About Portable Power Guide

Portable Power Guide is a small, independent site about portable power stations and backup power in Australia. We write about the questions that come up here: keeping the fridge cold through a cyclone-season blackout, sizing a station for a caravan trip up the coast, and working out how much solar it takes to refill a battery on a cloudy day.

A lot of what's online about power stations is written for American 120V outlets, or is a product page dressed up as advice. We wanted something that works in watt-hours, shows the arithmetic, uses Australian 230V figures and takes the electrical safety rules seriously.

Where our information comes from

Battery capacities, outputs, solar limits and charging specs come from the makers' own Australian product pages and user manuals, and every guide links them at the bottom so you can check. When a maker's pages disagree with each other, we say so.

Safety advice comes from Australian sources: electricity networks like Energex, fire services like the Queensland Fire Department, and health departments for food safety in a blackout.

We don't make up testing, runtimes or ratings. Where a guide gives a runtime, it's a sum (battery watt-hours, minus conversion losses, divided by the appliance's watts) and the sum is on the page, so you can redo it with your own gear. We don't publish prices either. They change weekly, and a stale price is worse than none.

Fixing mistakes

If something's wrong or out of date, tell us. We'll fix it and change the "Updated" date on the page. That date only moves when the content does.

Money

Some product links are, or will become, affiliate links, so we may earn a commission if you buy through one. You don't pay any extra and it doesn't decide what we say. The affiliate disclosure has the details.

The fine print

This is general information, not professional advice. Anything that connects to your home's wiring or a caravan's 230V system is a job for a licensed electrician. Never plug a power station or generator into a power point to feed the house.