Hi I’m Gidon from technoloygman.com.
The Anker PowerHouse 757 portable power station comes from a brand synonymous with portable
charging solutions.
It has nearly every feature you might want including two 1500W AC outlets, a 1229Wh long
lasting LiFePO4 battery, super quick 1000W mains charging and both 100W and 60W USB power
delivery.
These power stations are perfect for power cuts, camping, travel and festivals and around
the house and out and about to charge all your tech.
And this Anker unit can charge at up to 300W off solar panels alone when mains isn’t
available.
I’ll run through its capabilities and thoroughly test all its claims to help you decide if
this is the right power station for you.
So let’s take a closer look.
Overview The power station comes well packaged with
a tough outer box.
Inside you get a box of accessories, a user manual and the charger itself.
Anker includes a mains charging cable, a car charging cable with an XT-60 connector and
there’s a 3 x XT60 to XT-60 parallel charging cable for connecting Anker’s optional solar
panels.
There’s also a protective cover for the charging station which is a nice touch I’ve
not seen before.
The multilingual user manual is clear and concise.
The power station has an uncluttered elegant design and feels very well built with an aluminium
frame, and a grey and black hard plastic outer shell.
Like other power stations I’ve reviewed it doesn't have any ruggedness or waterproof
rating, but the included protective cover would offer some weather protection if using
it outdoors.
There are two substantial carry handles, and they’ve kept the top flat which is handy
for charging laptops etc.
You’ll generally need both these handles to carry the power station, which weighs in
at a fairly hefty 20kg thanks to the 1229Wh LiFePO4 battery.
This LFP battery technology based on Lithium Phosphate chemistry weighs more than standard
Li-ion batteries that use NMC or Nickel Manganese Cobalt chemistry, but they support 3000 complete
charge cycles compared to 500-1000 cycles for NMC batteries.
And allows Anker to offer a 5 year warranty with these power stations.
You can see its dimensions on screen, but it’s not as big as I was expecting, considering
its capacity and 1500W output.
Anker’s website provides a few examples on what you could run off this power station
and for how long, and I’ll show some real life examples shortly.
But anything from a portable fridge to a coffee maker to a CPAP machine to an electric lawn
mower is possible.
The front of the unit has a large LCD display with a LED light strip above it with its own
button.
Beside this screen is a button to turn this display on and a power saving mode switch
to automatically turn off the power station when your devices are fully charged.
There’s also a reset switch to factory reset the unit.
Below the display is a 12V 10A or 120W car socket output with its own switch, one 100W
USB-C port, one 60W USB-C port and four standard USB-A 5V 2.4A 12W ports.
Then you have the two pure sine wave 220V 50Hz AC outlets with their own power button.
These outlets support 1500W continuous output but can briefly surge to 2400W.
The number of outputs varies depending on region - in the US you’ll get six 110V outputs.
Around the back of the unit you have the 1000W mains charging input and the 11-30V 10A XT-60
DC charging input for charging using the car charging cable or optional solar panels.
There’s also the AC overload protection button.
The ports are protected via a hinged cover which I found a little tricky to release with
my short fingernails.
The sides of the unit have large cooling vents with no less than five fans underneath the
right vent that suck in cool air and exhaust the hot air via the other side.
There are no wireless charging pads like on some power stations I’ve tested and there’s
no integrated Bluetooth to monitor and control the unit via a smartphone app.
This is also one of the few units I’ve tested that has no 12V DC 5525 outputs - but I’ve
never found these particularly useful anyway.
Charging One of my favourite features of this power
station is mains charging.
You don’t need any AC adapter - it charges directly off mains using the ubiquitous IEC
mains cable - often called a kettle lead in the UK.
It’s the same cable that plugs into the back of your PC and even if you lose the supplied
one, you should always be able to find a spare.
And this input supports up to an impressive 1000W using Anker’s HyperFlash technology
which can fast charge the unit from completely flat to 80% charge in 1 hour according to
Anker.
In my tests I got to between 75 and 78% in one hour but achieved a full charge in under
the quoted 1.5 hours.
Charging times will vary slightly based on ambient temperatures and the temperature of
the unit itself.
In comparison, my Jackery Explorer 1000W needs the supplied 180W charger and will take over
5 hours for a full charge.
The fans do turn on intermittently whilst charging and there’s no way to slow charge
the unit to possibly extend battery life, but I don’t think Anker would be offering
a 5 year warranty if they didn’t have complete faith in their charging system.
You can also charge the unit at up to 120W using the supplied car charging cable via
the XT60 DC input, which will charge the unit in around 10 hours.
With a bench power supply set to 30V and 10A I was able to charge at just under 275W using
this input, so if your car has a 24V output you could charge the power station faster.
Anker recommends using 3 of their 100W 625 solar panels together with the included 3-way
parallel charging cable to charge the power station at up to 300W using solar power.
The power station has a built in MPPT controller for more efficient solar charging.
I didn’t have Anker’s solar panels to test, but I tried connecting a single 160W
solar panel I had which worked fine.
This panel has the common MC4 connectors, so I used an MC-4 to XT-60 cable I had spare
to connect the panel to the Anker.
I got 55-60W on a bright but cloudy summer’s day in the UK.
I also tried connecting 3 120W solar panels in parallel using some 3-way MC-4 branch connectors.
In again bright but cloudy conditions I got 100 to 150W peaking at around 180W.
I have little doubt that without any cloud coverage I could get close to the 300W maximum.
But even at around 150W you should be able to completely charge the unit in 8-10 hours.
And in perfect conditions you could charge the unit from empty to 80% in just over 3.5
hours.
The DC input supports 11V-30V at 10A, so if you’re going to connect more than one typical
20V panel, you’ll need to connect them in parallel - not series.
Otherwise you’ll exceed the maximum input voltage.
This is very easy either with the supplied cable and Anker’s panels, or these cheap
branch connectors and XT-60 adapter.
You’ll need to check the voltage of your panels, and remember that in series you add
the voltages together for each panel, and in parallel you add the current for each panel
- the voltage stays the same.
I did test the overvoltage protection connecting two 20V 120W panels in series and the power
station did protect itself by refusing to charge.
You can’t charge via the mains and DC inputs at the same time - mains will always override
the DC input, but at the speed of AC charging that’s not really an issue.
When charging you’ll see the battery percentage, a charging icon, the charging input wattage
and an estimated time remaining to a full charge based on this input wattage.
You can use all of the outputs while the power station is charging.
Performance The power station has a built-in 1500W inverter
which will support a brief surge to 2400W.
This makes it one of the most powerful portable power stations I’ve tested so far and it
should be enough for even power hungry devices.
This UK version has two 50Hz 220V outlets both with a pure sine wave output which I
confirmed with a graphical l multimeter.
This is important for sensitive electronics.
I tested these outputs with a variety of devices.
The LCD display shows the current output power and remaining battery capacity based on this
instantaneous power.
First off I tried mowing the lawn with a 1500W Flymo lawnmower which ran fine at just under
1200W.
I could also run a 720W angle grinder, a 1750W heat gun, a 1250W SDS drill and a 1100W compressor.
The large start up draw of an old 1500W circular saw was a little too much for it, shutting
off the AC subsystem.
You just need to wait a few seconds and you can turn AC back on again.
Around the house I could run a 1550W hairdryer, a Nespresso coffee machine, a heater and a
toaster.
Interestingly, if I ran anything over 1500W for more than a few seconds, the output dropped
to the maximum 1500W of the power station.
Using an energy monitoring plug, it looks like the Anker will drop the output voltage
for devices like this to keep them within its limits.
This heater runs normally at its low 1000W setting, but if I bump it up to its full 2000W
setting it will hold close to this output for 5-10 seconds and then drops to around
1500W with the voltage dropping from around 225V to 200V.
It’s the same with this toaster when I switch it from 2 to 4 slots, doubling its output.
It’s fine with devices like this with heating elements but I’d be a little careful plugging
in sensitive electronics that exceed 1500W.
To measure the capacity of the built in 1229Wh battery I ran a heater via an energy monitoring
plug at around 1000W until the power station turned off.
The heater ran for 1 hour 18 minutes and consumed 1063Wh. Power stations like this will always
have conversion losses and anything over 80% is pretty good.
The Anker works out at 1063Wh /1229Wh which is around 86%.
I did a similar test using the DC output with a 10A electronic load attached.
I measured 1052Wh which is very close to the result under an AC load with the same 86%
efficiency.
The Anker PowerHouse also has a very useful UPS or uninterruptible power supply function.
When the power station is charging off mains, any mains devices you plug in will bypass
the power station and run directly off mains at up to 1500W until there’s a power cut,
when they’ll switch across to the power station’s battery.
It doesn’t support professional grade 0ms switching but Anker quotes less than 20ms
to switch across, which I confirmed with a graphical multimeter.
I could also see the status LED blink on my heater when I pulled the charging cable on
the power station to simulate a power cut.
I tried this with various devices including my desktop PC and it worked very well, directly
comparable to my dedicated APC ES-700 UPS but with far longer battery life.
I tested the 12V 10A car outlet charging another power station at around 110W.
I tested this port to its limits with an electronic load tester ramping up the current to 11.6A
exceeding its 10A rated output.
The PowerHouse displayed 155W before it shut off with its overload protection kicking in.
Finally I tested the USB ports.
I’m really pleased to see two USB-C power delivery ports to charge your phone, tablet,
laptop and the ever increasing number of gadgets that support USB power delivery.
The 100W output is enough for even power hungry devices like the latest MacBook Pros.
I tested both USB-C ports charging this Gooloo GT3000 jump starter which is one of the few
devices I own that will charge at up to 100W over USB-C power delivery.
I got almost the full 100W from the 100W port and around 60W from the 60W port.
It’s worth noting that you’ll need a 100W rated USB-C cable with the E-mark chip to
use the 100W port at its full output.
The 4 USB-A ports don’t have any fast charging capabilities like Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0
or 4.0, but I tested them up to their 2.4A or 12W maximum output with a load tester and
they worked fine.
Most of the time the power station is silent in operation and with lower powered devices
its cooling fans will rarely kick in which is great if you’re powering something overnight
like a CPAP machine.
The only time I got all 5 cooling fans to come on is whilst mains charging.
Around 1 metre away I measured 46dB, around 11dB louder than room noise with all 5 cooling
fans running which is the worst case scenario.
And they do keep everything cool which I confirmed with a FLIR thermal imaging camera.
The power saving mode switch is a useful feature that turns off the power station when everything
connected to it is fully charged.
If you want to connect devices that use low power or intermittently turn on and off you
can easily turn this switch off.
So you should leave this turned off for portable fridges, CPAP machines etc.
If the AC and car outlet subsystems are turned on, they will slowly drain the battery, even
if nothing is connected when the power saving mode is turned off.
The LED light strip above the LCD screen has 3 brightness levels which change with each
press of the button and an SOS mode that can be activated if you hold this button down
for 2 seconds.
It’s not your typical harsh white LED having a warm soft light.
It's not super bright but would be useful for camping or emergencies.
Conclusions It’s difficult to fault the Anker PowerHouse
757.
Its 1500W of output is enough to power even power hungry devices and the 1229Wh battery
can keep lower powered items running for days.
I’m pleased to see Anker use a LiFePO4 battery that can remain in a healthy state after 3000
complete charging cycles.
It is heavier than power stations using more traditional Lithium Ion batteries, but I think
it’s worth it for up to 6 times longer battery life.
These power stations are a considerable investment - you want it to last and it’s reassuring
that Anker offer a 5 year guarantee - longer than any other brand of portable power station
I’ve tested so far.
I was also impressed with the charging speeds.
I could fully charge this unit in under 1.5 hours and directly off mains without having
to carry an AC adapter.
If I was being picky I’d like an app to monitor and control the unit, a user replaceable
battery, some fast charging USB-A ports and a couple of wireless charging pads wouldn’t
go amiss.
But these are all minor points.
If you don’t need the power or capacity of this unit at the top of Anker’s range,
they also do smaller models including the 500W 535 and the 200W 521 PowerHouse models,
that all still come with long lasting LiFePO4 batteries.
I’ve not tested them yet, but I’ll provide a link down below so you can check them all
out for yourselves or you can just search Anker PowerHouse on Google for further details
and pricing.
But I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Are you considering this power station or if you already have it what do you think of
it?
And as always, if you have any questions, please ask - I read every comment and will
do my best to respond.
I do hope you found this video useful.
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