I’ve done it, I’ve actually hit the road and I’m currently on day 4 I think it is now. I started on Friday the 10th of July and its now Tuesday the 14th. I’m sat in a library where they said I could use my laptop and also I asked if I could charge my power bank and they said yes to that as well, so the Eco Flow River 3 on charge as I type this.
I don’t think I could have done this trip without the Eco Flow River 3, you see they great thing about it is stay you can actually take off one part to charge and leave the base in the car. You might think this is not that necessary, but look at the size of some of these power stations and you’ll understand the situation when you start looking at the weight of some of them.
The one I chose was the 588 Watt hour one which was about £280 or something like that on Amazon. The reason I chose Amazon is because of their returns policy, I wanted to test out if I’d actually enjoy living in a car camper so I wanted to be able to return the power station very easily if I needed to. Amazon ticks all the boxes for this particular situation.
I believe the standard power station without the additional one attached is 245Wh which would be pretty good for charging up your mobile phone, but I wanted the option to be abe to watch movies at night time on my laptop. My laptop being kind of old, its battery does not last that long, so I decided on getting the powerstation with the extended battery. I can plug the 3 pin connector into the power station and just leave it on charge all night until its bed time. Movies dont take up much power its true, but if I start to play Black OP2, then the internal graphics card gets hammered and I think it burns through the power.
So on a 4 day trip, ive used my laptop a fair bit (wtched some of my live streaming friends and a bit of YouTube) and charged my phone several times and this is my second charge of the power station main device. So basically I’m not charging the bottom bit, only the top power staion, or the main unit if you like. The other part of the power station remains in the car, its much heavier with this unit connected as well. I think with both the power bricks connected, it weigh about 7kg combined becasue I put it on my post office scales (packet 50 scales!) they are amazing scales. If we are talking about just the power station on its own, it comes in at exactley 4.7kg, now thats a managable size to carry around.
Where did I charge it? Well, right now its charging in the library and this is all free and open 5 days a week until 5pm, so fantastic! But the other place I charged it was the Witerspoons, so that was a good deal as well, it was £1.89 for unlimited coffee and I was able to plug in my power station there and down 3 coffees. Do you know a latte is actually 119 calories in Wetherspoons? I was really shocked at that, but they must be using whole milk.
So if you are a person who uses the laptop and charges the phone, expect to charge this power station 2 times if you are living in a car per week. I am talking both the the extendable battery and the main unit here, so thats the full unit getting charged rather than just the main unit.
I guess I would have to have some other type of entertainment if I didnt have Eco River 3 588wh power station, maybe as I’m in the library, it would be reading a book, just like the olden days!