Budget AMAZON Power Stations... Are they worth it??

Intro when it comes to power stations do you really need to spend 600 to a thousand dollars or can you go on amazon or somewhere else and pay 200 to 500 and get the same result today i'm testing six power stations five of which you can get on amazon.com let's see if you can spend less money and still power your family weekend vacations and camping trips so stick around [Music] so what do you see when you go to Amazon Power Stations amazon.com and type in power station you see jackery everything is jackery you have to scroll down to get to a non jackery item you can also get jackeries at harbor freight as well now i love harbor freight if you those of you that watch my videos i absolutely love harbor freight stuff i've been using it for a long time but i am not a fan of way that they are marketing or showing jackery power stations on their website so for example this is a 500 watt power station that the very first line of it is 1 000 watt i know it says peak power afterwards but that's not what people see when they're looking at they're like oh 1000 watt power station 550 bucks that's not true it is a 500 watt power station i'm gonna take them out in the real world use them give it to my friends run their motorhomes run their campers run their coffee machines run everything and use and abuse them on several weekend camping trips and then come back do my specific set of tests on all of these and then see which one comes out on top so for me when i go on a camping trip the main thing that i use these four is running my fridge so i am going to be using the set power fridge it actually has a compressor in it and i've been using it for about seven months now i've taken out a bunch of four wheeling trips since king of the hammers and it has worked absolutely flawlessly we do have a discount code for you guys for the aj style fridges from set power i will leave the link in the description i'm gonna go through with you from the cheapest to the most expensive gonna go through the specs what i like and don't like about it and the performance of them and at the very end i'll tell you my opinion of which ones i would buy and purchase with my own money this is Live Power PA300 the live power pa 300 this is a 300 watt power station 296 watt hour claimed and this is a really nice little unit that you can get on amazon you can get it anywhere between 169 and 199 so 199 full price you can get them on sale just wait for it i see them all the time we have two ac inputs on the front we got our three usbs two dc inputs and our usb type c input on this side right here this side we have our dc input charging and our fan it's pretty simple it's very basic we got our light back here on the back which i do like because it is more of a flood light and it has different settings bright can lower it down and it's got our strobe fast strobe so it's not just one light that you have to point in a direction you can actually set it down and it does flood out the screen is very basic and simple it just has a little battery with uh you know lines in it and then it tells you what input or output you're using it doesn't give you any information about import or output wattage which on these smaller units most of them are not going to have that i do like this unit it is really light it's the lightest one at six pounds this gray right here the handle on the sides it kind of has like a tactile feel it's plastic but it's soft in a way it's hard to describe i took it on vacation with the family i gave it to the kids and let them charge their devices with it i ended up charging three kindles two headphones three nintendo switches with the ac inverter so that's gonna take a lot more juice than just plug it into the dc that's just the cable that i had i charged my laptop and then i charged two of these little tiny rc car batteries and then that was about all it had so it seems like charging four different devices with the ac really took a lot out of it i would say this is definitely a great unit for the price and i do like it so this next one is the Olight olight oh station i've worked with olive before for the last couple of years and i really like their products so they sent me this to test for this video this is 199 dollars it is basically a 200 watt power station 230 watt hours and this thing is seven pounds which is one pound lighter than the heavier than the 300 watt one but the housing is made of aluminum and not of cheap plastic we got our three usb inputs our usbc input we have one ac input right here and one dc input the one thing this does not have is a light unlike all the other units they have a light this one does not which really doesn't bother me because of its size and i always have a light i have a headlamp in my car at all times i have a flashlight in my pocket flashlight backpack i have at least three flashlights anytime i go off-road or go camping so i'm not really worried about a flashlight on the power station itself so the screen is very basic on this as you'd expect for something this small one of the best features of this that none of the other ones have if you plug in something dc it automatically detects that it's in there you don't actually have to hit the button to turn dc on so when i was testing this one i did make a little mistake and instead of charging two rc car batteries i charge two cell phones this took a lot more juice to charge this than it did those rc car batteries so with that in mind this one i charged two cell phones two kindles two headphones my laptop and two nintendo switches i added up all the battery capacities of these units to try and make it as even as possible even charging one less kindle and one less switch it still was a little bit more than on the 300 watt one after that test i still had two bars left so i charged a power bank a small one and a camera battery and i have one bar left now this unit is only about 66 watt hours less than the other unit before this and i feel that this one actually performed better and it has an aluminum housing which i like better so overall a great option for two hundred dollars we also have a discount code for olight 10 off use the code muddybeards link is in the description as well let's move up to the bigger power stations which i'm doing the standardized test on all of them for the baseline test of the 500 watt or larger units we're gonna be running this fridge for 24 hours two cell phones three camera batteries boiling two cups of water with this 300 watt water boiler set of headphones and then a laptop this is the king boss Kingboss 500 watt power station now this one currently on amazon comes in at about 329 dollars plastic feels cheap there's no cover for the dc input the buttons do feel nice though i do like the feel of the buttons but other than that it feels cheap the screen is cheap i don't know if you can see kind of on the bottom there's like a line here where the screen's not really like perfectly lined up in the housing here and when they first sent me this uh i charged it for the first time it charged up to 77 and it wouldn't charge anymore i emailed them they sent me a new one i sent that one back to them and this is the replacement one there is no usb c charger on it and the the output watts says zero percent a lot when i know that it is charging so the inconsistency of the algorithm or however it's displaying stuff on the screen the input and output doesn't seem to be working very well other chargers that i tested in this you know it would say two watts output and this would say zero charging the same camera battery when i took it on the camping trip i gave it to my buddy jeff he plugged his whole camper into it and ran all his lights his fans his heater everything off of it it did well it ran the whole camper the whole night the next morning i hooked up the 100 watt solar panel to this and it did charge with the solar panel it worked really well after completing the standardized test that i set at the beginning of the video we ended up at 12 battery left on this king boss power station also another thing on this i noticed after we came back from the camping trip and after the test the usb port right here the metal frame around the port itself is kind of split and seems to be kind of broken so it does still work but um long term on this thing i'm not seeing it even a steal at 329 i would not recommend this and i would not buy this now this is the largest unit of the fleet it is a 700 watt 606 watt hours from all powers now this one comes in at 429 dollars one thing to think about is this does not come with a car charger uh adapter so you'll have to buy that separately so that's 12.99 and that brings you up to 441 dollars to get this with the same spec as far as you know accessories and stuff that the other ones have which that's unfortunate i think that's should be something that comes in all of them because i shouldn't have to buy an extra cable to charge it in my car now like all of the units in this video there's some things that i really like and some things that i don't like there is not one unit then i'm like wow everything is awesome on this thing that's just not the case on any of them that i found now as far as the shape of it and the outside of it this is by far my favorite one it is 12.4 pounds outside of this i like that it goes flat so i can put this into uh into the vehicle in somewhere and i can actually stack something on top of it this handle is pretty nice it has this little rubber strip right here on the inside that kind of snaps it in here and then it also makes it you know comfy when you're grabbing it now this one does have probably one of the the second worst screen is way too small and the information on it is not so great there's lots of numbers on there extra digits and stuff like that that doesn't seem to need to be there got our screen right here and we have our two lights on the side and i right now i just realized that it stopped beeping when i push the buttons because every time you push the button on this thing uh every other time that i've used it it beeps which is one of the things on my list that i was annoyed by nothing in the instruction manual told me how to take the beep off or do it i must have done it by accident somehow or maybe it just stopped working i don't really know but it's not beeping anymore yay now it's way i love it way more now because the it doesn't beep every time you hit a button it beeped and it was very annoying uh this also has a bluetooth option so you can control this thing with your phone i can't really think of a scenario where i would need to bluetooth my phone to my battery pack but you know it's there as an option if you want to use it so like all the other units we got three usb plugs right here one usbc we got our dc inputs and on the other side we have our dc charger we got our dc plug for our output and then this one is our inputs for charging it after completing the standardized test that i set at the beginning of the video we ended up with 49 battery left surprising considering the last one had 13 battery left after using it a few times we went camping i gave it to my buddy dan and he ran his camper with it he ran his lights with it he we made coffee with it in the morning with an actual coffee pot and it performed really well after we got back from the camping trip i ran it again through the whole set of tests again and i came up with a similar result at 41 battery left i say that it's pretty consistent as far as uh how much battery is left after that test this unit right here plus a 100 watt solar panel you can get that for 500 i think that's the best bang for your buck in this whole video so far so keep that in mind as we keep going Ooops now this next unit is the oops oops i think it's oops i'm sorry i don't know how to say it my bad uh this thing is a 600 watt and it's 595 watt hours this one comes in at 449.99 so 450 dollars now this one is one of the heavier ones at 15.6 pounds but it does have the most beautiful screen of any of them it has the best buttons it has the best feel of the whole front of this it is the best now when i went on the camping trip uh for the weekend with my buddies i gave them the other two this one i had not done any testing on it yet and i used it for myself to run my whole camp for the whole weekend so after i got home i did the exact same test baseline test that i did with all the other ones and we ended up at five percent battery so this having the most beautiful screen and the best interface of any of them it kind of had a kind of letdown of how much battery it had left after doing the test so i'm still torn between having something that's going to last a little bit longer as far as the battery and having something that is like really nice coming in at the most Itahil expensive at 499 dollars on this test this is the itahil 500 watt watt hour power station now there's some couple of different features on this that you don't see on the other one also it is very large compared to the other ones and it weighs a whopping 19 pounds so it is super heavy compared to the other units and one of the reasons why is it has an aluminum shell so this thing is going to be more durable at least this shell part than the cheap plastic alternatives in the other units now this one is the very first one that i got i've had this since february i use it king of the hammers i've been using it on camping trips and i've been using it for a while now and i do really like it it has one of the better screens and displays of any of them you won't be able to see it because when it turns on it just turns into scramble so i'll try and put a picture up on the screen it has great information on the screen watt hours input output it's just really well thought out it does have these international or universal uh plugs i believe i'm not really sure why for me i found that obviously i'm not going to use it here in the united states and i found the receptacle pushing the connector or the plug into these to be kind of difficult and not very user friendly so this guy did the same test as all the other ones and we ended up at five percent battery left also these handles right here they're just pins that go through here and this thing being 19 pounds uh i don't see the longevity of these i feel like these pins and these plastic handles here are going to break at any moment when you're carrying it around which makes me nervous considering it is the most expensive the heaviest the handles kind of are the least strong i would say the connectors the plug-ins here that i don't really like although it has the one of the best screens this one probably for the money i would spend my money somewhere else when i was done Conclusion with all of the testing i went ahead and hooked all of these up to my itahil 100 watt solar panel just to make sure that they actually will take a charge from a solar panel and that actually works and every single one of them worked flawlessly i had no issues charging them with the solar panel now after six weeks of testing all of these power stations for you guys in my opinion this all powers 700 watt came out on top i just can't look past the 28 difference in battery capacity at the end of the test this being 41 and 49 because i tested it twice and the next best one at 13 left and five and five percent even though this does have the screen that i like the least out of all of them i just can't look past the battery capacity and how well it performed and then it having the square small light package now if i could take the screen from this one right here and transplant this interface onto this battery this would be the best 500 you can get this and a 100 watt solar panel similar to the one that i have and you will be set now as far as these little guys go both of them performed really well this one actually outperformed this one just a little bit it's smaller it's made of aluminum and it's just the quality is so much better on this one and i think the longevity of this unit right here is going to be much longer than this one now all of the power stations from amazon that i like and i recommend i will leave down in my amazon store the link will be in the description and this o station from olight i'll leave a link in the description for that we have that discount code for 10 well that's going to be it for this video guys i hope you found it informative if you want to follow me on social media i am at muddy beards 4x4 we got a website moneybears4x4.com we got shirts stickers stuff like that and those of you that have been watching till the end and have been counting how many times i said unit and made a drinking game out of it unit [Music]