For the past few years I have been interested in buying a portable power station but I wasn’t sure which one to buy. This year I made up my mind, thanks in part to the availability of power stations with built-in Lithium Iron Phosphate or LiFePO4 batteries. While a typical Lithium Ion (or Li-Ion) battery is capable of going through 500 charge/discharge cycles before losing significant capacity, many LiFePO4 batteries are said to be capable of 2,500-4,000 cycles! That’s great!

I looked at portable power stations from Bluetti, Jackery, Goal Zero, Rockpals, EcoFlow and others but the one which really caught my eye was this Anker 535 model. It features a 512WH battery and a pure sine wave AC inverter which can output 500 watts continuously. Other outputs include three USB-A connections, one USB-C connection and a car power port for devices you’d normally plug into the DC output in your vehicle. It also has a built-in LED light for general “night light” or reading light use and that light includes a flashing “SOS mode”.

I purchased this a few weeks ago through Amazon although the same deal was available through the official Anker website. The retail price is $599 but I often see coupons which bring the price down to $500 and, when I bought it, the coupon brought the price down to $450. This device can be charged with solar panels if the panels output 12-28 volts. The unit charges at a rate of just a bit more than 100 watts. Even if you aren’t using solar panels with this, it comes with an AC charger and a power cord to charge from a car’s DC port.

If you are camping, traveling in an RV, wanting to use a laptop or a drone in the middle of nowhere, wanting to use a CPAP machine when you’re sleeping in the woods or just looking for a convenient back-up power source during a power failure, this could be a great item for you! If you want to go off the grid but still have power, try one of these.

Sometimes, when devices like this are sold with solar panels (or when they are simply sold as being capable of solar charging) they are referred to as solar generators.