I’m a big fan of solar panels for recharging my e-toys in the backcountry. In theory, at least. In practice, for sea kayaking on the West Coast, they can sometimes be suboptimal. Enter a whole different charging device: the PowerPot. – Gear review by MEC staffer Philip Torrens
On my kayak trips, if it’s sunny enough to make solar panels work, it’s often so windy and wavy that I don’t want more deck clutter. If it’s calm, it’s usually also cloudy. And hand-cranked dynamo flashlight/storage battery thingies are great for backpackers, but not when I’ve spent my whole day working my wrists through thousands of paddle strokes.
This is where the PowerPot comes in. Like the BioLite Campstove I reviewed last year, it uses a thermocouple to generate electricity for your USB-charged devices. But while the BioLite is a wood stove, the PowerPot is – you guessed it – a pot. This means you’re not restricted to one heat source. You can plunk the PowerPot down on a liquid fuel or LPG campstove, a folding woodstove, or a campfire grill.
The thermocouple is built into the pot’s base and uses the temperature difference between the heat source and the cold pot contents to work. Which means that once the contents are boiling, the PowerPot stops putting out juice.
This works well if you’re just heating water to pour into a pouch of freeze-dried stew. If you’re doing full-on cookery, you’ll need to transfer the water to another piece of cookware to finish making your meal (the PowerPot’s lid doubles as a small pot).
To maximize charging time from the PowerPot, run your stove flame low and slow. In the time it took my coffee water to boil over a throttled-back Trangia burner, the PowerPot pumped my smartphone from a 49% charge to 58%. If you use your phone on trips like I do – turning it on briefly once or twice a day to send texts or make calls – then boiling the dinner water could keep it charged indefinitely through a trip. If you’ve got a campfire on the go, you could keep filling the PowerPot with cold creek water and fully reload all your rechargeables over the course of an evening or a rainy rest day. Add in this USB compatible charger and you’ll be equipped to recharge AA and AAA batteries for your GPS, headlamp, etc.
After some experimentation at home and on short trips, I’m sold on the PowerPot. How sold? Enough that I’m leaving the solar panels at home and committing to the PowerPot for my annual multi-week summer kayaking trip.