Anker 757 Portable Power Station

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If you are like us and love the outdoors and being off grid, but still want creature comforts while parked in the middle of nowhere OR if you are just looking for some emergency backup power to run essential appliances for a few hours during a power outage, the Anker 757 PowerHouse is currently the best choice out there in the 1000-1500 Wh range.

We were not financially compensated for this post and the samples were provided to us for review purposes. The opinions are completely our own based on our experience with the products.

A PowerHouse of a powerstation

Anker 757 Portable Power Station

We got the Anker 757 just in time for a weekend camping trip to the California desert to photograph the night sky. At an isolated campsite inside Joshua Tree National Park with no electrical hookup, we parked our car, put up the tent, rolled out the sleeping bags.

We had pulled in later than anticipated, but were able to fire up the microwave to heat dinner and boil water for coffee in our electric kettle. A few years ago, propane gas stoves were the only practical solution for preparing warm food outside of a camp fire. With the Anker 757 PowerHouse, it took us about the same time as in our own kitchen to prepare dinner at our campsite, with significantly fewer moving parts and no dirty cookware to wash.

Shooting the night sky with multiple cameras while using motorized star trackers and laptops to control the setup presents its own challenge if you are an avid photographer, especially if you need to bring fully charged batteries for each individual unit. With the Anker 757, we plugged in everything to the 120v outlets, as we would at home and never worried about any equipment running out of juice in the middle of a 6 hour Milky Way timelapse. Needless to say, the Anker 757 will be a standard part of our equipment going forward no matter where we go off grid.

1070 Wh delivered at 600W Load (120V AC)

After getting home, we decided to put the PowerHouse to some controlled tests. After first charging the unit to 100% overnight, we hooked it up to a 600W heating fan to test exactly how much electricity it can store. We used a "Kill A Watt" meter to independently measure the electric output and found the total delivered electricity to be 1070 Wh over a 1 hour 50 minute timeframe at 605Watts continuous load. This is in line with what we would expect given an expected approx. 20% efficiency loss when converting to AC power.

Key Distinguishing Features

A key distinguishing feature of this Anker 757 PowerHouse battery is that it uses LiFePO4 batteries instead of regular lithium batteries. The benefits of LiFePO4 battery are that it can be recharged 3 to 6 more times than regular lithium batteries and it tolerates being charged to 100% without battery degradation much better than standard lithium batteries. Something else to consider is that power stations using regular lithium batteries should really not be left charged to more than 80-90% if you want to preserve their lifetime. If the number of charging cycles is important to you, the Anker 757 will last much longer than similar regular lithium battery power stations without having to monitor the charge level when not in use.

Another area the Anker 757 really shines is in its very fast charge times compared to some other products on the market. Most large power stations seem to take forever to charge. As a comparison, the popular Jackery 1500 takes an advertised 4 hours to 80% and a reported 6 hour to 100%. On the Anker 757 Powerhouse, we measured 62 minutes to 80% charge and 87 minutes to a full 100%. On top of that there is NO large external charging brick to lug around with the unit. You just use a standard power cord (same as on your desktop PC) to plug it into a 120v outlet and it starts pulling over 1000Watts from the outlet. This means that on a road trip, you can ask to use an outlet during a lunch stop to plug in the Anker 757 and have a full charge when you get back into the car.

There is one more thing that makes the Anker 757 unique - the switch on the front that disables "power saving" can be a lifesaver when you are powering equipment that does not pull continuous loads. Most power stations will turn off all outlets after a set time if it detects no load. When the equipment later needs power, it will not be able to get any as the outlets has been disabled. This can literally be a lifesaver of you are powering medical equipment like a CPAP machine during an outage.

The power station also has a host of more standard features:
► 6x 120v outlets
► 4x regular USB-A
► 2x USB-C power delivery up to 100 Watts for one of the ports.
► A 12v car socket
► A display showing you the Watts going in and out and estimated charge/discharge times based on the current load.
► A built-in light strip that pulls 2, 3, 4 watts or blinks SOS. At 2 Watts it could stay on for over 25 days continuously if needed.

The Gist

In our opinion, the Anker 757 Powerhouse has many features that truly set it apart from the pack of other power stations available on the market. Key takeaway benefits from our testing include an integrated charger, extremely fast charge times and the LiFePO4 battery chemistry giving a very long battery life. This power station will definitely be part of our equipment pack going forward.

You can order it directly from Anker here