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These days, extreme weather events are both more extreme and more frequent. After an unusual ice storm knocked out power at my house for days this year, I found myself feeling weirdly vulnerable without a way to heat my home, so I decided to look into power backup options.
While a whole-home solution was not within budget, I knew I wanted at least enough power to keep myself warm and to power my phone, laptop, and modem (on the off chance internet wasn’t out, too). While portable power stations and solar generators are an option, they’re somewhat limited in how many volts/watts they can sustain and for how long. To really achieve something that could carry me for a few days, I needed to go bigger—to a power station. Luckily, Anker was willing to let me try out its new F3800 unit, and it might just be exactly what I was looking for, but it comes with a hefty price tag.
A serious unit
The first thing to know about the F3800 is that it is only portable in the loosest of definitions. UPS struggled to get the box to my door, I struggled getting it out of the box, and I really struggled moving it from my front door to my energy panel. Sure, there are wheels and a handle, but it’s still 130+ pounds. If you dream of hauling something like this camping, forget about it.
However, the unit is tall and has a compact footprint, so it tucks away neatly and looks at home in a closet, for example. It also required zero installation. Out of the box, you can just plug it into the wall and let it charge. It also comes with cables to daisy chain with additional batteries. Really, the only thing you need to do is bring up the Anker app and pair the unit, although the device will work fine without that. The app just adds some convenient features, like fine tuning how the unit works and monitoring it from afar.
And at $4,000, the F3800 is no small investment, but it’s something that will grow with me. While it’s possible to just plug the F3800 into the wall and wait for the power to go out, it can also tie into a home’s solar panels, which made it more appealing as a long-term option. The real benefit is that I can, now or in the future, install a subpanel on my electrical panel and wire the F3800 to it. That way, if the power goes out, my home will immediately start using the power in the backup unit.
Along with the F3800, I received two PS400 portable solar panels ($899 each), and while these did not weigh as much as the station, they were substantial in size and weight. I waited for a sunny day and hauled the station close enough to the patio so that I could charge it off the solar panels. We had a run of 70-degree, cloudless days here unusually early, and the F3800 achieved an 80% charge after seven hours of sunlight. The rate at which the sun can charge something like this is highly variable, changing with factors like placement and weather conditions. According to Anker, if you maxed out the number of solar panels this unit can accommodate (2,400 watts total), it could charge in 1.5 hours.
The F3800 is 6,000 watts, which is pretty beefy, but you may need more. Anker says the system is expandable up to 53.8 Kwh, which is impressive, if you’ve got the room—and the funds.
Impressive mix of outlets
In order to use a backup unit, you need enough outlets to power all the stuff you want to use. Luckily, the F3800 is well-equipped, with six 120v outlets. Of those 120v outlets, three are UPS outlets, meaning they have uninterrupted power. I’ve mentioned in the past that I love UPS as a way to keep my internet stable during unstable power conditions, and I’ll go a step further here to say that the F3800 could be a way to keep your entire smart home up and running through a short outage.
Then, there is a 240v NEMA 14-50 AC Port and a L14-30R AC Port, which would allow you to run something larger like a clothes dryer, but it also brings up the second use for a power station like this: delivering power where you don’t have it. That might include something like a work site, or just a garage workshop with terrible power servicing, for example. Again, I don’t recommend hauling this unit around town, but I kept coming up with scenarios in which the F3800 would be useful, like powering an EV or a garage freezer. There’s also a number of USB ports for fast phone and accessory charging.
Overall, a solid plan B for outages, if you can afford it
There isn’t a lot to compare the F3800 to because there aren’t many power stations of this capacity available to everyday buyers—but so far, I’m impressed. (EcoFlow does have a new station, the Pro Ultra, with slightly higher capacity than the F3800 at 7,200 watts. It’s also more expensive, at $5,199. I have not tested it, but it appears to be the same kind of expandable system.)
As I was thinking about how to really test the F3800 in the conditions it was meant for (an actual outage), a windstorm swept through that knocked out my power. As soon as it was clear the outage wasn’t momentary, I moved the F3800 into place. I connected it to my modem, TV, router, laptop, cell phone, fridge, a heater, and—with one absurdly long power cord snaked through the doggy door—the garage freezer. For the next two hours, my dog and I were happy, warm and entertained.
The power came back on by nightfall and I checked in with my power station. I’d only consumed 18% of the energy. If I had been a little more conservative in what I was powering up, I could have kept this party going for eight hours or more. The biggest obstacle, really, was extension cords.
