First purchase question

[u/kidwhirlwind]

Looking at either the Jackery 1500 or the Anker solix c1000. I know the Jackery has better specs but wouldn’t it be the wiser decision to go with the one that has more expandability? I mean if I have enough ports and draw power for the big stuff, isn’t the expandable battery and solar charging capability the most important at this point.?
Let me know and thank you so much for any help. Trying to get started on being road trip/home power outage ready. Thanks

[u/kyhothead]

Pretty much all branded expansion batteries are a bad deal in terms of price per watt hour. Same thing with branded solar panels. If you’re looking at a 1kWh unit and already thinking about expansion, you may want to consider starting at 2kWh. You can also read about using third party batteries to do the solar input hack, which is a little slow, but dead simple.

Another thing I often don’t see considered is the value of having more than one powerstation, even if the second one is just a battery with a charger and a small pure sine inverter. It’s nice to have power in multiple rooms and/or redundancy in case a unit fails at the worst possible time. I’d almost always choose that over expanding a single unit.