Outdoor powerhouse: Jackery Explorer 500 Portable Power Station with SolaSaga 100w Solar Panel review

As more and more battery-powered gadgets find their way into our lives we’re left with the need to locate more plug points to charge them. That’s easy if you’ve got a three-pin plug socket nearby, but what if you’re campingmiles away from civilisation, or working from home during a power cut?

Until recently your options included buying a petrol generator or a camper van leisure battery – both of which come with considerable faff, and in the case of the former, can’t really be used indoors. Is a mobile power station like this Jackery Explorer 500 the answer? Commercial Content Editor Adam Binnie has been charged with finding out.

Verdict: A mobile power station like the Jackery Explorer 500 is likely to be one of those things you either overlook entirely or immediately dream up a thousand uses for. If you’re in the latter group, then you won’t go far wrong with this one - it's great for everything from providing power to an outside office to recharging camera batteries on an assignment, and it's particularly useful when teamed with a Jackery solar panel for the ultimate summer camping set-up.

This article was originally published on 13/01/2022. We’ve checked back to update the links and change some formatting, so the date at the top of the page may not match up. The words and score of the original review remain unaltered.

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Build

• Hard plastic shell

• Attractive colour scheme

• Robust buttons

The Jackery Explorer 500 has a tough, plastic construction with an eye-catching black and orange colour scheme, the latter ringing the input and output ports to help you to locate them. A backlit screen displays things like the charge status and how much power your devices are draining, and there’s also a torch built into the case.

As well as vents and exhaust ports for the onboard cooling fan, the Explorer has four rubber feet to stop it from sliding around, and the top of the unit forms a generously sized carrying handle large enough to get two hands around. This does mean the unit is not flat on top, which makes it slightly more awkward to pack into a full car boot. Then again, it’s probably not a great idea to bury it under loads of heavy items anyway.

In terms of plugs, there’s a main AC port that you use to charge the Explorer up (either by domestic socket or solar panel), two DC ports and a 12v accessory outlet like the one you’ll find in a car, then three 5v USB-As and a 230v three-pin socket.

A protective case (sold separately) has a silver lining like a coolbox- whether this is to help regulate the temperature for storage or just to look cool is unclear, but it should at least protect the unit from knocks and scrapes. There’s a separate pocket on the top to keep the charging cable and manual in, plus substantial handles and a strap to carry it – handy because it weighs 6kg.

Jackery also sells a large solar panel to charge the Explorer, which folds in half to make its size more manageable and is held in this position by magnets. There’s a plastic carrying handle at either end and a zipped pocket on the back to store the tethered charging cable in, plus USB-A and USB-C sockets to charge things directly from the sun if you want to bypass the Explorer altogether.

You can lay it flat on a surface or there are fold-out legs that allow it to stand up - these seem robust enough, but the panel (and all solar panels) is reasonably fragile and you should avoid bending or squashing it in any way. That said it feels high quality with solid handles and a tough fabric outer layer.

The solar panel is splash resistant but not waterproof, so you can’t leave it on the roof of your house or use it outside in pouring rain. When, to be fair, there would be very little sun anyway.

Usability

• 500w output

• 518Wh capacity

• Lots of sockets

I’ll get onto the various charging and discharging times in more detail in the Performance section of this review, but as a broad generalisation, the Explorer’s 500w limit means it's powerful enough to plug in most stuff you’d use while camping or around the house during an outage without an issue.

TVs, laptops, and games consoles will all be fine, as will most of the chargers you use for gadgets like phones, cameras and smartwatches, but where you will struggle is with anything that heats things up quickly or has a big motor – so, in general, it’s a no to kettles, toasters and air conditioners. If you plug anything too draining into it, the Explorer 500 will turn itself off.

That’s not an exhaustive list of course and you may be able to find smaller, lower wattage versions designed for travel, in which case the Explorer 500 will cope just fine, not just because it has a wide array of sockets you can plug in to. There’s also a larger Jackery power station called the Explorer 1000, which can cope with twice the wattage.

Performance

• Charges your phone 50 times

• Kept cool with an inbuilt fan

• No USB fast charging

A total of 518Wh is available and in very general terms that should be enough for roughly 50 phone charges or nine hours running something draining like a mini-fridge. I’ve plugged my laptop into it for a full day before and managed just fine.

It’s not completely silent in use due to its cooling fan, which runs almost every time I use it, but it’s not intrusively loud or annoying, especially tucked away under my desk. It also means the Jackery can be used on hot days up to 40 degrees, so there’s no worries of it cutting out inside your tent in the blazing sun.

The variety of ports means I am able to charge my phone from the USB-A socket at the same time as using the three pin for my computer, although it’s worth noting the Explorer 500 does not have fast USB charging, or a wireless charging spot like the (more expensive) Bluetti EB55.

When it comes to recharging, I’ve found the Explorer 500 can be brimmed from a domestic socket overnight, while Jackery says the 100w Solarsaga panel can charge it in 9.5 hours. This is largely thanks to an efficient inbuilt MPPT controller – don’t worry if you don’t know what this is, but it means faster solar charging than with older PWM tech.

In reality, while that’s achievable in a lab or maybe southern California, in the drizzly and damp UK I’d be very surprised if that was possible. That said, it’ll have no problem keeping the Explorer 500 topped up on a trip if you fully charge it before leaving the house.

You can also use the unit while charging (called ‘pass-through’) although this is generally best avoided as it can harm the lifespan of the battery. Jackery says it has protective circuity to minimise this damage, but still, it’s probably worth avoiding doing this regularly.

Price

The Jackery Explorer 500 is a simple solution – you plug it into a three-pin socket until it’s charged, and then when taken outside it acts in exactly the same way as your domestic socket would, just not hooked up to the mains. No messing around.

But simplicity comes at a cost – the Explorer 500 is currently £529 and that’s before you add the solar panel and carrying bag. In comparison with rival products from Bluettiand PowerOak, the Jackery unit is of better value, but it’s at the expense of some features like fast USB and conductive charging.

Cheaper still are the existing solutions – a leisure battery or a petrol generator, both of which would offer more power. However, if you choose the former you’ll also need to buy an inverter and, if you want to use a solar panel, an MPPT controller. And then a separate charger to keep it topped up. You also have to be careful not to over-drain a leisure battery, not something you have to worry about with the Jackery.

A generator is more of an all-in-one solution because they usually come with an inverter, but they’re noisy, can’t be used inside, and are harder to store and transport. Plus you usually have to mix up petrol and two-stroke oil to fuel it, and the running costs can stack up quickly.

Verdict

If you just want to power a few devices outside the house or during a power cut in broadly the same way you would at home, the Jackery Explorer 500 is a neat, hassle-free way to do it. Rivals are more feature-rich but cost more, and at its core, this unit will likely be everything you need at a more affordable price.

How we tested it

I used the Jackery Explorer 500 indoors and out, powering my home-working set up (laptop and screen plus smartphone) for a day to see how it got on. I used a mobile 12v tyre inflator on my driveway and finally took the unit out with my son for an afternoon driving remote control cars, allowing us to keep the 2400mAh batteries topped up. In the summer we'll take it camping and I'll update this article after that.

Adam Binnie is the Commercial Content Editor and reviewer for WhatsTheBest, specialising in bikes, fitness, cars, parenting and cooking.

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