Ben from Snowys folks today, we're checking out
the Rover lithium 40 Amp-hour power bank from Companion.
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This is a nice, light-weight 40 Amp-hour
power bank that you can take with you in the campsite.
It has got multiple Outputs, multiple inputs
and you can charge it directly from solar
cause it's got a solar built-in MPPT controller.
Covering off what comes in the box with your power bank here
you get AC charger over here,
we'll show you where that plugs in shortly
DC charger so you can charge from 240 or 12 volt.
Get this cable here
so that you can charge it from solar as well.
You get these little adapters here
that go in the port on the front here.
This is a slightly different plug
than my standard LED lights.
So this allows you to plug your LED light in the end here
and then this will then attach to your power bank
and you get a user's manual.
And there's a Lithium iron phosphate battery inside here.
And it's all encased in this durable plastic outer here
and weighs, 6.3 kilos.
So much lighter than the regular sealed lead acid
always-heavy battery packs we've had in the past.
Dimensions-wise about 27 cm by a little bit over
24 cm in height and about 15 cm in depth.
Do a bit of a tour on the outside before we go in
to things too far in the back, nothing to see there.
But on this end here, you've got a little LED light here.
If we hold down on this blue button here
it will flick this LED light on, and that's a three-watt
LED not a whole lot of light but enough to find your way
to and from there the tent if you're carrying this at night.
Hold down for another three seconds and it flicks off.
Now moving onto the other features
there's a whole lot going on here.
So I'll try and explain it bit by bit.
I might start with charging
that if we come around to this end here
we've got an input here, which is our charge input.
That plug marries up to these little red and black plugs
that feature on the DC charger, the 12 volts charger
and also this adapter here which we'll plug in and then
turn this into a standard Anderson plug on the end here.
So that means we can plug a solar panel in here.
And one of the great things
about this unit is it has a built in MPPT
or maximum power point tracking controller which means you
don't need to use the solar controller or MPPT controller,
DC to DC charger that came with your solar panel.
You can plug solar straight into this
and plug this straight into the end here.
It will charge at a maximum of 5 Amps
so the MPPT controller will limit the charging rate
to 5 Amps so charged within about sort of eight to 10 hours.
But you can use whatever solar panel you like 120 to
200 watt is probably a good option.
But even though that 200-watt solar panel is kind of put
out maybe five to 11 Amps, this is only gonna charge
at five Amps.
Jumping onto the output settings here,
When it comes straight out of the box and you plug things in
it's in charge mode, to switch this into power mode,
We flick the power button and it turns the display on.
We'll go into a bit more on that shortly,
but if we hold down on the power button, we can see
that some red lights come on down here on these plugs.
Now, what that means is that the unit is in output mode.
So we're getting power out of these plugs here,
power out of the 12 volt plug here,
power out of this plug here as well.
This is a two-pin plug a bit like
what you find on angle and a lot of fridges nowadays
that will screw into place.
It's a really secure plug there.
You've got just a standard cigarette plug on the front here.
Now this and the one on the side here are 10 Amps outputs.
And you actually got a total of 10 Amps
combined output from this unit.
So if you've got multiple things plugged in here
can only pull a maximum of 10 Amps.
Down the bottom here,
you've got just the standard little pin plugs
which are these guys here
that you can use for your solar, not solar, your LED lights.
We've plugged that in there
and your LED lights can plug in the end there.
They're just one Amps outputs, a 2.8 Volts, one Amps
And you've got a couple of just standard USB outputs here.
These are two Amps each, and a type C output here
which is a three Amps output.
So lots of options for charging devices
but it doesn't stop there
because you've also got this Anderson output here.
Now we need to press a few buttons to activate this.
This is a 10 Amps Anderson output.
So to activate that one, we need to get back.
If we just take this back to the starter,
hold down on this power button
and put it back into charge mode
so these red lights have gone off on the bottom.
So if we want to activate the Anderson plug on the end
we've pretended on to start with
we hold the power button down for three seconds
and it activates the red lights of the bottom
that's now an output mode.
To then activate the Anderson plug on the end,
We hold down on the on-off Anderson plug, button here,
sorry.
This red light goes on here.
That now means that this Anderson port
on the end here is a 10 Amps output.
So we can charge devices directly from that output there.
That's all the inputs-outputs.
I wanna show you the screen on the frontier.
I'm just going to put it back
into charge mode from the start here now.
So lights have gone off.
This is now in charge right now.
If I was to plug a power source
into the side here to charge it up
this would show me
that I would have a little word up here.
This is input.
Another word down here.
This is charge.
It would show me how many Watts are going in
and how many hours or how much....
I mean many minutes until the battery inside is charged.
If I put this into output mode,
so hold down on this so these lights come up here,
you can now see the words here, output and discharge
above those.
I'm not sure if you can see it on the camera, but
above those, there is an input and a charge function.
They're not lit up at the moment.
Now this will always show the net difference
between the power going in and the power coming out.
So if I've got more Amps coming in than the Amps
that are being drawn out,
because you can charge and power device,
you can charge this, sorry
and power device at the same time.
So if the device is being powered is drawing less power
than what is being put in.
This will show a nets input.
If you're actually drawing more current out of this
than what's going in,
then this will show the output and discharged.
And I can show you a little bit of how that works.
If I grab this fan here
and I'm gonna plug it into the 12 Volt outputs socket here
We've got it in output mode
because these lights are on here.
And if I flick this
we can see nothing's been drawn at the moment.
It is showing....
I've got to mention before
but this is a battery indicator
on the side here that shows 70% charge in the battery
It's showing one, one.
That's some power being pulled out of this.
But if I flick the fan on down here now
and just give me a second, I'll flick that on
put the display in the back of this and a medium setting.
That's now drawing seven to eight Watts
and we've got 2,800 minutes of discharge time left.
If I'd set it up again and see
that'll now go up to 15 watts we've got
1,300 minutes of discharge time
left for power left in the battery.
If I now go and plug something
in at a higher amount of what's the misses discharging
then this will flick over to input and charge
and it will share the amount of time to charge.
You can't toggle between those settings.
What shows on here is very dependent on what you're running
from the device
That is all the features
of the Rover lithium 40 Amp-hour power station
from Companion.
True as I mentioned it's equipped with a short circuit
and over voltage protection and also temperature protection.
So it's a nice smart little device.
And 48 Amp-hours is a really good amount
of power to keep a fridge cold or keep your food cold
for a weekend away provided you've got a vehicle
with somewhere to charge it up during the day.
Solar is a great way to do that.
If you have any questions on this guy, let us know
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