The Brunton Sustain portable power device holds less power than the Brunton Impel, but still gives you enough juice to power nearly any gadget while you're off the grid.
more accessories needed
Gift: No
Cons: USB won't charge iPad, Needs 12v accessories
Best Uses: High-End Equipment, Portable Electronics
Describe Yourself: Quality Oriented
Primary use: Personal
I'm still in the testing phase with this and the device appears to be well built and works as specified but additional accessories are needed to make it really useful:
1) it needs a 12v charging cable so that you can charge it off of the 12v outlet in a car. Making one of these cables is proving difficult because the tips available from Radio Shack are too short to make a solid contact due to the rubber protection around the battery.
2) it needs a 12v female socket to allow you to attach devices which only have a cigarette lighter adaptor. e.g. iPad charger, AA charger, small AC inverter.
Some other notes:
- The AC adapter is pretty beefy and puts out 31W. I haven't had a chance to test it yet but at that rate it should be able to charge the whole battery in about 2.5 hours.
- Since it is a portable device and you may want to carry the charger so that you can charge it in the field, it might be nice if the charger had plug blades that folded in and a cord management system.
- The battery is 73Wh this means that trying to charge it with the typical 5W fold up solar panel will take at the very least 15 hours. If you are doing a major through hike this might not be feasible. You can probably get an hour or so during lunch but depending on your usage you might slowly discharge it.
- The USB port doesn't provide enough power to charge an iPad whose adaptor is 10W which is substantially higher than the its USB port is rated for. It won't even charge it in a slow mode. To work around this you need to fabricate a female 12 socket and then you can use something like a Griffin PowerJolt.
- It does seem to provide plenty of power to charge an iPhone but it may not be quite as fast as with the iPhone's 5W wall adaptor.
- All the other USB gadgets that I have tested so far have charged at the normal speed.
- It does seem to charge a Yaesu VX-8R Ham radio easily
- The weight listed in the specs appears to be the be the weight of the box with all the accessories. The battery itself only weighs: 647g and the AC adaptor weighs 147g. The cables will be extra.
Some additional tests that I intend to run and post in an updated review:
1) How fast does it charge off of the AC adaptor?
2) How fast does it charge off of a 5W solar panel?
3) Given virtually unlimited power (e.g. 100W 12V solar panel) how fast can it charge? Is the charge rate limited by the AC adaptor?
4) How fast does it charge an iPhone in comparison to the iPhone's 5W charger?
(legalese)
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