(whooshing noises) (adventurous music) (ice clanks) (blender whirs) (mugs clank) - Off-grid living is becoming
more and more popular as both a way to combat
the rising cost of housing and to clock out of this
increasingly connected world, even if it's just for a little bit. But sometimes you need technology to get away from technology. So when Jackery reached
out to sponsor this video, featuring their Explorer
line of power stations, my writer Colin immediately
thought of his friend Morgan. He's a photographer who's
been living that van life in a ski resort parking
lot for about a year now. With some serious tech deficiencies. So we're going to drop
a tech bomb on his van and bring his mobile editing
rig slash living accommodations into the 21st century. And we're going to
learn a little something about van living while we're at it. (electronic music) First things first, this
is the star of the show: the Jackery Explorer 1500. This little machine is absolutely stuffed with genuine Panasonic 18650 cells just like these ones. 130 of them, to be precise. That means there is a
veritable buttload of power crammed into this package. Slightly under 1500 watt hours. And these 110 volt AC outlets are, honestly they're just insane. We took the little brother of this, the Explorer 1000, and
hooked up an RTX gaming rig, and HDR monitor, and filming lights (screams in pain) all at once. As for the Explorer
1500, it'll do 1800 Watts of sustained load and up
to 3600 Watts of peak load. So toast? No problem. Blended avocado for your toast? Kind of awful sounding. I prefer sliced. But theoretically possible. Then, over on the DC power side of things, we get one of my favorite feature: USBC power delivery, up to 60 Watts worth, along with two USB type
A's for good measure. Now let's talk about what
we're going to hook up to it. Initially, we considered building a PC to replace the current setup in here, but seeing as Morgan's
living that mobile life, oh, and he's a Mac user, we opted for a shiny new M1 MacBook Air. Sorry, PC guys. The truth is, Apple Silicon really does offer
class-leading power efficiency and, with the thermal pad mod, which we have pre-applied of course, the Air manages just about
identical performance to the M1 MacBook pro. We did kind of blow the budget on this, but Morgan's a cool guy, right? - [Colin] Definitely. - Okay, then. For a monitor, we went with an LG 27GL850. I actually named this
the best monitor of 2019. It's absolutely overkill. I mean, it's sports a one
millisecond response time for that extreme gaming, but it's an engineering sample
that we were able to spare and for 144 Hertz display, it is remarkably color accurate. Colin calibrated this one for Morgan and we got the delta Es down to just 2.85. That is going to be worlds
ahead of this old MacBook and should handle photo and
video editing comfortably. But where's all that video to go? Ah, that's where Lacie's
Rugged Raid Shuttle comes in. This is a big step in the
right direction for Morgan. It's like baby's first data redundancy. Inside, there are two four terabyte drives along with a raid controller. That means you can either run it in raid-0 for a relatively speedy
eight terabytes of storage, or you can go big galaxy brain and use raid-1 giving you four terabytes of fully redundant storage. That means that one of the
drives inside could outright fail without losing any data. And this is something most
folks might not consider, but in a mobile, read:
vibration heavy environment, hard drives are just plain,
not going to last as long, even with a rubber bumper. Friends do not let friends lose data. And all of this is going to be connected to this Soho dock from CalDigit. It lets us run a single USB type C cable out to the MacBook for
charging, data, and video, and then from there we
can run display port up to our monitor and connect
to the hard drive over USB C. And everything will of course be powered by the Explorer 1500. And we threw in an Amazon soundbar for good measure. But while the outputs are awesome, the inputs are where things
get even more interesting. With the Jackery Explorer, sure, you can charge from the wall with this chonky 300 Watt wall charger. But the last time I checked, running an extension
cord out of the ski lodge across the parking lot
is mostly frowned upon. Mostly. So for true off-grid power, the Explorer 1500 can handle up to 600 Watts of solar input with solar panels (grunts)
like these bad boys. These turn an Explorer into
what Jackery likes to call a solar generator. So each one of these panels will output a hundred Watts at peak. That gives us, with four of them, a total of 400 Watts,
meaning that in theory, we could fully charge our Explorer 1500 in under four hours. Now in practice, especially here in BC, you are unlikely to get
the peak output from these. But even so, we're looking at comfortably being able to charge up by day and work or watch Netflix all night. And of course, it can also
be hooked into 12 volt power and do stuff off the car's alternator. That is a bonkers amount of flexibility. So this is it, hey? - Yeah, this is it. - I mean, I definitely
enjoy that house life with, you know, three kids and all. So I don't know if I'd want
to cram all them in there. - Oh no, they'll fit. - Sell me on the digital nomad life. - All right, well, here it is. - It's a lot bigger than it looks. That's not, I don't,
I keep trapping myself in that's what she said things. It's way bigger than I expected. (laughs) - I mean when you paint
everything white inside, - Yeah. - [Morgan] It looks bigger. It's like the TARDIS, but the
TARDIS was not white inside. - So show me around. Show me what I need. - Yeah. All right. - Okay. - Well all you need is a-- - Okay, why is this seat backwards? - Oh, it's on a swivel. - No! - [Morgan] yeah, yeah. (chair squeaks) It's loud, but it's on a swivel. - That's sick. - [Morgan] Yeah. - You could sit there and like, - Yeah. - Just be like hanging. - Yeah. You can discuss business
or problems of the world or anything you'd like. - Okay, now, I recognize this. - What have I done? - Oh, no.
- Oh, God, there's all the-- - Sorry, sorry. - Oh no. - You guys weren't supposed to-- - Yeah, I'm a short guy, but like, I'm easily comfortable
walking around in here. - You're, yeah. - [Linus] So then, there's like vents. - Yeah, so under, underneath you is a diesel heater. - Oh, seriously. - And it just pumps out heat like you would not believe when it's on. - [Linus] And what about this one? - And that is just going, a vent into my battery compartment. - Sink, I mean, what do you hook up to? - [Morgan] There's a
water tank under here, and then I got my food, more
storage for some camera bits, and then that's all my
ski stuff and camping gear at the back. - [Linus] Show me the workflow then, so what's your editing setup? - Right now? - Where are you gonna sit? - Right now, my setup is this. - No, no, I don't want to see that. Get that out of here. (Morgan laughs) Horrible. Are you a standing worker? Like you're standing desk kind of-- - Yeah, well, like, pretty active dude. - Yeah. - So I figured we'd go with
the stand-up desk for now and yeah, this would be it. This thing can go against the wall here, but we put it on that
swivel so I could sit here or I could just lean up
against the wall there. - Right. - By bringing this out like that if I wanted to get a little comfortable. - Or you could lie in bed. - Or I could lie in bed and watch a movie if we faced it that way. Right? - Okay. The skylights. You put those in, right? - [Morgan] Oh, the
skylights were in the van. Already, in the roof. - [Linus] Oh, really? - Yeah. The only thing I did not build in this van were these frames, which my dad built. - Wow, so that ended up taking up a lot less space than, oh, is that the old one? - [Morgan] That's, that's
the original one, yeah. - The capacity that would
have been dog (beep). All right. - That is good enough only
to run the house electronics. - That's a glorified car battery. Pretty much. I still don't think I would
want to have three kids in here. - They could fit in-- - Oh, the little cave, yes, they could fit in there (laughs) - You could stuff em-- - Got all the extra blankets just in case the diesel heater. - Yep, so all my clothes and whatnot. - Putts out or whatever? Do you worry about that? Like emergency supplies in case... - I do have, like, I have
a camping box down here with like a minus 10 sleeping bag and all that sort of stuff. - Right. - So if I was in like a bad situation. - By the way, can I
just say my favorite mod in this entire thing? This right here. - [Morgan] Yeah. - 'Cause like, what is
up with that, right? That's like, that's the
Linus tech tips way. I like it. This is fricking awesome, man. - This is all you need. - So the last thing you're going
to need to be truly on grid off the grid, is like a Starlink
connection or something. - Yes. - Well I hope you guys enjoyed this epic van life tech makeover. Thanks again to Jackery
for sponsoring this video. Thanks again to our neighbors for backing up into their unit. Thanks again to Morgan
for, you know, providing us with his van to use as a set for the day. If you guys want to check out one of Jackery's power stations, we're going to have the link down below. And if you haven't got enough
of this kind of outdoor tech, then maybe check out our ultimate camping battle station video. It was a bit of a weird
one, but it was super cool. And I would actually kind
of love to revisit it with one of these instead of
that diesel or gas generator or whatever it was. Getting that thing up to the
camp site was a nightmare.
This is just a long commercial
I'm actually pretty disappointed they didn't build an energy efficient PC in this video. It would have been a great sequel to the energy efficient PC video they did a while back. That vid was a jumping off point for my 12v gaming pc build, but I would have loved more tips in the process of fine tuning a rig.
Basically a Jackery ad, they do jobs like that a lot, and of course it's a business and they have to make money over at LTT too.
Doesn't mean it can't be interesting, even though it's probably no kind of "deep dive", just a "buy Jackery now" thing.
I want this so bad lmao