Who We Are
"Power for the trek, not the spec sheet."
We're the kind of people who plan a campsite around the inverter. The kind who owned a Jackery before Jackery had a marketing department. Who cross-referenced three RV forum threads before pulling the trigger on a second battery, and who have strong opinions about LiFePO4 cycle life at 80% depth of discharge.
Most portable-power "reviews" you'll find online were written by someone who unboxed the unit indoors, ran it to 50% on a laptop charger, and called it tested. They've never plugged in a CPAP in the rain at 9,000 feet. Never watched a Delta Pro's inverter efficiency drop at partial load in January. Never had to explain to their partner why the power station is more important than a second sleeping bag.
We have. And we talk to the people who have.
What "Field Notes" Actually Means Here
JuiceTrek is a synthesis publication. We don't claim to have tested every unit ourselves — the off-grid power category moves too fast and the gear is too expensive for any one team to run a proper lab. What we do instead:
- Aggregate real-user field reports — RV forum threads (iRV2, Expedition Portal, the Tacoma World build logs), Reddit (r/SolarDIY, r/vandwellers, r/preppers), YouTube van-build and off-grid homestead channels where people pull actual amp logs
- Read the manufacturer datasheets forensically — cycle life specs, BMS cutoff behavior, inverter efficiency curves, operating temperature ranges. The stuff buried in the appendix that most reviewers skip
- Run the unit economics — watt-hours per dollar at purchase, cost per cycle over life, capacity-to-weight ratio. Numbers that let you compare across chemistry and brand
- Tell you what we'd buy — not what scores highest on a rubric, but what the people who actually use this gear in anger have converged on after six months
The Spec-Sheet Problem
Here's the thing about portable power marketing: every company publishes the peak capacity at room temperature with a brand-new cell at 100% charge. Nobody tells you what happens after 200 cycles at 0°C, or how the inverter handles a surge from a refrigerator compressor, or what the BMS does when you try to pull 2,000W from a unit rated for 2,200W for more than 30 seconds.
The RV forums know. The van-life YouTube comments section knows. The guy who ran his EcoFlow in a Death Valley August and documented the throttling knows. We find those people. We aggregate what they found. We tell you what the spec sheet won't.
Our Affiliate Relationship
We earn a commission when you buy through our links — from Jackery's Impact program, Bluetti's ShareASale program, EcoFlow directly, and Amazon Associates. This funds the research. It does not influence the analysis. If a unit fails the RV forum consensus test, we say so — regardless of commission rate.
The affiliate relationship is disclosed on every page. We've structured it that way because we'd want to know, and we assume you would too.
Questions? Disagreements? Field Data?
If you've run a unit in conditions we haven't covered — extreme cold, high altitude, medical device use, multi-day van builds — we want to hear about it. Real field data makes every article better.