down the cut over with just
a resistive load or probably with a computer the cutover is something like 12 milliseconds which
is way faster than the ups needs to be they tell me that the eco flow unit is the fastest charging
battery pack there is and i can confirm there is no faster charging battery pack because this thing
completely maxes out a 15 amp circuit in fact it even popped the breaker on my power bar one time
although you can also in the app adjust the charging speed so it's not necessarily so hard
on your host wiring it also has a dc input on the back so that with this cord i could
charge it off a battery or using this cord connected to a solar panel which i don't have
the app is also quite useful in that for instance it shows the internal temperature the charge state
in more detail how much power comes off of each of the front usb ports in case you're charging phones
and the settings contains a whole lot of useful limits that you can set
such as maximum power how far it will charge and discharge timeouts for the various circuits so
that if you accidentally leave it on it doesn't drain your battery and you can remotely turn
the outputs or the unit on and off let's turn the ac on light is on and off again
the unit i have here is the ecoflow delta max they also have a new unit coming out called the
ecoflow delta pro and that one's even more powerful and you can connect two of those
together to get 240 volts to potentially back up your whole house plus they have smart gas
generators to automatically recharge the batteries when it gets low and they have solar panels you
can connect to it to recharge it they can also charge off of electric vehicle chargers they
have a whole line of products to go with that sort of thing they currently have a kickstarter
going for the ecoflow delta pro and with that kickstarter you can get it for a little bit
less than what the regular price will be once it's on regular sale see the links in the description