Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Jackery Explorer 500 is a solid, well designed product. The unit is rugged and compact with nothing on the exterior to break off or catch on nearby objects. The display shows charge level, charging wattage, and use wattage, all very handy. The pure sine wave inverter provides a clean AC supply at 110V, 60 hz. The unit charges in 8 hours with the AC wall charger, and 12 hrs with a 100W solar panel. Solar charging is ultra simple, requiring no charge controller on the panel, simply an MC4 to 8mm connector from the panel. Pass through charging is awesome, gives the ability to charge and use the unit simultaneously. DC socket provides a solid 12V (actually 13.4V) to ensure your 12V devices have full voltage as the battery discharges. The unit can run as many devices as you can plug in at a time in the 12V, 120VAC and USB sockets, as long as it doesnt go over the 500W max. The 6 hour socket timeout for loads less than 10W is still an undesirable feature. Running a ceiling fan or diesel heater in my van, the unit shut off sooner than desired. Jackery is working on extending the timeout time, but until then the problem can be solved by adding an additional load (cell phone charging or light) to get load over 10W and avoid the unit shutting down. The price is on-par with other portable power units at about $1 per watt hour. As mentioned, the battery is lithium ion, which has only 500 use cycles vs. LiFePo batteries at 2000. However, I dont think any LiFePo units are available at $1 per Wh, so the price is fair for the product. Thats only $1 per charge cycle! Note that inverter losses are real. I ran a desktop monitor from the AC plug with the typical AC/DC adaptor, and the unit drew 58W. I then plugged the monitor into the DC plug with 12V to 16V step up convertor and the draw was 30W. So use DC whenever possible... This is all around a great product with a combination of features superior to other portable power units you might find on Amazon. Jackery has prompt customer service to back it up.