Dirt-Cheap $150 Solar Generator - What Can It Run?

0:00 Solar generators can easily cost thousands of dollars, but these are two dirt cheap setups I just bought from AliExpress, and I had to battle my way through literal scam products to find them. So, did I waste my money, or did I find a couple hidden gems at rock bottom prices to find out? We're going to test

0:20 three key things. Their solar and wall charging speeds, their battery capacity, and of course, their power output to find out what they can run. Come on. You going to try Yeah. A the $100 setup is classic AliExpress. Questionable products from no-name brands. And after unboxing it, I

0:41 immediately had regrets. I may have wasted $100. This solar charger actually looks pretty decent for the price. But this power station, I mean, look at this little thing. Can this power anything? I tried turning the power station on, but the battery lights were so dim, I couldn't even tell if it was working.

1:00 The only way I knew was because I was able to turn on the light on the side. You solar charge this power station from its USBC port. So, I grabbed the charging cable and then turned my attention to the solar panel. It comes with another charging cable for like 12volt DC ports, which is cool. And in

1:16 fact, it's got four different ports. MC4 USBC, two regular USB, one of which is quick charge, and then that 12volt DC port. I'm going to track the solar energy with this meter, but it doesn't fit in the USBC port because of this green light. So, I use the quick charge USB port instead. Then, I just plug the

1:34 solar panel into the power station. I am already a little frustrated with this setup. It is very difficult to tell how charged the power station is and how fast or how much power the solar charger is outputting. if anything. So, I'm going to put it in the sun for an hour and hopefully we can collect some useful

1:52 data. I am as excited about this $150 setup as I am skeptical of the $100 setup. For this one, I got a 50 W solar panel, a solar charging cable, and this one has a bunch of different connectors, which is nice, and a power station from one of the most popular budget brands on the market, Pecron. That's right. Pecron

2:12 power stations are available on AliExpress for the best prices I've ever seen. This is serious hidden gem potential. The solar panel is a decent size for the money. And really the star of the show is going to be this thing. You can already tell much bigger battery, much more fully featured power

2:31 station. I cannot wait to test this out. The Pecron arrived 64% charged. And for solar charging, I again wanted to track the output. So, I connected a power meter to the solar panel first, then the solar charging cable I got, and then I plugged the charging cable into the solar charging port on the side of the

2:47 power station, and it started charging at a rate of 34 watts or 30 watts, depending on whether you trust the power station or the power meter more. At that point, shade was getting pretty close to the panel, so I moved it to a better spot and fiddled with the angle and direction to try to maximize the solar

3:04 output. The highest solar input I've been able to get is like 36 to 37 watts. That's a little low for a 50 W panel. I was frankly hoping for somewhere around 40 to 45. So, I put the second setup right next to the first to let it solar charge for an hour and waited for the solar charging test to finish. It's been

3:23 about 1 hour for the $100 setup. Power station told me nothing other than the battery was three bars full. Fortunately, we've got that power meter. It looks like it collected right around 12.5 watt hours. What can I say? That's not great. It's enough to charge a phone maybe 70%. This is a 30 watt panel, so

3:43 in good conditions, you'd expect about twice that. But 20 minutes later, I'd once again gotten excited about the $150 setup. Remember, the battery started at 64% and it's up to 69%. Well, I realize now I left the AC outlets on, which was definitely draining the battery a bit. But what's

4:01 the watt meter say? Only 19 watt hours. Is that right? It says we're still getting 30 watts. Man, these cheap meters sometimes I don't know how much to trust them. You'd expect around 30 watt hours based on the numbers we've been seeing. But if the meter's right, then that's really low output for a 50 W

4:17 panel, and it would take around 14 hours of good sun to fully charge the power station. I may have to test out a different panel later on. As for their wall charging speeds, I plugged in the Sabow's included USBC charger and got 34 watts charging speed, which at that rate would charge this roughly 89watt hour

4:34 battery in about 2 and 1/2 hours. And then I plugged in the Peekron, which claims to have AC fast charging of 300 watts, which is a great speed for this size power station. Pecron claims it'll wall charge in as little as 80 minutes. Man, look at that. 330 watts charging or 350 depending on where you're looking.

4:54 That's 10 times the speed of this little guy. It shouldn't take long. Charged up. Got the devices ready. Let's do some testing. Now, let's get a sense of their usable battery capacity. How long can they actually run appliances for? First, I turned on both of the power stations AC outlets to find their idle power

5:14 consumption. This is pretty important. It tells you how much power the inverter uses and basically the maximum amount of time you could run an AC device. After two hours, the Peekrron was sitting at 92%. That is a big drop. And the Sabow, well, to estimate that, I had to charge it back up and track how much energy

5:32 went into it, which was 3.65 W hours. So, for AC idle power draw, we're looking at around 1.8 watts for the Sabow, which is quite low. I wonder if that button is even turning anything on. And 11.5 watts for the Peekrron. Yeah, that's on the higher end for this size power station. For context, the Predator

5:50 350 from Harbor Freight uses around 5.8 watts idle power draw and the River 3 uses around 4.7 watts. That means if you turn the AC outlets on, you could expect the Sabow to last at most around 48.5 hours and the Pecron to last at most around 25 hours. That is your ceiling for AC devices. And then I ran a battery

6:11 capacity test by plugging in some lights to drain each power station at roughly 0.2C rate. If you don't know what that means, basically it's just the proper discharge rate for testing lithium iron phosphate batteries, which they both have and are the best kind for power stations to have. Again, these results

6:27 will help us estimate how long these setups can run critical appliances, which we'll talk about after we find out what appliances they can actually run. The Sabala's inverter fan kicked on at some point and it made a good bit of noise. Cheap power stations typically make some noise, but this is a lot even

6:45 by those standards. I mean, you get what you pay for. For this little guy here, the smart plug recorded 69 watt hours. Now, I'm going to add 4 W hours to that to count for the energy usage of the smart plug itself. It uses about 1 watt on average, and this power station ran for 4 hours. That brings the total up to

7:02 73 watt hours for 82.2% 2% usable capacity. And for the Petron, the smart plug recorded 223.8 watt hours. Again, adding 4 W hours to that and dividing by the total capacity of the battery, we got 79.1% usable capacity. All that to say, these power stations are not the most efficient at powering AC devices. Some

7:24 power stations will have 85% plus usable capacity from this test, for instance. And again, I will use this data later on to help me estimate run times. But can these dirt cheap solar generator setups, especially the $100 setup, run much of anything? The Sabow supposedly has 120 watts power output and 150 W surge

7:43 output. So, can it power anything substantial like a TV or kitchen fridge? Well, it charges three USB devices at once, no problem. And it runs a Wi-Fi router and LED lamp at the same time. No 12volt socket means no 12-volt appliances like 12vt chest fridges. Though there is a small DC port where

8:01 you could plug in things like 12volt lights. Oh yeah. And this is what the light looks like indoors. Can it run my TV? Come on. You going to So really, you're going to be able to charge your portable electronics and run small AC devices and maybe some DC devices with the $100 setup. That's

8:25 about it. But the Pecron from the $150 setup was able to run my TV without issue. It can handle 600 watts of continuous power output, five times the Sabow. So, it can run everything we've tested so far, but also it can run most kitchen fridges, including mine. And yes, 12vt fridges as well, thanks to the

8:46 12vt socket. But can it run high wattage appliances like a coffee maker? Nope. That beeping means it overloaded the outlets and I was able to reset them just by turning them off. I also tried a small electric space heater. No. Again, it did run my window AC unit, but only for about 40

9:12 seconds. So, based on all the data we've collected, I put together these runtime estimates for each power station. And you'll see I separated out fridges since their average power draw is usually way less than their wattage ratings. Feel free to pause and take a closer look. So, for about twice the price, the

9:26 Peekrron is about four times better. It has way faster charging speeds, about three times more battery capacity, and five times the power output. Not to mention things we didn't even touch on. The Peekron has a mobile app, it has a UPS, it has car charging, and even a wireless charging pad. The shortcoming

9:44 to this $150 setup is the solar panel. It's fine. I was getting 30 to 35 watts from it. Uh, you could instead go up to like a $200 budget and get a very cheap 100 watt panel. This one is like 60 bucks from Ecoorthy. And I tested this solar panel with the power station and was getting 70 to 80 watts solar

10:05 charging from it, which I think is a great solar charging speed for this size battery. And I also figured out the key to solar charging this $100 setup. It's not to use regular USB or USBC, but rather the 12volt port on the solar charger. And this setup includes all the parts you need to do that. I'll put

10:22 links to everything here in the video description below. These are available on Amazon, so I'll also throw some links to Amazon down there if that's where you want to shop. Let me know if you think either of these dirt cheap setups are worth it. And let me know if there's any other budget retailers out there like

10:37 Harbor Freight or Teimu or wherever where you'd like me to buy and test solar equipment from. Hey y'all. Um, just wanted to film a little outro about tariffs. So, I bought the equipment in this video in like January, late January, and I was able to get those prices uh $100 and $150 for the two

11:01 setups. Uh, I just checked and they prices are about 10% higher than what I got. Uh, but the tariffs, I'm recording this, it is currently um 3:33 on Tuesday, April 8th, and tariffs are supposed to go into effect midnight tonight. Um, this equipment is coming from AliExpress, obviously, from China.

11:22 Uh, they're looking it looks like China's going to get like 50% maybe even more, 100% tariffs at at the moment. And, you know, I'm sorry if prices are just way crazier or way higher than what I got. Um, I'm also going to put a link to the dirt cheap the original dirt cheap solar generator video. Um, which

11:45 I'll like link right here. That was equipment bought on Amazon and it's it's $250. If you look at that, maybe the prices will stay low for a little bit longer. I'm not sure. Yeah, hopefully you're able to get similar prices that I was able to get. Okay, bye.