Good morning, all today, i'm looking at the jackery explorer 500 portable power station. So this is a big box of lithium-ion batteries, 518 watt hours, and it's also got a 500 watt pure sine wave inverter. Let's do an unboxing inside is the bag of accessory cables. Also that manual with warranty card and a 12 month, warranty extension and here is the explorer 500..

Let's switch on the liquid crystal display, that's showing 78. I have been charging this with solar i'll put those shots in later. This input here is for both the solar panel or the power supply, which is a 24 volt power supply. There's a dc section here.

This is a 12 volt, 10 amp cigar lighter or accessory socket. Now these two 12-volt sockets are not 5.5 2.1. These are actually 6.3, i believe, but they work with standard laptop. Now i found that both these laptop adapters, one, which i think is six mil with a 1.4 millimeter pin the other one, i believe - is 6.3 millimeters, not quite sure what the diameter of that is, but these both fit these.

Incidentally, if you're looking through your set of laptop adapters, are the type a and the type b, mostly both these fit in here - and these are rated at seven amps, and i guess that's why they didn't use the 5.5 2.1. But these adapters convert it to that. In any case, here there's a set of three usbs now these are vanilla: flavor, 2.4, amp, 5 volt usbs no fast charge. Here, and here we have a uk uh shuttered 230 volt output from the 500 watt, pure sine wave inverter on the sides.

We have a fan outlet and, on the other side, a fan, inlet and there's also this light which you can switch on and if you press and hold you get an sos function. Let's look inside the bag of bits. There are two items in here: one of them is the 12 volt charging cable from your car cigarette lighter socket to a 7.9 millimeter plug and the other one, which also has the 7.9 millimeter plug, is the ac power adapter, it's 24 volts, 3.75 amps, 90 watts. So, let's plug in that ac adapter, the power station powers up and it's charging at 86 watts so to check pass-through mode.

I've got a 100 watt incandescent bulb here. Let's switch on the ac inverter on comes the bulb and we can see that we've got 84 watts coming in from the ac power adapter and 97 watts going out to the incandescent lamp. So yes, this explorer 500 has pass-through mode. Now i just wanted to do a size comparison between the jackery explorer 240 and the explorer 500.

That probably shows it better. The 240 is very light easily portable. The 500 is perfectly carriable that it's not heavy, but it's got some weight to it. It's the perfect size to carry around a useful half kilowatt hour of stored energy.

So let's get the jackery on the bench and do some tests now. The first thing i want to try is to compare the power supply that was supplied with the 500 and that's the 24 volt one and that yields 86 watts into the unit, and then i want to compare that with the other power supply. Now this is the one supplied with the explorer 240 and this one is 19 volts that gives 68 watts. So it seems that in a similar way to the explorer 240, this explorer 500 has a largely voltage, dependent input circuit.

So the more volts you give it. The more watts you'll get going into the battery now, as luck would have it or lack of luck, i suppose you'd say uh. The camera ran out of supply, so i'm plugging that into the usb, so that will be on as well. But let's put the i'll just check my ammeter or my electronic load dials are down.

Let's put the dc on and see how many watts we can pull from these six millimeter sockets. Okay turn this up to seven amps: five amps: six: okay, that's 7.3 amps on the electronic dc load, we're pulling 96 watts; let's take it higher and see when it drops out 8.3 amps, 108 watts, 9.6, amps, 127 watts, 10 amps, and i can hear a howling And whistling sound and that's the maximum, i can pull something shut off and i do believe it's the dc section right now: testing the cigar lighter or accessory socket. Let's turn that on i'll put the fine up, which gives me two amps as a starting point. Let's start turning the course up: okay, that's eight! That's 10 amps uh! This thing is rated at 10 amps, but i imagine oh no.

It has actually cut out okay, interesting. Let's try that again. Okay, i've got that at 130 watts. 10.1 amps.

It's making that squealing noise again 10.3 amps, 132 watts, 10.4 amps, 134 watts, 10.8 amps of the display has gone off yes and the dc output has gone off. So this one does cut out not much above 10 amps. So the protection circuit is working. Fine right onto usb sockets now i've got this one with a usb dc load set to 2.4 amps, and it's fine, i'm going to increase that.

So that's 2.5, amps 2.6 amps, 2.7 amps and the fan has increased in speed right. The little monitor unit has switched off and this fan appears to be slowing down. So i think, what's happened is the socket has cut the power, but the usb light is still on now. I assume that so that it can keep the other sockets going and in fact, if i look at my camera, i think that's charging uh.

Yes, that is still charging, so the socket um that hasn't got an overload condition is still working. Now. If i remove the overload condition - yes, this thing's come straight back on again at 2.4 amps, so these are protected. It looks like on an individual basis so that each one is protected at about 2.6, possibly 2.7 amps it cuts off, but it doesn't shut down.

The usb subsystem so other devices on the usb carry on working, that's actually rather good. So moving on to the ac outlet, let's switch that on and check the ac voltage and that's coming up at 228.8, so approximately 230 volts, and so we have a fairly good. Looking sine wave there 229 volts and it's 0.05 kilohertz, which is 50 hertz, so the next test i'm going to do - is a full discharge into an oil filled radiator, which is about 460 watts. I think - and this is a 500 watt inverter - i'm just going to charge this fully to 100, using the supplied ac adapter, so we'll do that first and then discharge it and measure the total discharge in watt hours right.

This thing's been on 99 now for quite a while, possibly 45 minutes, but i've noticed that the input power is now falling, 75 watts and it's falling steadily. So this is in its constant voltage phase, but it does look like it's also calibrating the state of charge indicator. Possibly one would only know that if uh you did this several times and look to see how long it's on 99, but this is definitely now falling. I think the unit is getting close to being fully charged and for the full discharge test i'll need to pull out the charging supply.

I've got an oil filled radiator on the end of this piece of wire that i think runs at 460 watts or thereabout. So, let's turn on the ac plug in this energy meter, which can measure the full discharge and turn on the radiator. The fans have come on on this unit. 435 watts i've tilted the unit up so that the displays are easier to see and so far we've clocked up um 51 watt hours and it's displaying 91, which is about right.

I think 50 watt hours 10 of the battery used i'll come back - probably around 50 percent, so we're at about 50 percent 51 and we should be at 259 kilowatt hours, which is half of the 518 and we're doing a little better than that 264 watt hours. Uh 51 and here again at 10, it flashes the display backlight 10 times according to the manual, so at 10 465 watt hours and now down to 1 battery remaining, it's done 505 watt hours. So i don't think it's going to run for much longer hasn't done. The 518 watt hours indicated in the manual, but then that is a nominal capacity of the cells.

It doesn't take into account the inefficiency of the ac inverter and it's switched off and we've got 508 watt hours. So, as i was saying uh in here, it says 518.4 watt hours 24 amp hour battery at 21.6 volts. So that is a six cell pack and we're not far short of that. Actually so sunny day test with the solar saga, 100 watt panel connected to the explorer 500 and we're getting 76 watts, 75 74 watts.

Now that was a little higher when the panel was cool, i was getting 76 watts as it's warmed up. It's dropped. A couple of watts uh again similar to the explorer 300. If you use a bigger solar panel, this is um 160 watts.

Then it doesn't actually make any difference. We're getting the same at 72 watts. Now that the panel has warmed up - and that's because it's not about the current this panel can deliver more current. It's about the voltage, it's the same number of cells, and so it's the same voltage and we're getting the same charge power.

So that's the jackery explorer 500. This is a neat system. It's very quick to set up, particularly when you use the solar saga. 100 solar panel.

You can install that just in a few seconds, charging does take a while it's seven hours from the supplied mains adapter. Eight hours from a vehicle - and the manual says up to 14 hours from the solar saga - 100 solar panel. So this is available on amazon uk from today with 15 off. That's during jackery explorer week, that's the 17th to the 19th and you can get an additional five percent off for the whole of may using my special code.

That's julian 2021! That's it for now! Cheerio.