When I discovered that getting two additional Baseus portable laptop chargers (four total) was going to perform better than the oversized, bulky Jackery 300 Plus I decided to ditch the Jackery all together and just keep the portal 40w solar panel it comes with. I can just hide a Baseus under the solar panels when working remotely and cycle through the Baseus bricks as I run out. When I’m near an outlet (which will be pretty much every day while traveling around America) I can charge all the bricks and other devices.
This works out because the laptop when it’s fully charged runs for close to three hours without any supplementation. The hotspot modems I have run for at least 6-7 hours and I’ll have two of them. If I watch movies on my phone instead of the laptop, which is easier in the tent anyway, then I will have no problem at all with power while away from civilization. Again, I don’t plan on being away from mobile phone range (and therefore usually a power outlet) for more than 24 hours tops while in digital nomad mode. When I’m in Tour Divide mode, well, that’s another thing all together but it actually works out just as well if I bring the Solar charger.
I have noticed that the Baseus do overheat and stop charging completely, which would leave me hanging in middle of a work day if I didn’t have a backup. But carrying four of them should have be covered. This redundancy is another reason to drop the Jackery. If it fails for any reason, I’m screwed. I was considering carrying two Jackeries for a while because of that. The Jackery does include an internal fan to keep it from overheating, which is nice. But not worth the bulk.
It says that a Jackery can recharge a laptop three times (roughly). And everyone is reporting a Baseus takes a laptop to 50% in an hour of charging. So roughly six Baseus bricks gets the same power capacity of one Jackery. But the bricks are actually much less weight and bulk. Plus, I don’t really need a full Jackery so long as I am able to recharge from a standard wall outlet every 24 hours for roughly three hours (usually at the same time as working). That means four bricks should do it.
$ bc <<< 'scale=2; 3922/3'
1307.33
$ bc <<< 'scale=2; 541*4'
2164
The best part of this discovery is that these fit in my ultra slim and cool San Util light panniers So I don’t have to take the ugly Ortlieb beasts.