- When I opened my mailbox
to find a 440 watt-hours of power,
I thought that deserved more than your typical battery test.
So I packed up every piece of tech
I brought with me for my 4th of July weekend,
and then I asked my friendly neighborhood boat captain
to give me a ride to a different kind of testing lab,
an island that would only give me four hours
to deplete these batteries before it sank beneath the waves.
(classy electronic music)
Safety first.
I'm gonna share plenty more nature shots
with you as we go on,
but first let me tell you about the products we're testing.
The stars of the show are
these big car battery-looking things,
the Anker Powerhouse 200
and the Jackery Explorer 240.
Those numbers denote the watt-hours
of stored energy when these are fully charged.
And to put that in context,
Anker says the Powerhouse can inflate
an air mattress 18 times,
while Jackery promises 40 hours
of power for a five-watt lantern,
the kinda things that matter when
you're going camping for a weekend.
But I don't have that kind of time.
It's nearly four o'clock by the time
I get everything set up.
By 8:00 p.m. the tide will have come
in enough to put the island tip
of this peninsula underwater.
So I plug in everything I can,
my half-charged MacBook Pro,
the Blackberry that's giving me my internet hotspot,
the Pixel 3 that's controlling the 360 camera,
that's the Insta 360 One X up here
on its mast at land's end.
Keeping time for us is the Casio Pro Trek F30,
also at about half a charge and now also plugged in.
And of course no beach visit is complete
without an Amazon Kindle to read,
so we'll top that up too.
And to make sure I don't get blinded
by that hot light in the sky,
I'm wearing Focals by North smart glasses.
I'll get into these in a future video,
but for now all you need to know is they need charging too.
And it gets lonely on a desert island,
so at my feet, to keep me company, AIBO the robot dog.
I'm about 3/4 charged and drawing power
from the dock in his protective little pen here.
(classy electronic music)
About an hour after I started
with seven devices pulling power from both packs,
let's check to see how much charge I have left.
And I'm still over 80% on both batteries.
So yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna be able
to run them dry before my feet get wet.
But I'm giving it my best shot, so let's put more load on.
I've brought along a personal cooler
in the form of the Evapolar 2 review device,
and after filling it with water
its fan is blowing cool, moist air
that's immediately swallowed up
by the hot, moist air blowing in from the bay.
I also ran out of charge on my camera battery
about this time, so I took the opportunity
to plug that in too.
Actually, let's make a point here.
This is a great example of why having an AC inverter
on a battery pack is useful.
Not all chargers are USB.
Of the tech I brought, that Fuji battery charger,
the Aibo dog, and my drone charger
all bore two-prong wall plugs.
There's a downside to this I'll touch on at the end,
but it's still important to have
and I'm glad both of these batteries are so equipped.
Even so, I wanted more USB ports.
Anker has the edge with a USB-C that can kick out 30 watts,
in addition to its two USB-As.
Jackery only has the latter.
Approaching the six o'clock hour,
my Insta 360 was running low,
so I unplugged the now full Kindle
and popped that in in its place.
Then I checked out the wind forecast on my MacBook,
which told me the breeze was just about to lie down.
So as the power level fell to below 80 and 70%
on the Jackery and Anker respectively,
and as the tide finally started to make its presence felt,
I took to the sky with the DJI Mavic Air
to burn some more milliamps.
(downtempo music)
While we're in the air,
let's talk about flying with these batteries.
In short, you can't.
In the United States, for safety reasons,
the maximum size of battery you're allowed
to carry on a flight is 100 watt-hours,
or in some cases 160.
Drones are great at burning through power,
and after just 10 minutes flying in this wind
I have another battery to plug in.
But this will turn out to be the last load
I put on these packs because the tide
and my ride has come in.
As you can probably see, my hair's a disaster.
I didn't know that.
But also more importantly my island is just about gone.
So I've got my rescue lifeboat waiting for me.
Why don't I check to see what levels
I've managed to get these batteries down to?
On the Anker I was able to get down to 52%,
still more than half a charge remaining
on the smaller of the two battery packs,
if I'm remembering my specs right.
And on the Jackery 74%, more than 3/4 power left
after charging every single thing
I brought with me which was,
frankly, for a beach trip.
Wait, where's the dog?
Okay, dog is safe.
Don't go anywhere, dog, we're about to,
we gotta get off this thing.
Which is too much for a beach trip
but that was kinda the point.
Now, I'll be honest with you, folks,
I did not expect that I would be successful
in draining these dry in less than four hours.
I've tested Anker's previous Powerhouse.
I tested a huge KaliPAK a couple of years ago.
But these are just massive batteries,
and as many devices as I was charging,
I knew I wasn't quite pushing them to their limits.
As the tide finally reclaimed my temporary office,
I thought of the notion of using the packs
to power my laptop while I wrote
and edited this video, which I did, back on dry land.
Oh, and here's that pro tip about AC.
Any time you're using the AC plug,
you're losing a ton of power because it's very inefficient.
The inverter inside the battery first has
to convert the battery's direct current
to alternating current,
and then that's immediately converted
from AC back into DC by your device's wall plug
so your laptop or whatever can use it.
So after just 60 minutes of writing
and rendering 360 video in my MacBook,
I was able to pull the Jackery down by 25%.
On a similar test with the Anker Powerhouse,
an hour of editing in Final Cut dropped its charge by 16%,
and this yet another reason
all battery packs should have USB-C power delivery.
It skips this conversion.
So if you're convinced you need this kind of power,
which of these is the better buy?
Well, the Jackery is the better value,
from a power density standpoint.
It's got a 25% bigger power reserve
and it's a full hundred bucks cheaper than the Anker.
But if, as Jack Shephard says,
I had to go back to the island with only one of these,
I think I'd buy the Anker.
I like that it's the smaller of the two
and I like that I have the option
of USB and USB-C, in addition to DC and AC.
Each of these is available now
and each is available in several sizes.
I'll link here to those products in the description,
and Anker and Jackery have
also provided a discount code should you want to purchase.
I'll include those down below as well.
This video was made possible by a literal boatload
of tech, including review samples.
No manufacturer paid a fee for inclusion in this video
nor were they given an advance copy or editorial input.
And as for all the other products I brought to the island,
if they haven't been reviewed already,
they'll be featured in upcoming review videos this month.
So be sure you don't miss that.
Subscribe to theMrMobile on YouTube and Instagram.
Until next time, thanks for watching
and stay mobile, my friends.
(downtempo music)