I Finally Did It! I Now Own A Jackery

 

I've had an alternative solar power source on my wish list for sooooooo long and now I am the proud owner of a Jackery 240 and a 60 watt portable solar panel.  I live in an older neighborhood and our infrastructure has issues.  We have power outages on a fairly regular basis, usually they don't last too long, but the last two actually did.  They were caused by equipment failure, as are most of the ones we have, and required lengthy repairs so we were in the dark for quite a while, almost seven hours.

 

During the last five years I've researched and shopped for the best possible deal on a small backup power source.  I knew I'd want a solar panel to charge it with too since we are blessed with quite a bit of sun around here.  I settled on this one simply because it is lightweight, will do what I need it to do, won't take long to charge back up and was affordable.  These systems aren't cheap, but I do think they are worth it.

 

Very compact & lightweight

I wanted a smaller unit to begin with.  One, to try it out, and two, because I don't need a lot of power for what I'm mainly planning to do with it.  I want to use it while I'm traveling and as a backup for when the power goes out mainly for charging up my laptop and my phone, or running the router and maybe making a cup or two of coffee.  If it works as well as I'm hoping it will I'll save up and see about getting a larger unit to backup my chest freezer.  Having one for travel is what excites me the most because it will allow me to be out and about longer without the need for civilization.

 

Solar panel briefcase

The Jackery can be recharged by plugging it into a wall outlet as well as with the car adapter so I will have a few options in that respect, but I thought the solar panel would be really nice to have.  In addition I invested in a car inverter so I can also use that while I'm driving down the road to charge my laptop or run a slow cooker.  Or stop on the side of the road and make me a coffee.

 

Charged to 100% in no time

I am super excited that I finally got one.  But!  I have to tell you how it worked out.  I had the unit and solar panels in my Amazon cart under "saved for later" and after learning we were going to be getting a state income tax rebate I moved those two items back into the cart and decided to "sleep on it".  It's what I do.  In the meantime they dropped the price on the Jackery another $30 and offered a $22 OFF coupon to boot.  Then!  Alexa interrupted me later that day with a "lighting deal" on the solar panel which saved me another $50!  When I went into my cart to take a look I also had another 5% OFF coupon attached to the solar panels.  I was able to get the Jackery and the solar panels for only $309.00 saving me over $200.  Ironically, that was about the same amount as my state tax rebate.  I figured it was meant to be so I went ahead and ordered it.  How about that?!  I'm pretty tickled.  Now to put it to work!