I tried charging an EV with a portable power station — and the results surprised me

[admin]

Portable power stations can charge just about anything, including electric vehicles. While there could be additional cost savings by charging power stations with solar power, the amount of work involved in doing it all to charge an electric vehicle may make you think otherwise.

I tried charging an EV with a portable power station — and the results surprised me : Read more

 

[Wererat6]

I think you've missed the objective by a bit. Dumping a tiny KWh battery into an EV doesn't buy a lot, and buying tons of battery capacity just to put it into the other huge power bank that is your car is bad ROI.

An easy path is to max the L1 charge rate (typically 1.44 KW/h) using the portable power station as the solar converter irrespective of its capacity. Roughly 4x400w panels will do it +/- some depending on your weather, time of year, and location. Using this allows you to plug when not using. (Works best if working remote or on weekends).

If you've already a sizable investment in solar that would mirror L2 or faster, you've probably done the grid-tied or whole house solar and can just use your house power to leverage the solar input.

I suppose if you're deep in EV and also doing a tiny house, the stronger portable solar converters like that Anker could *be* the house electricity hub. That might be a rare thing though.

 

[MangoCat]

Something people repeatedly miss when bragging about "free power" they get from solar charging of their power banks is: cycle life and cost of their batteries. If your 1kWh battery pack costs,$500 and it has 3000 useful cycles in its life, that's $0.16 per kWh over the life of the battery. I get cheaper power from my local utility.

Power banks charged by solar are great in off grid applications, but if you can just run an extension cord, you will save more money in the short and long run.