Reference
What a Power Station Is Not
A portable power station is a box of stored watt-hours with outlets on the front. That is a useful thing to own, and the first three items on this page are the ones people get wrong in ways that hurt someone. Read those three even if you skip the rest.
It never goes into a wall outlet, a breaker panel, or house wiring
This is the first item on the page because it is the one that kills people. A power station, an inverter, or a generator connected backward into a home circuit pushes current out onto the utility line that the crew outside believes is dead. Line workers have been killed this way. The same connection also bypasses every overcurrent protection in the house, which is how these attempts start fires.
There is a legitimate way to power house circuits from a portable source, and it is not a cord. It is a transfer switch or an interlock, installed and permitted by a licensed electrician, so the house is physically incapable of being connected to both the utility and the portable source at the same time. That is an electrical trade job with a permit and an inspection behind it.
This site does not cover that work, does not describe how to do it, and does not describe any shortcut around it. Everything else here assumes you are plugging a device into an outlet on the front of the battery, the way you would plug into a wall outlet at a campsite.
Hard limits
- Do not plug a power station, an inverter, or a generator into a wall outlet in your home. There is no correct way to do this and no cord that makes it safe.
- Do not connect any portable power source to a breaker panel, a circuit breaker, a dryer outlet, a range outlet, or any point in the house wiring.
- A double-ended cord for this purpose, sometimes called a suicide cord, is exactly as dangerous as the name says. Do not make one, do not buy one, do not use one.
- Backfeeding endangers utility crews who are working on a line they were told is de-energized. They have no way to know your house is feeding it.
- If you want house circuits on backup, the phrase you are looking for is transfer switch, and the person you are looking for is a licensed electrician.
It is not a fuel generator, and this catalog has no fuel generators in it
People search for the word generator, so the word appears on product listings for lithium batteries. It is worth being blunt about the difference. A fuel generator makes electricity for as long as you feed it gasoline or propane, and it produces exhaust while doing so. A lithium power station holds a fixed number of watt-hours, produces no exhaust, and stops when the watt-hours are gone.
Every product in this catalog is the second kind. There is not one fuel-burning generator listed here, and there is no plan to add any. That means the site has nothing useful to tell you about oil changes, fuel stabilizer, or break-in hours, and it will not pretend otherwise.
Because the word draws people in, one safety point about fuel generators belongs here even though we do not sell them. Carbon monoxide from an engine is colorless and has no smell, and it can build to a lethal concentration in minutes in an enclosed space. A running fuel generator belongs outdoors only, well away from windows, doors, and vents, and never inside a home, garage, basement, crawlspace, shed, porch, or carport, including with the door open. The Consumer Product Safety Commission publishes this guidance and the fatality counts behind it. That is the whole of what this site has to say about engines.
Hard limits
- A fuel generator runs outdoors only, far from windows, doors, and vents. Never in a home, garage, basement, shed, porch, or carport, and an open door does not change that.
- Carbon monoxide has no smell and no color. You will not notice it before it affects you.
- A lithium power station produces no exhaust and is the only kind of unit in this catalog.
It is not a plan for medical or life-sustaining equipment
If someone in the house depends on powered equipment to stay well, that is not a shopping problem and this site is not qualified to help with it. Runtime arithmetic on a web page is an estimate built on assumptions about a load it has never measured, and estimates are the wrong basis for a decision that has a person on the other end of it.
The people who can help are the equipment supplier, who knows the actual draw and the approved backup options for that specific unit, and the electric utility, which in most service territories maintains a medical registry and a priority restoration list you can ask to be added to before an outage happens. Your local emergency management office can also tell you where a shelter with power is opened during a long event.
For that reason there is no medical or life-sustaining equipment anywhere on this site. It is not in the device pages, it is not in the Runtime Estimator, and it is not in the Load List Builder. Leaving it out is deliberate. A number we produced would look authoritative and would not deserve to.
Hard limits
- This site does not estimate runtime for medical or life-sustaining equipment, and gives no advice about powering it.
- Plan that with the equipment supplier and with your electric utility, before an outage, not during one.
- Ask your utility about its medical registry and priority restoration program while the power is on.
It is not an uninterruptible power supply
A UPS sits between the wall and a device and carries the load through the gap when utility power drops, fast enough that a desktop computer does not reboot. A power station generally does not do that. You notice the outage, you walk over, you plug things into the battery.
Some units advertise a pass-through or backup mode with a transfer time measured in milliseconds. Whether a given unit does that, and how fast, is a claim on that unit's listing and manual, and it is worth reading the manual before you assume a desktop or a network rack will ride through the switch. If a machine must not lose power for even a moment, a UPS is the product category for that job, not this one.
The solar panel is not in the box
Several of these units are marketed with the phrase solar generator. That phrase describes a battery with a solar input port. It does not mean a panel ships with it. On every power station in this catalog, the listing itself states that the solar panel is optional and sold separately.
This catalog does not carry solar panels at all. Because of that, the site does not estimate solar recharge times, does not recommend panel sizes, and does not compare charge controllers. Recharging here means a wall outlet, or a vehicle outlet where the unit supports it, on the schedule the manufacturer publishes for that model.
Hard limits
- No power station in this catalog includes a solar panel, and no solar panels are sold here.
- Solar generator on a listing means solar-capable, not solar-equipped.
It is not a number that holds up under a load it never met
The watt-hour figure on the side of a unit is what the manufacturer rates the cells at. What comes out of the AC outlets is less, because the inverter takes a cut converting stored direct current into household alternating current, and because a pack is not run to absolute zero. Cold weather takes more. An older pack gives back less than a new one.
Everywhere this site shows an hour count, it is an estimate produced by dividing derated watt-hours by a steady wattage, and the formula is printed on the page so you can see what went into it. It is a planning figure. It is not a promise that a specific unit will run a specific appliance for a specific time.