Anker Solix S2000 portable power station under my desk.
My wife recently wanted me to start putting together an emergency preparedness kit. We live in San Francisco so things like earthquakes, heat waves and storms are not uncommon. The first thing I started to look into was a power station that could just provide us with a couple of days of power in the scenario that we just lose power for a few days.
I began researching portable power stations and of course Anker was the first brand I looked into. The S2000 is powerful enough to power a standard fridge for up to 35 hours, so it's quite powerful. What I like about it in particular is that it also acts as a UPS; it kicks in in less than 10ms when power is lost. I now power my Mac mini and all my office gear with it and was able to test this out without issue. While the S2000 is technically a portable power station, it is 35.7lbs so you won't exactly be moving it too often.
It also has an XT60i port, which is used to connect solar panels to charge the power station. I originally purchased a 400W Anker solar panel to pair with the S2000 but I severely underestimated how large it would be. It was massive so I ended up returning it. I think just a power station that can power some mobile devices for days is enough for our household needs at the moment. I, however, have been curious about a smaller solar panel (something like 60-100W) just for charging phones.
Overall I'm loving the S2000. It has a decent app for firmware updates as well as controlling a few settings like how fast it charges (I opted for slower so it doesn't turn the fans on and stays silent), how much it charges up to, and so on. It also has a feature that they call Storm Guard that connects directly to the National Weather Service and when there are severe weather warnings in my area, it will charge the battery to 100% ahead of time. And then I've also noticed that periodically it will automatically charge the battery to 100% to calibrate its internal battery management system.
