CHEAPEST 2000w LiFePO4 UPS Solar Generator! LEOCH 2048wh Portable Battery Power Station Review

greetings i'm professor hobo and welcome to another hobo dose product review back in the year of hell 2020 i previewed the prototype version of the leock 2 kilowatt ups solar generator to much fanfare it was serious bang for the buck but it still had some issues that need to be worked out fast forward nearly six months later and the professor finally has in hand the retail production version to see is this the hottest deal in 2021 or is it just a goofy looking paperweight on wheels let's find out the leox sports a 2048 watt hour lithium iron phosphate battery rated at 3 000 cycles or 10 years of normal use as for size and weight the production model is significantly smaller than the prototype and has actually dropped about two pounds 20 inches by 14 by 10 maybe 11 if you're counting the sides you know these sides aren't flat they kind of stick out the leok is all abs plastic all the way around it does sport these wheels in the back to help you pull it from the handle up front it does have a bin in the top where you can actually store the cables which is different than the prototype now the thickness of the plastic is certainly better than the prototype but in my mind it's something that's still a little bit thin and flimsy for something that weighs almost 70 pounds and as for the display it's unchanged from the prototype it still shows the basic five segment battery icon that shows the battery charge level and it does show you input and output watts as for the inverter size it is a pure sign rated at 2 000 watts with a 4 000 watt peak and it does have four 15 amp outlets now this shares the 2000 watt inverter as for ways to charge the retail version leock is different from the prototype in the fact that it now has three inputs on the back instead of just two for ac charging plugging the lioc directly into the wall with the included cable will net you about 280 watts of charging which means you can top this up from zero to full in about seven eight hours and if you choose the perk that includes the second ac wall charger you can bump that charging up to 560 watts are down to three and a half hours because this does support simultaneous charging from all three ports in the back so you plug it into the wall gives you your first 300 watts you plug this in to the middle port and that gives you another 300 watts and if that's still not fast enough for you you can add your own third-party charger into the anderson solar input on this and pump an additional 300 watts into it good for charging the lyoc in under two and a half hours flat that's some of the fastest charging on the market however it does require three sources of charging as for solar charging the base model does include an anderson input which has its own mppt solar controller in it good for up to 300 watts of solar charging it does come with this cable allows you to hook any kind of third-party panel in using the anderson adapter into the leock now the liox a little different from other solar generators and the fact that it doesn't support putting panels in series it only supports putting panels in parallel this anderson input is actually good for 35.5 volts up to 20 amps so this is a high amp input compared to a lot of other solar generators now to make your life easy leock does include these parallel adapters with the product that allows you to hook up to three solar panels in parallel and if you opt for the upgraded solar perk it actually includes a second third-party mppt controller that you can plug into the center input here and add up to 300 watts more solar so in total the leock with this perk actually supports 600 watts of solar charging now we'll go into this more later but with the base model you can charge from solar in under seven hours and with the added mppt controller you can bring that down to four hour charge time now that's going to be under ideal conditions the lia can also be charged from an external lead acid or lithium battery with the included battery clamp cables and you can also charge from a 12 or 24 volt vehicle with the included car charger which is good for up to 150 watts so from 12 volts you can expect to charge the layout from day in about 18 to 20 hours and at 24 volts cuts that back to about 14 hours as for 12 volt outputs the lioc does offer a single regulated cigarette lighter style socket rated at eight amps and a pair of 55 25 ports that's 5.5 millimeter by 2.5 millimeter rated at 3 amps these are all regulated at 13.3 volts as for usb output types there are six outputs total two of these are 60 watt power delivery ports two are 18 watt quick charge ports and two are the typical old-fashioned dinosaur-like usb-a ports as for other features the leok does come standard with this blingy blue light show if you're into that kind of thing it does also have a true ups relay built inside as i mentioned before these do have wheels on the back to help you pull it but this works best if you regress back a few million years into an australopithecus seriously don't do this if you have a bad back i'm still hurting as for the warranty the leock does offer a two-year manufacturer's warranty and they do have ul certification on this product and of course we took the leock into my secret laboratory where we performed all kinds of crazy experiments on it since we didn't do an ac capacity test last time we did one this time results of the new and improved leock 1840 watt hours the results of the ac capacity test which test how much battery can you get out of the ac outlets the results were 1840 watt hours out of 2048 or very respectable 90 efficiency now i didn't repeat the dc test because i did this previously with the prototype and the battery and that 12 volt circuitry hasn't changed those results were 2077 watt hours out of 2048. they're probably wondering how the heck can you get 2077 watt hours out of 2048 that's impossible well here's the thing leok actually under rates the battery size they claim the battery inside of this is 92 amp hours at 24 volts or if you convert that to 12 volts that's 184 amp hours and that comes out to about 2200 watt hours so they advertise this as a 2000 watt hour power station when in fact it has 2200 watt hours inside of it now this is a smart thing to do because it gives you a more accurate representation of what you can actually expect to get out of this product now if we take the true battery capacity of 2200 watt hours into account the test results come out to a more realistic 84 efficiency for ac inverter use and 94 for the regulated 12 volt output note that the 12 volt output on this is only rated at 8 amps which is much lower than most other solar generators and probably one of the reasons why it's so efficient on 12 volt since the circuitry for the 12 volt is so low it's much more efficient than a lot of other solar generators now this is good news for those who plan to run 12 volt refrigerators on this because that means it's going to run a lot longer than say on a blue eddy ac200 or even a jackery because those have a lot more overhead on their dc circuits now we did a dc output rate check we can pull up to 9 amps from the 12 volt socket and up to 3 amps from the 55 25 outputs so you get slightly more power than what it's rated for but it's still nowhere near the 10 amps you get pretty much with everybody else now this isn't going to be a problem for most of you because most you're going to use this 12 volt socket for stuff that's under 100 watts anyway as for the inverter test we had some mixed results let's check those out sine wave check it looks like we're getting a nice clean sine wave at idle at 118.7 volts 60 hertz now let's see what happens when we add a dirty load giggity giggity still 117 volts at 60 hertz no change in the sine wave and that's at 1300 watt load so pretty impressive there leok okay what we're going to do next is max out the inverter i have the heater running on the floor it's pulling almost 1300 watts and we're going to add solar degenerator to that to get this to 2000 watts so let's see what happens all right adding power as i add solar degenerator with the heater on we completely lose that sine wave and we lose the voltage i don't know what's going on there so it doesn't like resistive heating that much that seems to work overload okay so the leox inverter did not like the solar degenerator combined with the hair dryer it didn't like the solar degenerator combined with the electric heater so we're going to go ahead and do a hairdryer which is not a variable resistance load so this has a variable controller on it which that might be causing a problem because it's kind of a variable resistor in there that might not be a good combo with other heating elements so it's got the heater on the floor going at maximum 1250 watts i'm going to add hairdryer to it let's see what we get and i'm watching over here the sine wave and the voltage as well to see what happens 2050 watts oh it overloaded but it was 117 volts with a pure sine wave okay sine wave still looks good at 600 watts let's add some heat now we're close to 2 000 we're down to 114 volts that's totally acceptable 60 hertz sine wave still looks good let's go ahead and run it at where i know it'll run let's see if we can get at least five minutes out of it and what kind of noise we get out of the inverter stopwatch enabled loads enabled so we're gonna run about 1950 watts and see how long we can go getting some fluctuation uh-oh the hell that was weird there it goes again a hairdryer just shuts off oh we seem to have an issue watch this folks we're at 1900 watt look at that the voltage drops to 75. what the heck's going on so that was strange we got some really odd behavior from the leok inverter when we were running it at around 1900 1950 watts for several minutes i don't know if it's a heating problem or what the air coming out the back was pretty warm one thing to note is that the fans are running on this even though i was running an ac load on it i could barely hear it let's see what kind of decibels we're getting under 45 decibels so there are the results of the inverter test kind of strange now i did run this big heater that i have for probably 15-20 minutes to discharge this a little bit to do some other tests it had no problem running the heater by itself whenever i added anything else to that including the solar degenerator heat gun or that hair dryer it started to quag out a little bit it didn't really handle the heavy loads it seems fine at 16 1700 watts when i was pushing it to 1950 you guys heard the hairdryer basically conk out and then the voltage dropped on the inverter to 75 volts which is insane so i don't know if it's because this thing was getting hot and it was like thinking about shutting down but quite didn't i didn't smell anything coming out insulating burning although this was putting out 112 degree heat which is kind of warm coming out of an inverter regardless i still think the invertebrateness is pretty good it has a really strong sine wave it holds the voltage very well as long as you don't push it too hard once you start getting above 1800 it starts acting funny so keep it under 1800 i would say 16 1800 is probably the most you ever want to push out of this inverter so take that with a grain of salt i don't think that the minor issues i've seen here with the solar degenerator and heater means this is a no buy or a bad inverter by no means it seems to self-protect just fine but that is a weird situation when it gets up close to 2000 watts where it cuts the voltage and does weird things like that so i stress that if you own a leok or if you plan on buying a leock that you keep those inverter loads under 1800 watts where the voltage is still stable if you exceed 1800 watts and it drops voltage really hard like that there are some appliances that could get damaged all right max charge rate test we're now using my variable voltage charger to pump power into the lioc now last time i did this i blew up the solar controller and the lioc and it became completely useless this time i'm not going to exceed 300 watts i know i typically do push them to their limit but i know how sensitive the input is on this they got warnings all over the back of this to say do not exceed 300 watts do not exceed 35 and a half volts so we're not going to do it this time because i don't want to burn this thing up and there goes the dim screen so i was telling you before the screen will dim if you wait long enough so 12.6 volts we're getting 113 watts totally expected let's go ahead and bump this up to 13.6 a running vehicle and we're up to 124 watts so let's take it to low and solar panel voltage 18 volts well we're up to 176 watts now so the mppt is not only kicking in it's doing it very quickly you can see as i adjust the voltage this thing just immediately climbs up on the wattage so upper end single solar panel 24 volts we're now up to 232 watts now we know this thing can take 300 watts but 35.5 volts so let's go ahead and do 35 volts okay we're 35 and a half volts it's actually 345 watts uh that's kind of bothering me here we go that's maybe a little safer so while it does say that the cap is 300 watts it's pretty easy to exceed that if you're above 30 volts so just remember don't put more than one solar panel on this unless you do it in parallel so unlike a lot of other solar generators where they want you to put the panels in series the leock wants you to put the panels in parallel in fact they give you these to tell you put them in parallel because if you put two panels in series on this you're going to burn up the solar controller so don't do it put them in parallel you don't want to exceed that 35 volts because like i showed you in the prototype video i smoked it in under a minute so i'm not going to do it or this one do note that the leock does have three inputs on it now the prototype only had two inputs they do have this new connector on it which is basically an xlr connector and you can pump 300 watts into this this connection does not have any kind of solar controller or anything built into it this input here is the same input that came on the prototype that has the pretty much useless circuit breaker which did nothing for me preventing from blowing up the prototype but it's there it does say solar input 10 to 35.5 volts 300 watts maximum so this is an anderson connector so you would typically run your solar panels into this now if you do want to run more than 300 watts of solar panels you have to run this other connector and in that case things get a lot more complicated now you have a couple of options depending on which perks you got on the campaign this is the extra charger that you can get as part of a perk this has the xlr connector on it so you would just plug this in and then you can plug this into the wall you can do this at the same time you have it plugged into the wall here so you can actually do double ac charging on it let's see how fast that is okay first let's plug it directly into the wall and see what kind of charging we get okay we're getting 284 watts so now let's go ahead and plug this in now we've bumped up charging to 524 watts so you can significantly speed up the ac wall charging on this just by plugging in that additional ac wall charger but what else could you do with that input well you can actually put solar into it as well it's just kind of complicated so if you opted for the perk to allow additional 300 watts of solar charging they didn't put it inside it gave you this cheap 10 amp mppt controller that you have to hook up yourself let me show you for those of you who are not comfortable with wires electrical hooking up solar and all that you're not going to want to do this okay i'm going to tell you right now you're not going to do this comes with this mppt controller this is something you'd met on the wall right i don't know maybe you can just screw it to the side i'm sorry this is the most ridiculous thing i've ever seen when it comes to solar charging with a solar generator they put one controller inside why did they just put a bigger controller in it get rid of this crap put a larger controller into the last 600 watts why do this funky multiple input solar control external stool controller thing anyway so it looks like they went down to the local hardware store they picked this up off the shelf probably they have this really cheap cable this isn't even solar cable this is like something made out of a extension cord like a 99 cent extension cord you get at walmart then they put the xlr connector on the end and you plug that in and because it's plugged in directly to the battery this turns on because it's getting powered by the leock through that port so how do you hook up solar to this well i hope you're good with stripping cables and stuff because you have to actually strip your own cables and put them into these inputs they don't provide anything for you to do this so they give you this which plugs into the leock but now you have to wire your solar panels into these little tiny connectors so basically what you can do is you can find an adapter online that's a pigtail basically mc4 connectors like this and on the other side just be bare wires this has an anderson on it but let's pretend it's bare wires then you can put those bare wires into here make sure you don't get them wrong because there was a positive and a negative you don't want to get those backwards or it won't work could potentially fry this i find that completely unacceptable absolutely ridiculous i think this is the worst solution they could have ever come up with and it's definitely my biggest gripe i decided to go ahead and bow to the absurd and hook up my variable voltage power supply to the mppt external controller that they give you and i found out something very interesting right away because this is a 24 volt battery you can't charge it with less than 24 volts so that means you have to have at least two solar panels in series on this mppt controller in order for it to work right now i am pumping 28 volts into this controller now it's powered up and it shows that solar because this is a fake solar array that solar is coming in it shows a little arrow it's showing that it's charging the battery but you come over here on the lioc the liax shows zero it's not charging at all now i have to bump up the voltage above 28 volts in order for this to start charging so let's bump it up to 30. oh you see the lights kicked on did you see the little bling stars the little bling lights come on telling you that it's charging so now at 30 volts it's bringing in approximately looks like about 190 it's going up and down it can't make up its mind 30.5 there it settles down to 270 watts so right away it just goes ahead and just takes all the power that this thing can give it so you have to run two solar panels in series if you're going to use this external mppt controller that they give you now this can handle up to 60 volts so that means you can put two pretty big panels in series like you could put a couple of you know probably 200 watt 250 watt solar panels in series as long as you don't see the 60 watt the 60 volts on this controller you should be all right so let's just go ahead and give it everything we got interestingly nothing is happening why is it not and why is it not working it's still showing pv going in well this is very interesting it's not charging now let's go ahead and shut it down let's bump it back up again nope the leop is just not charging oh there it goes okay let's try that again i want to crank it up i want to crank it up all the way let's take it up to 51 volts this can output i believe 10 amps but this can do 500 watts so basically i'm feeding the leok 500 watts right now we'll see how much it's actually taking so it's taken 260 watts out of the 500 that this can provide through the mppt controller so lesson learned here is you actually do lose power with this box because i'm feeding it 500 watts this box is consuming some of that in order to convert it to the proper voltage to give to the leop the leox only charging at 265 watts when you saw the previous test where i was using the actual built-in controller we're able to exceed 300 watts no problem so that tells you that there's an inherent inefficiency with this controller this is not a good controller it's a cheap 10 amp mppt i'm surprised they even provided something like this with this product it's kind of a disgrace to be honest now there's one other thing i notice about this wonky solution i am basically changing the voltage coming into this mppt controller i'm going from basically all the way down to all the way up and i'm fluctuating it like there'd be clouds coming by so when a cloud comes by it goes over your panels panel voltage drops and that could you know sometimes that confuses mppt controllers bad ones so what i was sitting and doing is i'm just fiddling around off camera adjusting the voltage up and down i noticed this thing doesn't charge all the time so right now i'm going to turn the voltage all the way down let's assume that the solar panels got disconnected now we're going to go ahead and turn them back up we know we need at least 30 volts well now nothing's happening right i don't know why 33 volts okay now finally it's kicking back in where our maximum 270 watts it doesn't matter what voltage you put in 270 watt seems to be the maximum through this controller okay let's go ahead and crank it up because hey the sun's out there's no clouds let's crank up the voltage all the way the mppt controller freaks out and now we're not charging again so i'm pumping 500 watts into this mppt it's coming into the leock but nothing's happening it's not charging now i can turn the voltage back down again it's still not charging i'm turning it all the way down to 32 30. it's still not charging okay i have to turn it all the way back down and then i can turn it up again it's still not charging these connections are good oh there it goes it just took a few seconds there but it did actually decide to go ahead and charge again let's go ahead and crank up the voltage and see if it stops there it goes again i only put 40 volts in and it stops charging this solution doesn't work my suggestion to anybody who still hasn't bought this who's planning on buying it now don't bother with this perk okay just get the layoff charge it with the 300 watt solar and just consider that good because this solution i can tell by testing on the bench this isn't going to work in real life because the voltage goes up and down when there's cloud cover big cloud comes over your panels the voltage drops and then when the clouds go by the sun comes back out the voltage goes up this should detect that and correct it is not the leock doesn't have a problem it's this little box that has the problem so i'd suggest getting your own good quality mppt controller to hook up to this if you really need to have that second set of solar inputs as you can see from the results of the max charge rate test we do have some mixed results again the ac input and the built-in mppt controller work flawlessly but the add-on mppt is really sketchy when it works it provides up to 260 watts of extra solar power however i had issues getting that to work consistently as for other findings if you want to turn off the blingy light show you just double tap the power button and a light show will stop and previously when you turned on the lyok there was an insanely loud beep that would wake up the dead now it's more of a little chirp every time you turn it off and turn it on you get the chirp now this has been toned down significantly from the prototype but i still don't understand why you have to have a beep of any kind every time you turn on and off the product now let's go ahead and demo the feature that most of you are buying this for and that is the ups or uninterruptible power supply feature now on the back you have a regular ac plug that you would see like on a backup computer computer monitor or something like that uses a standard cable you can get anywhere so we go ahead and plug that in and this is a 15 amp connection so you can push up to 15 amps through this cable and now on the back side i'm hooking up my kilowatt meter which is going to tell us how much power is actually coming through this cable going into the leock and you can see here we're charging from the wall outlet at 286 watts so that's typical so if you turn the inverter on now you have a ups which means you can plug something into this and it will power it as long as there is power in the battery so i have this 1600 watt heater okay you can see the light is on on the heater and it's now pumping out a lot of power but nothing's showing up on the screen that's weird isn't it well no because it's passing power from the wall outlet into the liac bypassing the batteries completely and powering the outlets down here so the battery's not being used at all in fact the battery is still charging at 286 watts so this will charge while it's passing through power directly from the wall so over here we have just over 1600 watts going in but what happens when you actually cut the power so let's pretend nearby lightning strike power outage you heard a click and then the leop instantly takes over within 20 milliseconds switches from external power to internal power so it's a pretty fast switch over i don't think it would affect computers or anything like that 20 milliseconds is fairly fast unless you're running some really really sensitive computer so now you see we're pulling 1250 watts so the lioc is now powering the load while the power is out so power's out nothing changes for you because the load is still powered so you can still be on your computer still watch tv power air conditioner power heater whatever you're doing okay so now the power comes back on you hear the click you see all the numbers change and now it's passing power back through the liac again and not using the battery in fact the battery is now recharging so you can see how this works as a ups so it doesn't matter if the power is on or off it still continues to power the loads as long as you have the inverter on so what do i like about the leock well besides the high cycle life lithium iron phosphate batteries which is now becoming a lot more commonplace in the solar generator industry it definitely has to be that built-in true ups relay that's got to be the main cool feature here and the next coolest feature has to be the three-way charging where you can actually charge this from three different sources at the same time to get this thing to charge very quickly so what don't i like about the leock well the absolutely worst feature by far has to be the ridiculous external mppt controller workaround thing they got going on here it makes absolutely no sense and it doesn't even work right the first cloud that passes overhead or shadow by your cat just completely kills the input this is utter trash what leop should have done was just upgrade the mppt controller inside of this from 300 watts to 600 watts and been done with it i'm sure they decided against that because they wanted to shave a few bucks off the price and that brings us to the best part about the leock its current price when i reviewed the prototype last year they were crowdfunding for 9.99 amazingly they're still selling these through the indiegogo in demand storefront for only 10 49. now before you all tune out and go running away because i said indiegogo i want you to all know the crowdfunding bit has been long over they succeeded in the campaign and they got fully funded in fact leock is now shipping these exact same retail version out to customers right now many of you been chiming in at my facebook group the hobo tech crew and talking about your lyok and sharing photos so if you already got your leock feel free to come on over to the facebook group and post the photo and talk about it so what's the competition at this price point and feature set there really isn't much competition to be honest i'm not even sure how leo is even making a profit here the blue id ac 200p is likely the main competitor as it offers main the same features except it doesn't have a built-in ups and it runs about 600 bucks more although the blue eddy does have much better dual charging ability fantastic mppt rock solid true 2000 watt inverter it also offers better power delivery charging and wireless charging along with a fancy touch screen and a 25 amp dc output but as the saying goes you get what you pay for and that's the case here that being said the leok can't be beat with a stick if you just want a basic lithium iron phosphate sodium with basic charging a basic inverter with basic 12 volt and basic usb you can't go wrong this product is aimed at the hardcore value customer someone who wants a lot of usable power with a long life battery they just need a decent inverter they want to get it at a dirt cheap price and they don't mind waiting a little bit to charge the base model and they don't mind moving around 70 pounds this product is not for somebody who wants the absolute best on the market nor is it for the portable crowd as the leok really pushes the boundary of the word portable if you want all that you're gonna have to go to jack or your blue eddy and expect to pay more for it recommended solar leock does sell their own 100 watt panels and they're okay for the best deal you're going to want to get the leok perk that includes two of their 100 watt solar panels for 15.09 otherwise you can shop at hobotech.tv amazon click on solar kits and that'll take you down to the best deals on rich solar bouge rv and renegy there you'll find flex panels rigid panels of stands suitcase kits and even the elusives state of the art sigs panel which can take a bullet and keep on ticking remember that you can easily run up to two 200 watt solar panels or three 120 watt solar panels in parallel into the leock before you max out that 20 amp input on the back i'm constantly asked every time i do a large solar generator review can it run an air conditioner well here's your answer [Music] so there it is it's running this air conditioner no problem so if you're interested in the leop there is a link in the description below that takes you directly to their page where you can buy one of the production models right now thanks for watching if you learned something today don't forget to give me that thumbs up below and if you're not a subscriber already you know what to do that's it for now till next time odin commands you to like and subscribe and clean my litter box now if you're curious what i'm using the old prototype leo for that has the burned out solar controller well i'm using it as a ups to power this big ice co freezer which i have set to freeze and i have a deep freezer here so these are all packed full of meat and veggies ready for the apocalypse [Music] [Music] so you

Channel: HOBOTECH

Views: 153,989

Rating: 4.9066148 out of 5

Keywords: LEOCH, LEOCH retail, LEOCH production, leoch power station, leoch solar generator, UPS solar generator, leoch generator, LIFEPO4 generator, UPS generator, UPS power station, hobotech, dirt cheap solar generator, battery power station, solar generator, portable solar generator, cheapest generator, DIY generator, portable power station, battery generator, bang for the buck generator, best solar generator, DIY solar, backup generator, silent generator, lFP generator

Id: 9hLrcpMTnak

Length: 34min 53sec (2093 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021