A lot of the time, when we think about backup power, we go straight to either a full solar system that can power up our whole households or something smaller, like an inverter trolley, that we can shove into a room and have just that room filled with electricity.
When I first played around with the Elecstor Core range, I thought these devices would be useless because they didn’t satisfy either of the above criteria; however, after spending some more quality time with them they’ve become part of my essential load-shedding kit.
Earlier in the year, we did a review of the Elecstor Pro portable power station. Quite the unit and is able to power your whole gaming rig for hours. The Core range from Elecstor is on the much smaller side, and while they won’t be powering your whole gaming rig for hours, they do come in handy.
I had both the 180W/158Wh unit and the slightly larger 300W/314Wh unit in for review, and I used both similarly. My first test was to try and connect the 300W unit to my lounge set-up: a TV, a Home Theatre System, a PS5 (powered down) and a small switch, and the unit wouldn’t even turn on. This had me worried about what else I would even use these devices for.
One dark, load-shed night, I was lying on the couch when my small portable light ran out of battery—in the midst of grumbling to myself that I had forgotten to charge the damned thing, a new source of light suddenly appeared, the one from my genius idea.
I quickly ran to pick up the Elecstor Core 180W unit and a streaming lamp that I had on hand, ran back to the lounge and plugged it all in. Viola! Light!
It was then that I realised the Elecstor Core range offers up a portable 3-pin plug to keep things going until the power returns. This changed everything.
Because the units are small and lightweight, they are very easy to move from one room to another to provide a power source for whatever task you have to do in that specific room. From powering up a lamp in the lounge for you to carry on reading your book all while your phone charges, to using it in the kitchen to power up a blender (mine is rated at 250W) to make your soup nice and silky, the Elecstor range seems to handle the small tasks really well.
I started to think of them as more of a power bank for devices larger than just my cell phone. Some of you may already know that my laptop doesn’t have a working battery, but with the Elecstor Core at my side, that was no longer a problem. Forget to charge your shaver? Again, no longer a problem. Any small task that would otherwise have annoyed me because I wasn’t able to do became something that I still could do, and it was that sense of convenience that I enjoyed the most from the Elecstor Core range.
Earlier, I mentioned how it wouldn’t power up my lounge set-up, but if I had to remove the PlayStation from the mix, I could easily squeeze a couple of hours of watching Netflix on just the TV alone using the 300W unit.
Yes, these units aren’t as powerful as a lot of the bigger units out there, and yes, they don’t offer UPS functionality for automatic switchover between Eskom and battery power, but that’s not what these units should be used for. The Core range is a portable plug that will tackle those small tasks for you so that when life gets in the way and you’ve forgotten to charge this or you need a little bit of life for that, you’re covered.
The Elecstor Core 180W Portable Power Station (43200mah) is a 180W unit that offers 158Wh, meaning you could power a business laptop with a 30W power brick for around 5 hours, or a lamp with an LED bulb for around 12 hours. It comes with both a 3A and 2A USB port for charging or running smaller devices, a DC output port for certain DC devices and a South African 3 Pin Plug for larger items like lamps or TVs. It takes around 5 hours to get it from 0-100% charge. The device weighs around 1.4 kg.
The bigger unit is the Elecstor Core 300W Portable Power Station (8400mah), a 300W unit that offers 314Wh. This almost doubles the capacity of the smaller unit, and I definitely found myself using the 300W unit a lot more than the smaller one. If I were running only my lamp on the device, I would easily get through a week of 2-hour evening slots and still have around 40% charge left on the device. When I used it to blend up my exceptionally delicious butternut soup, the device drained around 5% during the 5 minutes of use. The Elecstor Core 300W takes around three to four hours to get back to a full charge, and that’s because the charging brick that it comes with is a lot bigger than the one for the Elecstor Core 180W. Unfortunately, the charging bricks are not interchangeable. You get both the 3A and 2A USB ports on the 300W unit and an extra 3A USB-C port. The DC port is also there, and, of course, the 3-pin South African plug. Weighing in at around 3kg, the Elecstor Core 300W is still remarkably portable and easy to move from place to place.
Both units have an LED display that will show you the percentage charge remaining, and they have an LED torch equipped that can be used for a little bit of extra light or switched to SOS flashing should you need it.
I didn’t think I would enjoy having these units around, considering how small they are, but in reality, I’m glad they were here. They have provided a convenience that I didn’t know I needed. If you’re looking at the smaller backup power devices from Gizzu, the Elecstor Core range should definitely be something you should consider. Both these units come in at around the same price point: R3,999 for the Elecstor Core 300W and R2,999 for the Elecstor Core 180W.