About Solar Power Auditor

Buy a portable power station and you are buying a number. "1,070 watt-hours." "2,048 watt-hours." That number is on the box, in the product title, and in every advertisement.

It is not the number you get. Between the cells and the AC outlet sits an inverter, a battery management system and a reserve the manufacturer keeps back to protect the pack. Independent laboratory testing puts the real figure at somewhere between 75% and 93% of the rated one depending on the unit, and manufacturers do not generally publish which end of that range their product sits at.

That gap is the entire subject of this site.

We are a research desk, not a test lab. Concretely:

• We collect published measurements from independent testers who do run these units — principally OutdoorGearLab, which publishes both its results and its procedure, and StorageReview, which publishes instrumented figures for some models.
• We put those measurements beside the manufacturer's own claims, so you can see where they diverge.
• We apply one published rubric to every unit, in the same proportions, and show the sum.
• We calculate runtimes from measured capacity using one fixed set of assumptions, and print the arithmetic under every figure.
• We cite everything, inline and again at the foot of every page.

Solar Power Auditor is written and maintained by a small editorial desk rather than a named individual reviewer, because attaching a personal byline to work that is fundamentally a synthesis of other people's measurements would misrepresent what it is.

That is a real limitation and we would rather state it than dress it up. If you are weighing this site against one with a named tester who owns the hardware, the named tester is telling you something we cannot.

What we offer instead is transparency about provenance: every number here has a visible origin, which is not true of most of the category.

We will:

• cite a named third-party laboratory for every measured figure;
• publish the arithmetic behind every runtime we calculate;
• state plainly when nobody has measured something, rather than estimating around the gap;
• keep manufacturer claims and independent measurements visually distinct;
• correct errors on the page, with the date, rather than silently.

We will not:

• claim to have tested hardware we have not tested;
• accept sponsored placements, paid scores, free units or press pricing;
• run display advertising;
• quote a street price we have not checked;
• rank a unit nobody has independently measured.

We intend to run our own bench. When that happens the procedure will be published here in full, our figures will be labelled as ours, and third-party measurements will remain on the page next to them rather than being quietly replaced.

Until then, everything on this site is somebody else's measurement and our arithmetic — which is exactly why we show you both.

Corrections, disagreements and requests for units to cover all go to the same place: our contact page. If we have something wrong we would rather hear it from you than leave it up.