The hottest commodity on the South African gaming market right now is batteries capable of running a gaming rig for the duration of load shedding, and then some.
In our quest to find the best and most affordable solutions, we finally found a really good option in the Elecstor Pro 1,485Wh power station. This is an unassuming portable battery pack that packs a punch.
As one of the newer battery brands we’ve seen on the market, every Elecstor product I’ve reviewed to date has been really impressive, in build quality and battery performance.
The Elecstor Pro 1,485Wh Portable Power Station is the biggest battery in the brand line-up and this thing does not play around. It features 464,000mAh LiFePO 4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries that can handle up to 1,500w of power draw.
The unit is sturdily built but not too heavy to lug around thanks to the two built-in handles. In fact, this is the perfect battery set-up to take along if you are of the camping and outdoor variety.
The front panel of this power station features all the input and output plugs and connectors. There are four South African 3-point plugs, an AC input by way of a normal PC power cable, there’s a DC input, a 12v car adapter, and a solar-in connector. To power all of your mobile devices, there’s also a panel of USB power connectors rated up to 100w. The LCD panel is large and easy enough to read and understand, with power in and out displayed in watts, real-time battery levels, and time remaining clearly visible. Sadly there is no mobile app to monitor levels remotely, but this is not a deal breaker.
When it comes to what really matters, battery life, the Elecstor Pro 1,485Wh Portable Power Station delivers a solid performance. My office studio where I spend my days, draws around 450w with two gaming notebooks, LED lights, and audio equipment running. At load, the Elecstor Pro delivers around five hours of use with about 10% battery to spare. If I power down the non-essentials I get around six or seven hours of battery life from this unit. That is really impressive for something that weighs only 16 kg.
Equally impressive is the recharge time, it takes only 2 hours to charge it back to full from a near-empty battery. This makes the Elecstor Pro 1,485Wh Portable Power Station ideal for managing our ever-changing load-shedding schedules.
I was impressed with the build quality and the number of power outputs on the Elecstor Pro, in fact, I thought this was the perfect portable power station, until…
There is just one minor drawback of the Elecstor Pro, it is not able to auto switch from AC power to battery when running your devices. More precisely, you cannot enable the power output while the unit is plugged in or charging. For some gamers this will be a deal breaker for others, this won’t be a problem. I did speak to our friends at Apex Interactive who supplied the hardware. They assured us this is a feature that will be available in future revisions of the Elecstor Pro.
If it was not for how long the battery lasted, I would not have given the Elecstor Pro my recommendation, but this thing is pretty impressive regardless. It can power a full gaming rig and more for a couple of hours and it’s very light to carry around. For more than gaming, I see a lot of use in the Elecstor Pro to power studio equipment when the power goes out and you need to get your shoot done. Or use it to charge your notebook and devices exclusively when the power goes out.
For around R25,000 the Electsor Pro is a great solution for gamers and content creators who want to survive load shedding. You’ll get around 2,000 cycles on the battery, which is far better than Lead Acid batteries. While it is not badly priced, I think this would be a killer product if it’s priced more aggressively compared to its competitors; but check it out for yourself, I think you may be pleasantly surprised.