- [Michael] When we talk about portable power packs,
normally we mean the kind of battery you slip in your pocket
to power your Pokemon hunt.
This -- this isn't one of those.
This is the Anker PowerHouse,
and it's the biggest battery I've ever reviewed.
I'm Michael Fisher and this is Mr Mobil.
(upbeat electronic music)
The PowerHouse is portable in the kind of way
that the first laptop was portable.
It's about the size of a 6-pack,
and it weighs over nine pounds.
This isn't the kind of thing you'd casually tote around town
unless you want a lot of funny looks.
Everything on the PowerHouse feels well made,
from the thick handle with its soft-touch underside
to the clicky buttons that activate each charging bay.
Over four days of testing I never got the impression
that the PowerHouse was anything but
a quality piece of gear,
which is important for two reasons.
First, at nearly $500 it's not cheap.
And second, at 400 watt hours, it's probably the most
potential energy I've held in one hand.
You want that kind of thing to be built right.
The PowerHouse's theoretical capacity is equivalent to
all these power packs put together.
So much capacity, in fact, that you shouldn't fly on a plane
with it in the U.S. because it's four times larger
than the FAA says is proper for carry-on luggage.
Of course, you're not supposed to take it on a flight.
You're suppsed to take it camping or on a boat trip,
or keep it in your closet for when a hurricane strikes.
None of that was on the agenda
during my review period though,
so I just decided to see how the PowerHouse
would factor into my daily use.
I plugged my Note 7 review device
into one of the four USB ports
and my Macbook Pro Retina 15 into the A/C power outlet.
There's also a 12V receptacle here but I don't have any
electronics that use cigarette lighter adapters,
so I didn't test that.
The USB ports use Anker's PowerIQ system,
which I touched on in my power pack roundup.
Basically it detects what kind of device is connected
and then delivers power at the most efficient safe rate.
The A/C charger will accept any standard U.S. wall plug
and my Macbook had no complaints.
I even managed to get my little Borg Cube mini-fridge
working off this thing.
But don't go thinking you can power a coffee maker
or microwave oven.
The PowerHouse will disengage
when it sees any draw over 160 watts.
If you stick to more conventional scenarios,
you'll be fine.
And, you know, it's a liberating feeling
to know you can power your entire mobile office
from this little box.
The display gives you an estimate of
time remaining to depletion,
which changes based on what's plugged in
and how much you're using it.
But in my experience I found it mostly unreliable.
I'd much prefer just to see
the percentage remaining instead.
Now the math on Anker's website is really fuzzy.
It promises 40 smartphone recharges from the PowerHouse,
which it probably got by dividing its total capacity
by a slightly above-average phone capacity,
but that's not how physics works.
All kinds of inefficiencies crop up when you transfer power,
especially when you're charging something like a laptop,
because the invertor in the PowerHouse first has to
flip the battery power to A/C
and then the transformer on your charger undoes that
to make the power palatable to your laptop.
So there's lots of waste there.
And also I didn't pull any punches with my usage.
I used my machine as I normally do,
which means a lot of video editing.
Hopping between Final Cut Pro and web browsing in Chrome
with screen brightness at 85%,
I drained the PowerHouse completely
in a little over 4 hours.
Now that wasn't with a full PowerHouse.
I had used it for 2 hours prior to that
to keep my phone topped up
while it was doing GPS navigation.
Now that's impressive.
This thing powered my everyday devices
at their most power-hungry modes for almost a full workday.
But don't get bamboozled by the rated capacity
and don't take the marketing promises at face value.
When it comes time to recharge the PowerHouse,
the wall charger will get you from zero to five hours
of estimated capacity in about 90 minutes.
I left it charging overnight
and it was full eight hours later.
Anker also has a solar charging solution on the way,
but it wasn't yet ready at press time.
The PowerHouse is a cool product,
but it's also a very niche one.
For most people, pocketable power packs are going to be
a much better fit than this beast
and according to some Amazon reviews,
there's basically no way to replace any of the cells in here
once they inevitably wear out.
Still, there's a lot of power here
in a relatively small package.
It's wide array of ports make that power very easy to get at
and it's much lighter than the immediate competition.
So if you often find yourself
just out of reach of a power plug,
or often in the dark thanks to
an unreliable electric company,
the PowerHouse might just deserve a shelf on your workbench.
Just as long as you remember that it's a battery,
not a miracle worker.
For more battery talk, 'cause I know you love it,
check out Mr Mobile's earlier power pack video, folks,
and subscribe to see more videos just like this one.
Until next time, thanks for watching
and stay mobile, my friends.