About Power Station Data
Power Station Data compares portable power stations on what their manufacturers publish, measured against what the rest of the class publishes. We do not test them.
Why this site exists
A power station advertises watts and watt-hours side by side and explains neither. They answer different questions — one is a ceiling on what will start at all, the other a budget for how long — and conflating them is the single most expensive mistake a buyer makes, because the fix for one is not the fix for the other.
Reading one listing tells you very little. Reading 170 of them, normalised into the same units, tells you what an ordinary station in each class looks like. The median here holds 1,024 Wh and runs 51 min at its own rated output.
What we do
We collect listings, extract every specification the manufacturer publishes, convert them into consistent units, and compute a baseline for each output class, capacity band and cell chemistry. Every page then measures individual stations against the baseline for their own class, and every station carries the runtime its own figures imply.
The work that matters most is the cleaning. Uninterruptible supplies, jump starters and bare panels sit in the same search results, and the specifications they publish look exactly like a power station’s. The methodology page documents how each is excluded.
What we do not do
We do not physically test power stations. No unit described here has run anything for us. We say so on every page rather than implying hands-on experience we do not have.
We do not publish star ratings or review counts, and we do not publish exact prices — where price context is needed, we describe a band. Where a manufacturer has not published a specification, we print not stated.
Who writes this
Tobias Renn, Editor, is the byline on this site. Tobias is a pen name, and we would rather say so plainly than let a fabricated biography do work it has not earned. There are no trade credentials behind it, and there should not be: a site that states on every page that it does not test equipment has no business presenting a credentialed engineer as its author.
What stands behind the figures is the method, not the persona. It is written down, it is repeatable, and where it fails we would rather publish the gap than paper over it.
Why baselines, and not verdicts
Most buying advice ends in a ranking. Rankings are useful when someone has genuinely tested the field. Where nobody has, a ranking is an opinion dressed as a result, and the confidence it projects is the part that misleads.
A baseline makes a weaker claim and keeps it: here is what an ordinary station of this class looks like, and here is where this one sits against it. That is a fact about the market rather than a judgement about the product.
The limits, stated plainly
This site inherits every weakness of its source. If a manufacturer publishes an optimistic capacity, we repeat it. The runtime figure we derive is a ceiling, because inverter efficiency is not published by a single listing in this corpus and we will not estimate it. If a station is sold only through specialist retailers and never appears in the catalogue we read, it is absent from our baselines and we will not know it is missing.
Coverage is uneven in ways that constrain what can be compared. AC recharge time, inverter waveform and operating temperature range are all too sparsely published to compare fairly, so we offer no comparison rather than one built on the fraction of listings that state them.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, it is worth more to us to know than to look right.