I Bought Harbor Freight's CHEAPEST Power Station

0:00 this is Harbor Freight's cheapest power station and we are going to test it in this video but I'm already skeptical that it will live up to Harbor Freight's reputation of quality tools at low prices because it's $200 it cost me $220 after tax and for what you get it feels a little overpriced but we will take a

0:20 close look at it test the solar charging and the wall charging which is apparently really slow find out what all it can run and then compare it to the other power stations on the market to see if it's a good deal so what does it come with well you get three charging cables for AC car and solar charging and

0:38 then the power station and a manual first impression is that this thing feels rugged the case seems strong it's got the knurled handle it makes me want to strap on work gloves and take it to a work site to charge some power tools and there's a warning label of sorts telling me to charge it or I void my warranty

0:55 it's a 5-year warranty which is really good actually so I'll charge this up in just a second the specs are right on the front which is nice 350 running Watts I'm guessing that means continuous power output 700 Max starting Watts which I'm guessing means surge rating and a 294 wat battery we will definitely be doing

1:12 a capacity test on that it's got two AC Outlets with a pure sine wave inverter USB and USBC ports the USBC is input output so you can charge from USBC it's got a standard 12volt socket with a 10 amp limit then there's the screen which just shows battery percentage when nothing's plugged in around back you got

1:28 your charging ports for the wall charger yeah 100 WS Max that's slow and then the solar SLC car charging port which uses Anderson connectors and the solar input ratings right there underneath well let me charge it up now so I don't void my warranty and we can find out what it can

1:44 run what are we getting 76 watts and that's it not even 100 Watts we're definitely going to compare that to the solar charging later the box says 4.1 hours to AC charge it so I'm going to leave it here for 2 hours and see if it charges by 50% [Music] after 2 hours the power station was up

2:05 to 88% so just over 50% charge you can actually charge it faster from USBC which shouldn't be the case in 2025 but you need a fast USBC charger much faster than this 35 watt one I've got so how do you get the supposed 2 hours charging speed you got to do AC and USBC at the same time this might be how I have to

2:26 charge this thing and it's still about onethird the speed of other power station in this price range so I just let it charge like that the rest of the way to 100% there we go now I can actually turn this power station on so I'll turn on the AC outlets and first we're going to see how

2:44 much battery just doing this uses the manual says the AC Outlets automatically cut off after 1 hour and then 2 hours for the DC outlet so I came back after an hour you can see the AC Outlets just cut off and the battery was at 98% and if we do the math that works out to around 5.88 Watts idle AC power draw

3:06 which is pretty good for this size power station for context when I calculated the river 3es it was 4.7 Watts I tried repeating this test with the DC outlet but I noticed a little after an hour that the outlet had turned off remember it's supposed to stay on for 2 hours but I guess maybe the Manual's wrong the

3:23 battery was at 98% still so I couldn't estimate its DC idle power draw but this number is usually very low so it wasn't that big a deal it was then while setting up for the battery capacity test that I noticed weird thing number one I was figuring out which light I could use to drain the battery at 60 watts roughly

3:43 that 0.2c rate for lithium iron phosphate batteries when I noticed that there was a big difference in the wattage on the power station screen and the wattage on the kilowatt but the power station's wattage was suspiciously close to the volt amps almost as if the predator 3 50 wasn't accounting for the

4:02 power factor which in this case was around 0.5 I was pretty sure I'd never seen this before but to make sure I wasn't crazy I checked not one not two but five other power stations I own from three different brands and well first off you'll notice that their wattages all vary a little bit which shows you you

4:22 should take these numbers with a grain of salt but they all displayed a number a lot closer to Watts rather than voltamp so the Predator is the exception here so I found a couple lights that together actually use around 60 watts because I put an incandesent bulb in one of them then I turned them on and

4:40 started the AC capacity test and yes the wattage is almost exactly match in this case because the incandescent bulb brings that power factor up to essentially one the final result was 0.24 kwatt hours or 240 wat hours which means 81.6% usable capacity it's not the best you see some power stations with 85%

5:07 plus usable capacity from these tests time to figure out what this power station can run we know 350 watts of continuous power output and 700 watts of surge output but what does that look like in practice which devices which tools can it run for how long and what can't it run to start it's got the three

5:27 USB ports and you can use all of them at the same time to your phone camera laptop Etc and the 350 WS of output definitely covers small devices like a Wi-Fi router and drill battery charger though plugging in two devices at a time may be a little tricky I just get around it with an extension cord or you could

5:45 use a power strip to run even more AC devices at a time like this LED lamp with all these small devices plugged in it's only using 50 Watts so a lot more room to work with and we'll get to the more high- powered devices in just a sec and then there's the 12volt socket which can run 12volt devices like this chess

6:03 fridge now it's sitting at 80 to 90 watts and it can run all this for an estimated 2 hours and 45 minutes if you're not connecting this many devices to your power stations what are you doing I let the power station run all that for an hour while I ate some lunch and came back to find everything still running just fine

6:22 some of the batteries were charged and the power station was sitting at 67% it's not bad next I was planning to run the more power hungry appliances like this small electric space heater my kitchen fridge and my TV but we had a window of sunny weather open up so I grabbed the power station in the

6:38 included solar charging cable as well as a 100 watt and 200 W solar panel to test out the solar charging the thing you definitely want to make sure is that your panel's open circuit voltage is within the power station's 30 volt input limit both of my panels are safe to use so I grabb the solar charging cable and

6:54 connected it to my 100 wat panel then I plugged it into the solar charging port on the back of the power station and pretty immediately the power station started charging at close to 100 wat at that rate it says it'll take a little over an hour for it to fully charge I also wanted to see how well the Predator

7:12 handles being over paneled so I connected the 200 wat panel the biggest size you should connect according to the manual and look at that it started charging right at the max solar charging rate of 120 watts for about 52 minutes to a full charge that's when I noticed weird thing number two I was just

7:32 watching the screen you can see I'm not shading the panel or anything like that and the solar output dropped to 11 Watts huh so I unplugged the charging cable plugged it back in and 27 Watts I switched the Predator back over to the 100 watt panel and that had normal Power output is it my panel

7:55 well I brought a second power station out and plugged the 200 W panel into that one and I started getting full power output so it's not the panel I gave the Predator one more try with it and well it's back to the max charging rate I do not know what the heck that was that was a little concerning to be honest but now

8:13 it seems to be solar charging properly from the 200 W panel needless to say I was still skeptical so I moved the setup away from the encroaching shade and put a camera on it to see how the charging worked for 30 minutes I know this is a weird angle but I wanted to show you the screen and the panel at the same time

8:30 and fortunately you can see it was charging right around the max charging rate of 120 watts the entire time so not sure what that drop in output was and after 30 minutes it was 88% charged and with that I figured it was time to test out some higher wattage devices so I brought the power station inside and

8:49 first plugged in my TV which uses 165 wats Max and it worked just fine you can see there's an estimated 2 hours of run time but that's to be expected since 165 watt is well within the Predator's 350 WTS of output getting closer to that limit is my kitchen fridge which is rated to around 290 Watts Max and again

9:14 able to run my kitchen fridge without issue most of the time my fridge is using far less than 290 Watts anyways and before testing the power station's surge rating I quickly wanted to test its pass through charging so I plugged in its wall charger the power station kept powering the fridge and its battery

9:31 started charging at the same time but worth noting this particular Predator model doesn't have a UPS which brings me to the electric space heater it has a 500 watt rating but I've caught it on camera before using as much as 800 watts on Startup can this power station run it unfortunately not to reset the AC

9:56 Outlets I just pressed their power button and after that I was once again able to run AC devices this power station also can't run a window AC unit most kitchen appliances like a microwave or electric stove top and it can't run most power tools though there are some tools like a jigsaw which might be able to run off

10:20 this thing so is Harbor Freight's cheapest Power Station worth it is it a good deal or is there something better out there you should buy I made this comparison table so we can quickly compare the Predator 350 to other popular power stations in this price range what does it tell us well right

10:37 off the bat we see that yes the AC charging wall charging is painfully slow this is previous generation uh charging speed you see that a lot of them are 3x the charging speed when it comes to wall charging uh also it doesn't have a UPS or mobile app which most power stations do nowadays but every other

10:58 spec it's pretty good uh it's better than the jackary Explorer 300 because pretty much everything is better than that power station I love my ecoflow River 3 but when you're looking just in terms of specs it doesn't really Stack Up in terms of value these three are compelling alternatives to the Predator

11:16 350 and they're all about the same price uh sometimes a little more expensive if they're not on sale the e3a from Blue EDI you could go with if you want more power output 600 watts continuous power output 12 00 watt surge output and you get the really fast charging speed pekron the E300 lfp is usually a great

11:38 deal I mean $199 on Amazon with a $40 coupons that'd be like 160 in similar specs and then the anchor solic C300 is maybe the most similar in terms of specs to the 350 but you get over 3x the the wall charging speed you you'd still get a 5-year warranty and you get a UPS and a mobile app but Harbor Freight got the

12:03 basics mostly right here this power station has a good battery with good capacity and decent power output for the price sure we found a few Kinks that they should probably iron out in the Next Generation but it does the basic functions just fine and then there's the convenience kicker you can go to a

12:20 Harbor Freight today buy this in store and if it stops working you can take it back to take advantage of that 5-year warranty I'll put links to this pack station as well as the other ones in that comparison table in the video description below and let me know what you think of the Predator 350