Portable solar power station great way to beat winter disruptions.
As New Zealand shivers into midwinter, each cold snap brings another set of headlines – Could you be about to lose your power?, Grid emergency sparks power cut warnings, Energy Minister “incredibly concerned”.
The threat of power cuts underlines that our electricity network is under severe stress. Transpower, the state-owned enterprise responsible for electricity transmission, recently admitted Kiwis would face winter power cuts if the wrong weather conditions collide.
The grid operator needs to spend billions on creaking infrastructure – much of it built in the 1960s and 1970s – and faces headwinds in recruitment and supply chains.
If the lights – and other appliances – go out, most larger organisations in New Zealand have a Plan B. But how can households cope in an electricity outage that could – as recent events have shown – last from a few hours to several days or even weeks?
The answer, says Jamie Elliott, product manager for EcoFlow, can be found in a “portable power station” that will keep your fridge and freezer, cooker, WiFi, perhaps even medical equipment such as CPAP machines charged and ready to go.
EcoFlow is a solar-powered power system (it can also be charged off the mains) that aims to keep a house running without the fumes, noise and fuss of a traditional diesel generator.
He says there’s a major difference between an old-school generator and EcoFlow’s solution. While a generator is engine-based, creating power from its motor running, the EcoFlow system has a solar-charge option with a battery that stores energy to charge or power appliances as you need them.
“One of the great things about the EcoFlow system is that you can charge up the power station and just have it on standby for when you need it, so it can just be charged and left. Then, when you do need that power, you can just plug your appliances straight into the unit. You don’t need to go and get fuel to make it run. You just charge it beforehand, then it’s all there, ready to go.”
That, he says, is a major source of reassurance. “They’re great to help people out when they have lost power or need to supplement the bad power supply they may have in their area. So, in an emergency, as long as your unit’s fully charged, you always have access to some power to keep you going until your main power source comes back on.”
Elliott says the River 2 product charges fully in only an hour – five times faster than other portable power stations on the market – and the battery lasts for up to 10 years.
Cyclone Gabrielle, Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods, the Kaikoura earthquake: there’ve been plenty of examples of adverse weather and natural disasters in recent years – and predictions of more to come.
“With changes in weather and other infrastructure issues, everything’s getting very unpredictable, so this is a way to give yourself a bit of security for those things you may not have expected to happen,” says Elliott.
The kit is plug-and-play, he adds: “One of the things EcoFlow set out to do was to try and take away some of the confusion around similar systems where you have to buy individual components and then wire them all up yourself. Once you’ve got the EcoFlow unit, you don’t need to do anything else - you don’t need to get it wired in or get it connected by an electrician. You’re paying upfront for a complete solution.”
The products have been available here for about three years, and Elliott says they have a surprising range of users. “We sell a lot to RV or motorhome users, tradies for powering tools on sites that don’t have power connected or for recharging their batteries on the go – even campers who do remote work where they don’t have access to power for phones or laptops.
“The applications are almost endless because pretty much everything that we do nowadays needs power, and the EcoFlow units provide that power for whatever you need.”
Solar-powered backup for electricity outages might seem counter-intuitive in a New Zealand winter, and Elliott agrees that for solar panels to be effective, you need a clear day.
“But as long as you’ve got access to some sunlight coming through, they will generate power. We have a number of different solar panel sizes and they generate a different amount of power depending on the size. The bigger the solar panel, the more cells which generates more power and, importantly, they can store that power to be accessed later.”
One of the surprising aspects about EcoFlow’s products are their size: some solar panels fold down to not much bigger than a computer carry-case, the three models in the River 2 series weigh from 3.5kg to 7.8kg. Even at this size the River 2 produce enough energy to power from 19 to 57 phone charges, from 20 to 60 hours of a typical lightbulb or WiFi, or from 3 up to 18.5 hours of a fridge-freezer.
“Physically they’re not massive, so you can just pick them up and put them down where you need them,” Elliott says.
But EcoFlow’s biggest asset, he says, is that promise to keep the lights on, the fridge chilling and the heaters warming – or, for increasing numbers of Kiwis, home-based medical equipment ticking over - in a power outage.
For more information visit ecoflowtech.co.nz