I recently acquired three Jackery power stations for use in our trail races that we put on. I have the goal of not using gas powered generators at our events (whenever feasible), and so I stocked up on a few different power stations for the different aid stations. I charged them up and they seemed to work fine, but I didn’t have any use for them right away. Until this afternoon….

A wind and rain storm blew through the neighborhood this afternoon and suddenly the power dropped like a rock. No fizzle or fade, just dropped. I still had some work to do this afternoon and my son was about to start his Twitch stream, so the timing really sucked. After a few minutes of feeling resigned to our fate I suddenly thought, “Wait! I’ve got power!” I looked in the corner of my office at the three boxes and started to make a plan of attack.

First up, get internet going again. I grabbed a power strip and plugged in my router and modem and then plugged all of that into one of the 240Wh Jackery’s. Within a few moments we had precious WiFi permeating the house. Total draw on those two items was hovering around 16W. That gave me plenty of hours on those two components.

Next, get my son’s rig up and running. He uses a desktop for his streaming so I grabbed the 500Wh Jackery for that purpose. We got the computer up and running and then I grabbed my USB powered light system to replace his standard 120V lights. All totaled it’s drawing around 45W of power. Again, plenty of power for many hours. Also, to ensure that nothing has to get disconnected when the power comes back, I plugged in the battery to the wall so it would start recharging as soon as power came back.

Finally, I plugged my laptop setup into another small 240Wh Jackery. However, my 4K monitor was drawing a LOT of power, so I unplugged that and just used the laptop screen. That got me down to about 40W which would manage to keep me going for a while.

As I’m typing this the power just came back and everything kept working. The Jackery’s that are plugged into the wall started charging and should be back up to 100% very soon. Later tonight I’ll remove the batteries from the circuit and everything will be back to normal. This has been a great test of these units and they performed perfectly. It also has me thinking that getting a battery for my house solar system wouldn’t be a terrible idea, but they’re just not very cost effective. For now, the Jackery’s will do nicely.