Back in August, EDN published my coverage of the SLA (sealed lead acid) battery-based Phase2 Energy PowerSource 660Wh 1800-Watt Power Station on sale for $149.99 plus tax at bargains site Meh:
I hypothesized at the time that both it and a Duracell-branded clone, which originally sold for $699.99, were private-label brands of a common design originally sourced from a company called Battery-Biz. And toward the end of that same writeup, I also mentioned a couple of lithium battery-based successor power sources, also Battery-Biz-sourced, among them a $599.99 (versus $1,899.99 original MSRP, believe it or not) Energizer-branded bundle with a 200W solar cell that was also at the time being discount-sold by Meh:
That initial limited-time promotion has subsequently been resurrected several more times (that I’ve seen, maybe more than that) by Meh to date. Why? I’ll let them explain in their own words:
We’ve offered this a bunch now, but we haven’t seen any real drop-off in sales.
The third time I saw it, I decided to take the plunge. The second time, it had been sold in two different configurations: $499 refurbished with a 90-day warranty, or $599 new with full two-year factory warranty. But by the time I got around to acting on my purchase aspiration, refurb inventory was depleted. “No problem,” I thought this time, “what’s available for sale is only $100 more, is brand new, and comes with a much longer warranty period.” Hold that thought.
Here are more stock photos and infographic images from the Battery-Biz website product page (and here’s the user manual, linked to from that same page):
Along with a few more stock images from the promotion page on Meh’s website:
And now, some images of my unit, both in action while being initially charged and accompanying its SLA battery-based sibling:
So why did decide to pull the purchase trigger, aside from out of engineering curiosity? While the Phase2 Energy PowerSource Power Station remains a perfectly acceptable solution for residential backup power in utility outage situations (which we unfortunately seem to be increasingly experiencing of late), as I mentioned back in September, it’s quite a (carrying handles-included, but still) boat anchor. The Energizer PowerSource Pro Battery Generator is comparatively quite svelte: nearly half the total volume (15.35” x 9.5” x 8.8”, versus 19.9″ x 12.8″ x 8.9″) and less than half the weight (23 lbs., versus 58.8 lbs.). However, even though it’s lighter, its battery has 50% higher capacity (991 Wh versus 660 Wh). It recharges faster too: 2 hours to “full” on AC from an initially empty state, versus 10 hours. Its inverter-driven AC outputs are pure sine wave in form, versus simulated. It provides one more DC output, that being 100W USB-C with Power Delivery cognizance. And IMHO, it looks cool, too.
That all said, I actually decided to not keep it (and by the way, Meh was stellar in handling the return, going as far as issuing me a full refund while the bundle was still enroute back to them). Cons of the Energizer PowerSource Pro Battery Generator compared to the Phase2 Energy PowerSource Power Station precursor include:
- Lower cumulative inverter output power—1200-W versus 1440-W continuous/1800-W surge—with the lack of surge support in the Energizer product case due both to the comparative battery technologies in use and the lack of circuitry support (versus, say, the EcoFlow units I told you about in the recent Holiday Shopping Guide for Engineers)
- Lack of support for “chaining” the internal battery to an external supplemental one for runtime extension
- And a permanently attached topside handle, making it difficult to stack other things on top of the Energizer unit should I want to take it on a trip in my camper, for example.
So far, these are minor “nits”. This next one’s more notable, however. As I also mentioned in the recent Holiday Shopping Guide for Engineers, Battery-Biz and Energizer were vague upfront about the exact battery formulation in use with the PowerSource Pro Battery Generator, referring to it only as a “lithium-ion”. Turns out, it’s NMC (Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt); no, I don’t know why there’s no upfront “L” in the acronym, either. NMC batteries are typically spec’d for only a few hundred recharge cycles before they need to be replaced. Ironically, this is comparable to the Phase2 Energy PowerSource Power Station’s AGM (absorbed glass mat) SLA battery cycle spec. But it’s much lower than the several thousand cycles oft-touted for LiFePO₄ (lithium iron phosphate), also known as LFP (lithium ferrophosphate), counterparts.
And even this might not have been enough to prompt a return-and-refund request, given the compelling bundle price, except for two other “gotchas”. For one thing, the Energizer PowerSource Pro Battery Generator arrived with obvious already-used cosmetic evidence, contrary to the brand-new claimed condition in the promotion (to be clear, I blame Battery-Biz, not Meh, for this seeming bait-and-switch):
Who knows how many recharge cycles that NMC battery already had on it when I got it?
The accompanying solar panel was also pre-owned, it turns out, with similar cosmetic evidence, plus it arrived damage. I’ll save more details on this twist for my next post in this series. Until then, and as always, please sound off with your thoughts in the comments!
—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.
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