Micro Solar Generator Buyer's Guide! Jackery vs Rockpals vs Expertpower

so today is going to be like the ultimate buyer's guide for solar generators and these are like micro solar power systems and they're super cheap they're typically around the 200 to 300 range and they have a battery they have an ac inverter they have a converter so that you can charge a usb devices and you might have like a 12 volt plug so on the far right we have the rock pals lineup and then in the middle we have the jackery and then on the far left we have expert power these are like the best sellers that you would find off of amazon and the first thing that you need to know is that the biggest cost determinant factor is going to be the battery size and the going rate right now is one dollar per watt hour so this is a 240 watt hour unit and it sells for 249 dollars so it's around one dollar per watt hour if you spend more than that like a tiny lithium goal zero you're overpaying if you spend less than that it's probably very very cheap and you want to avoid it so that's a sweet spot is one dollar per watt hour in this class of solar generator the next thing to look for is going to be the solar input limit so a lot of these will say that you can connect a 50 or 100 watt solar panel after testing these for two weeks on multiple occasions i found that you can over panel all of these safely and what does that mean that means that you can connect 200 or 300 watts of solar panel power even though the manual says 50 watts because these are designed to work with an amp source or like a cigarette lighter adapter and that is directly connected to a vehicle's starting battery so these have current limiting so that means that you can put as many solar panels as you want to it but you cannot exceed the max solar input voltage and for most of these that's going to be like 20 to 30 volts so if you have a 12 volt solar panel and you put like two or three of them in parallel and the voltage does not increase you can connect it to these and it will charge very quickly but understand that all of these have their own amp input limit and so even if you have a bunch of solar panels you will still be limited by the charge circuit board on the inside so the max solar input actually varies quite a lot and i used to think the jackery was pretty good but then i started testing these and i found out that other ones completely blow it away so we're going to get to that test later but understand that the max solar input is very very important and the best way to find this is if you look on the bottom or if you look in the manual it will say dc input so this one says 13 volts to 22 volts and 2.5 amps max and so to be able to charge this it will take like 7 to 10 hours if you look at this one it's actually smaller it only has 193 watt hours but it can handle 4 amps input max so it's almost double this one and this one's cheaper so yeah the testing later on in this video is going to be very cool to see i can't wait to show you guys and all of these generators have their own ac inverter and they're typically rated 200 to 300 watts in all of my testing i found that the ac inverter was pretty much the same efficiency for all of these and that the rated capacity was accurate but the rated capacity like this one says 240 watt hours it does not calculate the inverter losses so add an extra 10 if you want to calculate the exact capacity another feature is that all of these have some form of 12 volt output so that means that you can connect like a 12 volt fan or a 12 volt light and you can use small plugs to connect them directly to these solar generators what i found is you can buy these off of amazon and you can wire up your own 12 volt appliances and plug it directly into any of these solar generators and so on this one you have these plugs right here and some even have a cigarette lighter adapter so you can plug it into the output and on this one you have it right here and you can find these for super cheap off of amazon and even though all of these can output 12 volts the jackery is the only one that has a regulated 12 volt output and has a boost converter so it's 13.2 volts that means the performance of any 12-volt device connected to this thing will work really good compared to these ones um we're going to learn later in the test that it produces a lot more power like 50 percent more power in some instances with some 12-volt appliances and some of them even have a boost converter that does 24 volts at 3 amps and that's the rock pals none of the other ones have this and even though the jackery has better performance on the 12 volt output side the converter requires power and so you're going to have a 10 loss usually so using 12 volt from these will have lower performance but you'll have higher efficiency i personally would rather have better performance so i think the jackery is still the winner here but just understand that you're not going to get the full capacity from this thing the next thing to look for is the display screen so jackery has the absolute best display screen you can see the watts going in the watts going out and how much battery capacity you have left compare that to the expert power you have these little lights and it's pretty boring it doesn't tell you how much power is going in or how much power is going out it will tell you when it's charging or discharging and when it's low but it doesn't tell you how much power is going in and out of it this one actually has a screen but it doesn't tell you how much power is going in and out and the rockpels is actually a little bit different so it has the watts going out for the inverter but it doesn't tell you how much power is going in so the jackery is the clear winner when it comes to the screen the next feature is these small led lights and i thought they were pretty goofy when i first saw them and i thought i would never use them but i actually use them a lot the jackery does not have it and the mid performance expert power one doesn't have it but the expert power cheap one and all of the rock pals have led lights so that's a really cool benefit all of these batteries have the same chemistry of nmc or nickel magnets colbates oxide and so what that means is you get about 500 charge cycles and will drop down to 80 capacity but you can still use it um even if you have reduced capacity you guys can use these for like the next 10 or 20 years they won't just stop working they will stop working if you keep them in a hot environment that's probably the biggest killer of these solar generators if you leave them in a hot car these batteries do not like that if you charge and discharge very quickly in a hot environment then you're going to get a few years and then the reduced capacity will be down to like 30 percent so it won't make it as usable and the performance will decrease quite a bit and now that we have all of that stuff out of the way we're going to start testing these units and you're going to see how powerful they actually are so for the first test we're going to connect 200 watts of monocrystalline renegy solar panels and the two solar panels connect through my window to this watt meter and we're going to attach it to each of these generators and see how fast they charge and i've actually been doing this test like every single day for the last two weeks and i have the same numbers every time so check this out so the first one is the expert power and when you plug it in we're getting watts at 2.9 amps that is incredible considering the price of this thing it's awesome now let's plug it into the bigger one and this one supposedly has an mppt solar charge controller and this one doesn't and we're producing 56 watts so these things are practically the same input but this one's a lot cheaper and has less capacity right now we're charging the jackery and this is the 240 watt hour model it's only getting 28 watts of input and on the input on the jackery it says 30 watts and the largest number i've ever seen it hit was 40 watts so very limited this takes a very long time to charge now we're going to test the other jackery and see if it's any different right here we've got 27 watts 27 26 so pretty much the same thing so already the results are very impressive for expert power that's pretty much double the power input of these jackeries and now we're going to do the small rock pals this one does not have an mppt and it's only producing 30 watts so it's practically the same as the jackery which is not that good it's very slow all right guys moment of glory this thing is insane check this out it has mppt and it has the fastest charge rate i've ever seen it's producing 70 66 68 72 watts it destroys all of these other ones it's insane check it out we just hit 80 watts isn't that incredible that is so good and i've actually been taking notes of the max amp input in the max watt rating for the last two weeks and they all agree but the rock pals this one the maximum i've seen with this was 83 watts all the other ones were consistent around 30 to 60 watts depending on which one it is so this one is the clear winner for maximum input power but for the price this one blows the competition away but i should also stress that these are all at a low state of charge at a slightly higher state of charge you need to boost the voltage higher because these 12 volt panels do like 22 volts open circuit they work really well for these but if you're charging off of a cigarette lighter adapter in your car and your alternator is only producing 14.5 volts they will charge slower so you need to think about that also if you want consistent numbers for charging you need to over panel it so use 200 or 300 watts for any of these you won't be able to use all of it but you'll have a lot of power throughout the whole day when the sun is low so they claim that this one has an mppt and the jackery does not so we're going to see if there's any measurable difference in low light circumstances so right now we have about four to five watts going in 4.4 4.5 watts going into the jackery we have eight eight watts going into the rock pals so already we have double the power with the same amount of light so let's switch these two solar panels that are coming in and see if our results are accurate now that we switched the panels we have four 4.4 watts going into the jackery so the same as before we have 7.6 watts going into the rock pedals so the mppt makes a huge difference and you should always buy a solar generator that has an mppt in it so after that last test it got me curious i wonder how different it is with this one this one does not have an mppt but the amp limit is much higher than the jack green and guess what we've got 4.7 watts going into this one we've got 8.89 watts going into the rock pals so the mppt is very very important and i just thought about it and this one has an mppt as well so let's see how it compares to the rock pals so we've got 6.3 6.7 7 watts going into this one and we've got 9.7 watts going into this one so this one still is killing it but this one has an mppt function and beats the jackery and all the other ones in low light conditions now let's switch these to make sure our results are consistent and now the rock pels is producing 10 watts 9.8 10 and then this one's producing 7 watts so not as good as the rock pals but this one is absolutely better compared to the other ones without an mppt so yeah this one won the test for sure now what we're going to do is charge with my 24 to 12 volt converter and we've got 13.8 volts which is similar to an alternator so let's plug it in and the cheap one is producing 58 59 watts and now we're going to test this one and see what it produces we're only getting 18 watts 20 watts so this one needs a higher voltage it will charge way faster with the solar panel if you were to charge this with your car's alternator it would take forever and now we're going to test how fast the jackery charges and so on top we have 42 watts going in and on bottom we have 42 watts going into the jackery so whether you use a solar panel or your car's alternator the jackery doesn't care it will charge at the same rate now we have the rock pals tiny one connected and it's producing 28 watts so whether you charge this with a car or a solar panel it doesn't seem to care i actually forgot how well this one does in this test but let's see i've been testing the solar panels all week so yeah 46 watts we get half the power that means it will take twice as long to charge from a cigarette lighter in a car versus using solar power so you definitely need solar panels for this one and i want you guys to understand that the charge rate is very very important with this size of a battery if you spend more money on one with a larger battery it does not matter because it takes too long to recharge it no matter how much power your solar panels produce if these take you know 10 hours to recharge like the jackery how are you supposed to use that power with this one if it charges quickly you can use that power so even though this has a smaller battery this one will produce double the power of the jackery even though it's a lot cheaper and a lot smaller now we're gonna use a battery in my phone and we're gonna see how many amps we can push through the usb outputs so the first one i tested and these are in parallel so i don't need to test both of them right here we've got 4.8 volts and 1.7 amps and then with the qc port when i plug this in and this one has not decreased and we are pulling we are pulling 16 watts to charge my phone now we're going to do the expert power right here we have 4.9 volts and 2.3 amps and then for my phone it's only doing 5 watts so that's really not that good and i plugged it into a different one and we're getting pretty much the same numbers you can see that when i unplug this one this one jumps a little bit so that means that they are in parallel so yeah not that great usb performance wise now we have the jackery connected and it says 2.4 amps and it's producing 2.5 amps at 4.8 volts so that's really good this is pushing what it's rated for now let's connect this and see if it drops and it doesn't so you have two separate circuits and this one's producing five w 5.8 watts so yeah these are rated properly and that's pretty great now we're doing the rockpels and it has a normal usb and then the qc 3.0 18 watts and so from this one 2.2 amps at 4.8 volts and we're getting 16.3 watts so pretty much the same as the qc 3.0 port on this one and this one also has a usbc but i don't have a tester for that so we're just going to leave it now we have the rock pal so you have a qc on the bottom and the normal one on the top and we're getting 4.8 and 1.5 amps we're only getting like 5 watts out of the qc 3.0 so the usb on the rock pals for this one is pretty bad it might be because it's at a very low state of charge but this one's at a low state of charge and it's the same chemistry as well so yeah i don't know why the performance on this is just horrible so out of all of these the performance was not great on most of them so i think this one was the best especially for the price it pushed a lot of current and for a standard usb the jackery won this test so now what we're going to do is test the 12 volt output so the cigarette lighter on the jackery these little power plugs these outputs and we're going to see what the voltage is and how well they perform when we connect this 12 volt light to it and before we do this test i want you guys to understand that these are at low states of charge so that means that the output will be decreased because these output ports are directly connected to the battery so look at this when i plug it into this one we're getting 10.2 volts so at that low of a voltage for this 12 volt appliance we're only pulling 15 or 14 watts continuously now when i plug it into this one we have 10.7 volts so that means we are pulling 21 watts continuous and so when these are charged up to full they can power 12 volt appliances really nicely but when they are discharged a little bit the performance decreases a lot now we're going to test the jackery and you'll see the difference this one's at a high state of charge and this is at a low state of charge so when i plug it in we're getting 13.1 volts so that means we have 35 watts getting pulled from this port 31 watts 30 31 34 so there is a huge performance increase even at a low state of charge with this and whether it's at a high or a low state of charge it should give you the same performance and so yeah 30 watts 33 watts 28 watts so you're producing twice as much power at the output than these other ones because this is regulated there's a boost converter at the output and so you always have good performance out of the cigarette lighter plug but this comes at a cost you're going to have a 10 percent loss with these so even though these have lower performance they're more efficient but also realize that the jackery only has a cigarette lighter plug with these other ones including the rock pals you can buy these little adapter plugs and connect your devices directly to it but because the jackery doesn't have that what you have to do instead is buy these cigarette lighter plug adapters with wires and so you crimp your wires to whatever device you wish to use and then you can use 12 volt appliances with the jackery we'll only have one receptacle like for example check out this rock pals you have four of them so if you're running led lights or tiny 12 volt fans you might want to go with one of these or one of these so yeah let's continue the testing so we have these 12 volt power adapters at a low state of charge we have 10 volts so this light is only pulling 13 watts 12 watts but with the jackery it pulls double that and now we have the rock pals it's only a 10.6 volts and it's pulling 19 watts but yeah this is at a slightly higher state of charge than the other rock pedals so all of these other ones besides the jackery have the same performance at a low state of charge for 12 volt appliances only the jackery is really good at powering 12 volt appliances so you guys might be wondering what kind of solar panels should you use with these solar generators and jackery sells their own but it's 300 for a 50 watt one sometimes on sale you can get them for 200 and that's a rip off there is literally nothing special about this thing so if you're on a budget you should buy the 50 watt hqst monocrystalline solar panel and it works well with all of the solar generators in this video and if you can afford it you should hook up 200 to 300 watts of 12 volt solar panels you can use any solar panel on the market but you just need to make sure that the open circuit voltage is less than the solar input voltage limit on the solar generator and most of them can handle 22 to 30 volts so any of these will work but if you use two panels together you have to put them in parallel with some mc4 branch connectors also it's not a problem to use your own flexible solar panels if they're 12 volt panels um they're a lot cheaper than the ones the solar generator manufacturers sell i do not like flexible panels at all because they never seem to work after a year but you have that option but if your panel produces like 50 volts or something that's for commercial or residential application do not connect it to these solar generators it will burn it out you should also try to buy a solar generator that has an mc4 adapter cable so what this does is plugs into the solar generator and then you plug it directly to a 12 volt solar panel and this way takes seconds and we're already charging you just plug it into any of these solar panels and you can see that it's charging right now and if your solar generator doesn't come with this cable adapter you can buy one on amazon that will work for your solar generator so now let's talk about which one you guys should actually buy these ones are pretty cheap okay very cheap quality these are slightly better quality and the jackery is really nice i still like the jackery but it takes so long to recharge like it's insane how slow it is you can't even use this whole battery because it takes like two days to recharge under most normal circumstances so if it was me i would probably be going with the rock pals or the cheaper direct power one this one's still okay compared to like the jackery but it's not that great but the biggest downside to these is that if they are at a lower state of charge the output for the 12 volt receptacle will not be nearly as good as the jackery the jackery has a regulated one but you can actually build your own converter board and attach it to this i don't recommend beginners doing that but it's very easy to do but because these charge up so fast they're more likely to be at a higher state of charge like these literally charge up in half the time compared to the jackery or the other ones and the next one i would recommend is this one it actually works really well and for the price for the battery size and it can charge at 60 watts this would be actually a pretty darn good idea it gives you a lot more capacity than this one but it doesn't have the qc 3.0 charging port so what should we think about the jackery now it's still a very high quality product i mean the case that they use is super durable and they have like the best readout screen on the market the output's great but compared to the other ones that charge up twice as fast i will not be using these nearly as much anymore because i don't want to sit around and wait for them to charge but it's still technically a high quality product so i can still recommend it but understand what you're getting yourself into it's going to take like two days to recharge this thing and this little guy actually lost the competition in my opinion i mean the input was just as bad as the jackery so yeah it has a lot of other neat features it has a light has all this other stuff but god it would take like two days to recharge this thing with actual solar power i hope you guys found this video useful this was not sponsored by anybody i guess jackery sent me those out for previous video reviews but for this video it wasn't sponsored by any of these guys if you think that i was wrong about something or you have another solar generator that beats all of these please let me know i i would love to learn of one that's better than all of these so yeah thank you so much for watching and i'll talk to you later bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 722,929

Rating: 4.9250402 out of 5

Keywords: rv solar, will prowse, jackery, rockpals, expertpower, solar generator review, van life solar, #vanlife, vanlife

Id: 8k1URSZZ9uY

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019