Gear
Gear, By What It Is For
Five categories, each named by the job it does rather than by the shelf it sits on. There are 40 products across them. There are no solar panels here and no fuel-burning generators, and nothing on this site has been tested by us.
Portable Power Stations
Core job: storing watt-hours and giving them back as household AC
A power station is a battery, an inverter, and a row of sockets in one case. You charge it while the power is on and spend it while the power is off. Nothing else about the category matters as much as those two sentences, and most of the confusion in this aisle comes from listings implying more.
5 products · 2 groups
Open this categoryJump Starters
Core job: getting one engine started without a second car
A jump starter is a lithium pack that can dump a very large current for a few seconds into a vehicle that will not turn over. It replaces the part of roadside assistance that involves flagging down a stranger, and it is one of the cheapest useful things in this whole sequence.
11 products · 2 groups
Open this categoryFlashlights
Core job: seeing, in the first ten seconds and the tenth hour
The cheapest item in this whole sequence is the one that people are most reliably missing at the moment they need it. A flashlight has two entirely separate jobs, and one light rarely does both well: being found instantly in a dark room, and still working at hour ten.
8 products · 2 groups
Open this categoryBattery Chargers & Maintainers
Core job: keeping a battery from dying while it sits
This category exists because of one observation: most dead vehicle batteries did not die from use, they died from sitting. A car driven twice a month, a mower parked for the winter, a motorcycle under a cover. A maintainer costs less than one tow and removes the failure entirely.
6 products · one group
Open this categorySurge Protectors & Power Strips
Core job: one outlet becoming several, safely
This is the least exciting category on the site and the one with the most ways to misuse it. A strip solves a real problem, both at the wall and on the front of a power station, and the rules for using it correctly fit on one hand.
10 products · 2 groups
Open this category