I purchased this little baby about 12 months ago, prior to a trip away with the family. It’s a great blend of form and function. Ecoflow call it a “Portable Power Station” and what I was after was a lithium battery powered device with 240v plug in capability, plenty of USB ports and ideally, some sort of solar charging. This bit of gear has it all, and it’s worked hard over the last 12 months on a variety of expeditions.
First the specs (a full list is here: https://au.ecoflow.com/products/river-max-portable-power-station?variant=40043438211270):
- 576Wh of power
- 7.7kg in weight
- power charging from solar (400W with built in MPPT), car adapter and my favourite – from mains, with the capability of going from 0 to 80% in 40 minutes (!)
- USB-C, USB-A, cig lighter, and more power outputs
- bluetooth management.
The bluetooth management looks a bit like this:
Well, it looks exactly like that and you can see you can turn on the light, 12V DC and the X-Boost. This function gives you 1200W from the AC adaptor ports instead of the normal 600W.
The device itself looks like this:
It’s neat and tidy in appearance and not very heavy if you’re lugging it around. On the sides are additional input and output ports – check out the website above to see all of those. Here is one of the weird things – the car input and the solar input (which are one and the same) use XT-60 plugs which is unusual – I haven’t really come across them before. They’re a solid connection though, and I’ve purchased a kit so I can make up some more to charge from my car with (using additional connections so I don’t blow a fuse in the car).
From a use case, this thing has recharged phones, laptops, tablets and run a 55L fridge while we’ve been travelling without any issue. I’ve used it at home to power computer / monitor and internet connectivity when we’ve had outages and it’s performed admirably – particularly when I combine it with 200W of solar panels (or more) and it generates net positive power even with laptop + dock + dual monitors. Your mileage may vary of course.
During a trip last year we were off-grid and had three days of rain, which pretty much killed all our solar power. I took the Ecoflow up to the camp kitchen and an hour later it had most of a charge which got us through the next day or so until we had decent sun (and solar power). This was a huge win for our camping – having backup power readily available. Very nice.
In summary, I really like this unit and to be honest, it almost became my second battery in the four wheel drive, rather than a discreet unit. It could charge off the vehicle or solar while driving, and then keep the fridge cold at night. Ultimately I didn’t want to tie it down so now it moves between cars and office, providing long lasting power and keeping the party going. Well worth the expense and they often have sales so I’d recommend hanging out for one of those rather than pay top dollar. It’s become a staple of our travelling toolkit.
Angus' Blog 