Hello, today I have something new for the channel. A channel first to take a look at a full power station. I am looking at a small one to start, in this case the EcoFlow River 2. This is quite a bit larger than a simple power bank, but effectively it is the same kind of thing. It's a battery in a box.
There are a lot of questions to answer for the power station like this. It has a ton of features, so there's a lot to explore and figure out. As always, I will check out what the usable battery capacity, how fast it charges, and what kind of power it can deliver. In this series, I try to answer the question.
which power bank do i want to get the videos get technical so hang on and always ask questions if you don't understand something the performance is measured and compared to near competitors in this video the power station will be reviewed to find out its charging capabilities to help you make an informed buying decision i'm slowly building up a list of power banks and now power stations tested and hopefully we'll find some better ones so that is why this video is here to find out if this is that better power station if you want to help support the channel there's a link to my patreon super button and my website down in the description. Special thanks to my patrons and channel supporters. This is the EcoFlow River 2 Model EFR600 256 Wh portable power station.
Let's get the box opened up and see what it comes with. The box is big and the product itself is fairly large. It is a large product to have on my bench compared to what I'm usually looking at too.
I'm going to need a bigger bench. In the box is the power station, an AC charging cord, and a DC charging cord. This thing has a lot of ports. Before we get too far, let's check out if this has any compliance marks or safety listings.
I wouldn't expect this to have a DOE mark since it's above the wattage rating considered for that mark. They still could make an effort to have low idle power consumption, so more things to check. A feature that this unit has is wireless connectivity via either bluetooth or wifi.
I'm not going to get into that here since there is already so much to look at, but it is nice to see that the capability is present. The power station claims that it uses lithium ion iron phosphate technology. which is also used in many electric vehicles and it is known for being a little more stable over a wider temperature range as well as having good longevity characteristics. That helps lead into the 5 year warranty on this device, better than any small power bank I have seen and very impressive. On the back of the unit it bears a safety listing for the Canada and US markets.
This is great this larger battery pack is taking safety seriously. We also see some specifications for AC power in and DC power in. There is also a table of numbers and specifics that talk about the unit power capabilities. Here we see the 120 volt nominal input rating and we can say it has no universal input voltage. The River 2 has an 8 amp input current rating.
This is higher than it will charge at but it's at this rate because it will pass current through to the front AC outlet when it's plugged in. The user manual is good and covers a lot of functions in great detail. Lots of things to check.
I doubt I will cover all of them. But essentially, you plug it in and it either charges or discharges. They state the modes of operation and the general statistics of the power bank. The capacity is listed in watt hours as the first number shown, and then the amp hours and voltage afterwards. Nice.
There are some very important warnings, like don't put it in a microwave or don't swim with it, but they do have some actually important ones like not recommended for medical devices, how to store it long term, and the usable temperature range. There is a warning that says don't use in a humid environment, but They don't provide a humidity range, which is not so great. What defines a humid environment? Is it the absolute water quantity in air or the relative humidity at dew point, wet bulb temperature? No idea.
Surprisingly, the user manual even covers connecting it to a solar panel. Not bad. On the website, they make claims that the device can charge lots of things, and I'm sure it can charge all the listed devices as well as power heaps of small AC appliances.
The device does have a claim that it will keep the power flowing, so it will act as an uninterruptible power supply with a 30 millisecond switchover speed to maintain the ac output something else to check the power station weighs about three kilograms and is about 7100 cubic centimeters in comparison with the other power banks it is much heavier and much larger but it also has more capacity in terms of the energy density though it's not great since there are a lot of other features in the box with the battery pack if you look at this in terms of a raw power bank capacity it is very low in terms of watt hours per liter or watt hours per kilogram at 30 and 73 respectively. Typically you'll see numbers closer to 100. No, you can't take it on an airplane. This is well above the limit for any carry-on type battery pack, so this is strictly road travel and something that has to be ground shipped.
The limit is 100 watt hours non-permitted and 160 watt hours with permission from the airline per pack, and this is a 256 watt hour, so no go on a plane. The display on this unit is just right if you ask me. It provides good information and is easy to read and is clear in various environments.
It provides enough information for the user to let them know how much time they have left or how much the charge state is at and what the power are in or out is, as well as any faults like overload or under or over temperature. There really isn't much else the user needs to know, which is why I think the app side of this and the Wi-Fi connection is a little bit redundant. This power bank has a multitude of inputs and outputs, starting at the USB end of things. The front panel has three USB ports, two USB-A and one USB-C.
The USB-A ports can deliver up to 12 watts each and are 5 volt only ports. The USB-C port is more advanced than it offers the power delivery protocol. This allows it to increase the voltage of this port to deliver more power to devices that are plugged in. In this case, this device has fixed output voltage modes of 5, 9, 12, 15, and 20 volts. It can deliver up to 3 amps, so maximum of 60 watts of output power.
Not bad. This port can also be used in the opposite direction to provide 60 watts of charging for the power station. The power is not shared, so none of the ports trigger renegotiation. The USB power does work while the unit is in charging and plugged in. An overload condition is testing when the fault condition occurs.
This could be a short circuit or a broken cable. The overload wattage will be on screen for the USB ports. Around the back of the unit is the AC power input and the DC power input. The DC power input allows this unit to be charged from a car at up to 100 watts or from a solar panel at up to 110 watts.
With the claimed capacity, it'll take around 3 hours to charge this with the DC port at its maximum power. The AC power in is a different story. This unit charges at around 330 watts from the wall. It does that with a power factor corrected circuit to maximize usage of the incoming AC power, which is also great.
Because of this high input power capability, this unit charges from 0 to 100% in 57 minutes. The idle power consumption of this unit is on the high side though. So, using this as a power adapter is probably not the best idea, but I'd say it's a little overkill for that too.
I'll have to compare it with some other UPS units to see if the idle power consumption is in line with other products in that market. The AC output on the front of the unit has some special features. This is a pure sine wave inverter that can provide the full 300 watts of output power while maintaining a nice, clean sine wave output. The DC output on the front of this unit is basically the battery voltage and 8 amps current limited.
This can deliver another 100 watts though. The DC socket on the front of the unit supplies this power. I didn't actually do any testing with this one since I had trouble finding reliable DC plugs.
The inverter is moderately efficient. Difficult to check but it ended up providing about 202 watt hours of output power from the 256 watt hour battery pack. So roughly 80% efficient. While the unit is plugged into AC power and charging, this AC output on the front acts as a pass-through.
The claims on this unit are the switchover time that this unit will switch from pass-through to inverter mode is 30 milliseconds to keep the AC output on. This is a small delay but inductive loads like a refrigerator may trip off if running while this changeover happens. This means this unit can act as an uninterruptible power supply or UPS. It isn't the primary function but the function is built in. I need to make a bigger load bank to get this unit into overload on the inverter side so I'll have to keep working on that.
Thankfully this device is marketed as using the watt hour terminology for its capacity. It makes it very easy to figure out how long devices will run. This value easily translates into the figures used for things like cell phone charging.
For example, if I need 30 watts for an hour to charge my phone, that's 30 watt hours. It is nice to see they're up front with the capacity on this unit. So we have the battery capacity of 256 rated watt hours.
I measured the output capacity at 217.5 watt hours through the USB-C port and 202 watt hours from the AC output. With the losses for converting the voltage to the output you end up with about 73% of the stored energy being sent to the output on DC and 68% on AC. This is not the best but it is still a strong performance on the DC side. On the AC side compounding losses are not so great for a smaller unit like this. The charging on this power station which tops out at 330 watts was also good but the charging efficiency ends up around 86%.
This lost energy is the price you pay if you need portable power. If everyone used this power bank in between, for AC to AC you'd need about 32% more grid capacity. As already mentioned, the charging time was well within the requirements.
In terms of the marketing claims for outputs, this power bank meets the basic requirements claimed. In reality, the real world performance does vary and will certainly be lower on paper, but this power bank looks good for running the claimed devices for the times mentioned. Except the blender. What? This power bank can run for about 3 hours and 37 minutes with a 60 watt load on the USB port.
On the AC side I got 1 hour and 20 minutes with a run time with a 150 watt load. This is good, and the unit never gets so hot on the outside or shuts down during any normal use conditions. The unit does have a fan in it. Here's a little clip of the sound that the fan makes. It is quite audible, but it does mean that the unit doesn't get too hot under any conditions.
The pack is ready to deliver its full rated power and recharge as needed anytime. The fan did not turn on while using the USB output, but it did turn on with any AC inverter output or charging enabled. In terms of value, this represents average performance. The extra features means it costs a bit more, even when compared with much lesser power banks. It is cost competitive.
This is a power bank, so value... to capacity seems important. In this case, you get various inputs and output types as well. Very fast charging, and an AC inverter for directly powering small devices.
So still, this is impressive on the watt-hour to dollar scale, not considering all those extras. Okay, overall, this power station is quite capable. It is a larger unit with tons of features. I am sure I haven't covered everything here. I really struggled to find much bad about this power station though.
I wish it was a little more efficient, I guess. Getting the most out of the battery pack would be a nice addition. There are really only small concerns or issues and some nice to haves, but other than that, the unit seems really nice.
The 600 watt marketing rating is confusing since that's really total output power. The AC inverter is 300 watts, the USB is 60 watts, the DC port is 100 watts, and the other two USB ports are 12 watts each. How does that make 600?
Anyway, so a little bit of confusing marketing really. The power meters aren't particularly accurate. They give a general indication of operating power though, so again, minor issue.
This does have a lot of positive though. This power station can do so much and manages everything in a very easy to understand and simple interface and display. I like that it can be charged very quickly, less than 1 hour, and it does so with very clean power usage, power factor corrected all the way. The ability to act as an uninterruptible power supply or UPS is another nice feature. It is not an online UPS and it doesn't claim to be.
but it does have the feature that it could keep some smaller appliances online longer than a traditional UPS. The multitude of DC output options mean you can use just about any device on this power station. The USB is very capable, offering three non-negotiating ports. Two at 12 watts for low power devices and one at 60 watts for laptops and things. This is a nice balance.
An extra 60 watt port or 100 watt USB port would always be welcome, but again, value is high, so keeping things reasonable, which it does. I think it finds a great balance of feature set and value. This will also charge from that USB port on front, but it will take a while. Of course if you needed more USB-C output power you can just plug in a power adapter.
This device also has WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. This is a feature I didn't get into, but you can manage timings and features, not on screen, through the app, as well as get more advanced power monitoring. Maybe I'll get into this app features in a future video.
I don't really have any direct comparisons for this yet, but we can look at the data compared with power banks I have looked at, which were of reasonable efficiency. This isn't the best for efficiency, but it is far from the worst. You will have to spend some extra energy to use the energy from this battery, as with all battery packs.
To use the DC output power of this device, you end up having to spend about 73% of the system efficiency. Okay, well this device does plug into the wall and use AC power, so as an AC power consumer it can get a power quality score. Sticker and end up on the database, but it isn't yet.
Power station is kind of its own thing, but we'll have to make it in the power bank category for now. Thanks for watching. Next, I'm going to be looking at a Beelink mini computer, specifically an older model because I think they can be had inexpensively on sales.
I know this won't be as popular of a topic, but I'm mostly focusing on what I do here, power usage. The power adapter that comes with it, and what else can power it. So, check the AllThings website linked in the description for upcoming videos. As always, I will see you in the comments section.
Thanks again, and goodbye.