Dirt-Cheap Solar Generator Setup from Amazon

0:00 I'm giving myself a budget of $250 to spend on a cheap solar generator setup and we're going to find out what it can run and what it can't I know exactly what I'm going to get ecoflow River 2 that's where we're starting for me it was between this one and the blue edti AC 2A both seem great I don't think you

0:19 could go wrong with either frankly but the ecoflow river 2 has a slightly higher battery capacity $239 but there's a $70 off coupon and it comes with a solar charging C that we need so I'm adding that to cart now we just need the solar panel and I think we could get away with a 100 watt solar panel this

0:40 wouldn't be a portable panel because portable panels are just way more expensive the ecoflow river 2 has A10 wat Max solar input and this is what I wanted to see there's a $58 100wt panel that might be within our budget let's quickly make sure this solar panel is indeed compatible with

1:00 the ecoflow river too so that uh Power station's solar input is 8 amps Max 11 to 30 volts 110 Watts 24.5 volts VOC that's within the limit and 5.2 amps ISC that is also within the limit so this very cheap 100 wat panel is compatible add to cart the subtotal is 297 but remember we have that coupon

1:25 proceed to check out 256 you've got got to be kidding oh wait free shipping free shipping that's got to get us below 248 I feel like I just won something place order order placed I know some people will say it's just cuz I got a good coupon but if you

1:50 have been seeing the sales and the deals on these power stations for basically all of 2024 and you know that is not abnormal and it's not hard to find that good of a deal on these things right now hell yeah everything arrived so let's unbox it I'm going to start with the solar panel to get it out of the

2:18 way okay so it is a 100 watt believe it is yes monocrystalline solar panel from ecoworthy next I will do the adapter cable to connect the solar panel to the power station this is ecoflow branded simple but long which I like the

2:43 ones I own of these are more like 2 feet so I'm excited that this is a lot longer and lastly the ecoflow river 2 portable power station got the manual here looks like a 12vt like car charging cord and then uh a little wall AC charging cord and of course the ecoflow river 2 power station

3:09 quite small as we expected but looks like it has all the stuff we need before we see what this setup can run we have to charge it so let's solar charge it so it arrived 28% charged and then to solar charge it I just plug the adapter cable into the cables on the solar panel so I just match male to

3:35 female mc4 connectors make sure this one connected and then I grab the xt60 port and I plug it in to the back of the power [Music] station and then after a second the solar pan panel should start

4:01 charging we should see an input pop up here at some point still not seeing anything okay all right let's check and we're just going to check if this end of the adapter cable has voltage okay it does have voltage 22 volts okay the panel is in a bit of

4:26 shade so let me move it out here and just see if that changes anything oh my God thank you I guess it was just shaded but it didn't wasn't even that shaded okay but there we go 62 WS charging from a 100 W solar panel it's actually not too bad I'm going to use this chair to prop it up at a slightly

4:48 better angle to try to get the most power out of it as possible look at that 78 Watts I'm just going to leave this out for an hour and we are going to come back and see how much it charges in that [Music] hour another good thing about going with a brand name like ecoflow or bluetti or

5:13 anchor is that they're going to have a good app so while I'm just inside cooking I can look at the app and see okay the solar panel is charging the power station at a rate of 74 watts in the power station is around 42% charged [Music] it's been exactly 1 hour and the battery is at

5:40 55% so this setup can solar charge the power station in 3 and 1/2 to 4 hours of good sun and solar charging is just one of four ways that you can charge this thing you can charge it from your car's 12volt socket using the included 12volt charging cable there we go it's charging at a

6:01 rate of it's creeping up it's maxing out at a charging rate of around 100 watts of course you can also use the included wall charging cable to charge it from an AC outlet let's see how fast that is it's making a little bit of noise and the charging rate settle at 365 watts in the app if you want you can adjust the

6:22 AC charging speed from 100 to 360 Watts so I'm actually getting a little bit higher than the max at 365 and you can adjust the car input charging speed if you want when you're charging it from your 12vt car socket and lastly this USBC Port is bire so you can charge via USBC there it goes

6:43 charging it right of 17 wats I plug the AC charging cable back in and if you're wondering what this is this is estimated time remaining uh so it says recharge time there's 12 minutes until it's full the last five 10% has been taking a while it said 5 minutes remaining for about 20 minutes now and I did turn it

7:07 down to 100 Watts charging speed uh just to just to you know keep the battery a little cooler but still it's been stuck at like 995 96% for a while so I don't know what's going on with this thing okay it took a little longer than expected but we got there now that it's fully charged let's see what it can run

7:27 so it can obviously charge your portable electronic I like your phone your laptop portable power bank a pair of bluetooth headphones and it can power them all at the same time but I also want to push this thing to find out what its limit is for starters you have the two AC Outlets

7:44 here which you can turn on and off just by pushing this button that turns on the power station's inverter so there is a bit of a high pitched woring noise that I can hear but what allows me to do is just plug in almost any device that you can plug in to a regular wall outlet and yes you can plug in two AC devices at a

8:01 time but to be honest these two outlets are pretty close together so at times you might have to get a little creative about how you connect your devices normally I'd be able to see the power output of these two lamps on the screen here right there but it's showing zero watts and this is a quirk I've seen of

8:19 more expensive power stations as well I just think they have trouble tracking the power output of low wattage AC devices you can also run 12vt DC devices up to 100 watt off of the power station's 12volt socket so you remove this little cap turn it on like we did with the AC outlet and then take your

8:38 device's 12volt plug and just plug it like that right in and the device turns on this 12vt chest fridge is a higher wattage device than those two lamps so we can see in real time how many watts it's using and we get an estimate of how long the power station will last this information is also all available in the

8:56 app so I can see output state of charge and the cool thing is I can turn the AC and DC outlets on and off remotely so let's turn this off there we go it turned off in addition to the estimate of time remaining on the screen you can calculate how long your device will run off the power station first you need to

9:15 know how many watts your device uses so look on the label or on the product page the label will be on the back or on the bottom most often and look for wattage and sometimes it won't list wattage it'll list current and voltage this one I know from the label on the bottom uses 0.55 amps at 12 volts ac so it uses 66

9:32 watts and then you take your power station's stated capacity in this case it's 256 wat hours and according to ecoflow you hair cut that by about 15% so we're going to multiply it by uh85 so 85% and we get 217 218 wat hours we divide that by the uh wattage of our device and we get roughly 3 to 3 and2 3

10:00 and a qu hours of runtime uh which kind of lines up even though this is only 90% charged at the moment it lines up with what we see on the screen devices don't always use their you know stated wattage often times it's a little less but it gives you a good estimate being able to find or calculate a device's wattage is

10:18 also key to knowing if you can run your device off the power station The River 2 has a stated power output of 300 watts I looked at my TV's power rating on the L C and I saw that it uses 165 Watts Max so I know I can safely run my TV off of this power station which is also how I knew I could safely run the 12vt fridge

10:40 off of the DC outlet because the 45 watts of power that it uses is less than the 100 wat DC limit ecoflow is a little vague if this particular power station could be used as a UPS so let's test it so first I'm going to plug the power station's charger into the AC outlet back here we're going to see what the

11:00 heck happens okay just plugged it in so it's now charging the power station at the same time that the power station is powering the TV now the TV it's running off of grid power and not the power station so we're going to see what happens when I unplug it okay it worked okay I'm honestly

11:22 impressed never mind unplug the wrong thing okay let's try this again I unplugged the right thing that time you can hear the power station turning on it worked the TV didn't cut off round two this time with the TV and a lamp Okay a little flicker with the lamp

11:48 it's pretty fast the UPS's switch over time is I think 30 milliseconds I don't think that's fast enough for some sensitive Electronics but I mean we saw it work for the lamp sort of and it worked for the TV so what is the limit then surely something this small can't run a kitchen fridge right well if

12:08 we look inside and we come over here look at the label and do the math it turns out yes for fridges like mine that use less than 300 watts this thing can run them at least in theory let's make sure I unplugged the fridge it's not on and I connected it to this extension cord here so let's plug it in I had to wait about

12:30 10 minutes for the fridge to start running again which is normal uh this happened the last two times I ran this thing off of a power station but now if you look it's using around 50 watts and it is indeed running off of the eof Flow River too since the device's wattage rating is the max amount of power it can

12:48 use you might be thinking what if I run a high wattage device on a low setting this blender for instance has a wattage rating of 1440 Watts but it also has 10 speeds so maybe it'll

13:13 run we got an error code and then I tried it again off camera and I got another error code so we you're not doing this again did the blender overload the power station which is what caused the error message well when I plug the blender in to the wall via a kilowatt thankfully the error message is

13:32 gone now so I can still use my blender I was a little worried about that when I turn it to the first speed setting which is what I was doing on the power station and we check the kilowatt we see it's only using around 80 Watts I didn't get an overload notification on the screen which can

13:49 happen here so I'm at the point where I'm kind of concluding and maybe I'm wrong let me know you know that sensitive high- powerered Electronics just shouldn't be run off of this power station that brings me to this thing's surge rating which is 600 WTS but it doesn't say how long that's for you have

14:05 to turn this feature on in the app it's called X boost there for whatever reason it just says it's ideal for shorter durations like hair dryers and drills and you can connect only one Appliance to avoid interference caused by voltage fluctuations so I've got a hair dryer and we are going to test it to see what

14:22 happens when we go over 300 watts this is my fiance's so hopefully it doesn't get damaged and this thing doesn't have like a circuit breaker as far as I can tell so if we go over 600 watts oh my God oh my God it turned on oh crap okay 300 watts 300 watts wait okay it's holding steady and we are

14:45 on oh my gosh what's happening okay we are on the I think medium heat low speed what happens what happens if we turn it up to high does it overload am I going to blow this Power Station 361 output oh okay that's not nearly as high as I thought it was going to be using but I'm waiting

15:07 to see if there's like an overload sign that pops up I know there's a notification that I saw in the app or in the manual it should pop up here but I'm not seeing I'm not seeing anything and this is obviously oh it cut out overload oh do you see that wait wait let me zoom in more okay over okay well it just

15:30 flashed overload I don't know if you saw it it was flashing overload underneath the 74 and that must be why why this cut out let's see if this is still working oh thank gosh can you do cheaper than $250 like why did I choose $250 to be my budget well I actually tried this challenge with a $100 budget earlier in

15:54 the year and frankly I was unable to do it I got this setup here for around $115 total but I never made a video about it because the power station was Dead on Arrival it wouldn't turn on or charge or power anything and I could have replaced it but a lot of the super cheap power stations in that price range just seemed

16:17 like total crap and that's not even mentioning you know uh how tiny the solar panel is and I started filming this video with a $200 budget in mind but after a day of online shopping I kept running into a similar problem for that price range I was probably going to be stuck again with a noname brand of

16:36 power station or incredibly tiny solar panel so it was at that point that I figured I'd let you guys decide the budget and y'all pretty overwhelmingly wanted to see the $250 budget and after going through this experience I think that 250 is the price at least today at this moment in time and would you start

16:53 to get a lot more bang for your buck that being said let me know if you think this setup is worth it or not and if I do another video like this one let me know what my budget should be for that one [Music]