Jackery Explorer 1000 Off-Grid Solar System Review

Hello there, welcome back. In this video, you've probably guessed what we're gonna be taking a look at. It is this combined solar charger generator thing from Jackery. If anything goes wrong with the grid, I've got my main solar thing. Anything goes wrong with my main solar thing, I've got a petrol generator. If, for whatever reason, I can't get petrol, the sun is never gonna run out. And this allows me to travel with it as well. Now the model I've gone for here is the 1000 and the 1000 relates to how many watts it'll store in here. This is the battery storage generator, if you like. Obviously these things are the panels, each one is 100 watts, so in theory You could be putting 200 watts into here as an input and now it's approximately half two, three o'clock in the afternoon so we've gone beyond the midday sun and it's presently putting in about 120 watts. Now if I lived on the equator, you know, like the top of Africa or even the Mediterranean or something, I'm sure the midday sun with these two panels would give you almost 200 watts. Up here it's never going to happen. I think the most we've had out of it is about 160 and that was on a pretty good day. Now we've got a bit of cloud cover. I think the most I've been able to input into here Was just after midday one day and it was about 165 watts going in, which to be fair, isn't too bad between these two panels. As I mentioned before, I've got a big, like an off-grid solar system type thing. 12.4 kilowatts, I think the best we've had out of that is about 10.6. And that was round about midday, one particularly sunny day. So, you're never going to get. the maximum out of these things unless you live somewhere bang near the equator where you've got like the intensity of the sun you know i think this might be the biggest one in the uk don't quote me on that though i'll put the link to jackery's site in the video description just check it out see what they've got at the end of this video i will show you something i recorded within an hour of receiving this when the grid went off and my supposed off-grid solar system failed to supply the house with any electricity. I had loads of orders to process, I needed the internet, printer, laptop, all that sort of thing, and between this fella, which had just arrived, and the petrol generator I've got, which was in a different location, I managed to get all the orders out without any interruption. This really did save my bacon on that day and we've used it in the house since then. As I said before, I haven't had this thing long, but it has come in useful already. I'll just unplug this so I can show you the features. But here we've got a folding 100 watt solar panel. And the top of it has actually got a couple of magnets here and here, which just allows it to hang together that bit better. Carrying handle on the top, your cable in the back, which you just cram into there. And in here, it's also got a USB outlet and a Type-C outlet as well. And on the back of each of the sections, we've got a fold-out stand. That's what was allowing it to stay at the right angle when I had it out here. So when we want to charge the generator up, all we do is open this out, kick open the stands, chuck it on the ground, pull out the cable. There we are, and connect it up. It's currently on 65 watts only from that one. Plug that in, it's up to roughly 120 watts. So that's both of them feeding into here now. Now the other panel is exactly the same, there's no point showing you that. But what I will show you is this splitter, which comes with the kit. That allows you to feed in both panels into here for your input. Just zoom in there so you can see the display there. Top left is what is going into the generator, roughly 120 watts from the two panels. The output is roughly 70 watts. I've got my phone plugged in, I've also got like a battery that I use for like a battery pressure washer plugged in. And the figure on the right hand side is the remaining battery life, so it's got 99%. That means it's pretty much full, so it's holding one kilowatt of power in there. Now in the middle of the screen is the input. That's what the splitter is feeding into, but it also has a DC input there as well. So if I only wanted to plug one panel in, I can just plug one panel in there. Oh, and as you can see, it's gone up to about 60 watts. Now, if it's a particularly cloudy day and you can't charge it via the sun, you have got a plug-in charger, and that just goes in here. And you've also got yet another way of charging it. This one would just go into the tab lighter in your car, and you could charge it like that. Now the sun's just gone in and we're still pulling in 55-ish watts from the sun to charge this up and that's going in there. Obviously this is our charging bit here. We've got an outlet with like a tab lighter outlet sort of fitting and we've also got a couple of USBs and a couple of like C-type connector outlets there as well. One normal and one fast charging for each. And then, what is really the business end, this is just two standard plug sockets. So you can charge a hell of a lot of different stuff up all at the same time with this unit. Now in total, this weighs 12 kilos, although to me it doesn't feel that heavy. I should maybe have weighed this. Either I'm getting stronger or 12 kilos isn't what 12 kilos used to be. Still perfectly manageable. Either side of the generator has got Like fan outlets to allow the air through to keep the batteries cool whilst it's charging and discharging. And on the end here, you've got a little light, which, I mean, you know, it's feeble at best, but it's still a light. And I've seen a lot of folks online complaining about this light, you know, asking what the point of it is. But if you're camping and you just need a light, say, to go to the bathroom or something or just to get in and out of your tent. You know, just press that, it's enough light to do whatever it is you want to do. You want to change your wheel at the side of the road or something, you know, your car breaks down, again, that's enough light. I can't see a problem with that, I think that's a nice feature. Now unfortunately, this kit doesn't come with a bag to carry this fella around in, but they are available. I forget where I got this lad from, but I got the bag on Amazon. It's basically a glorified cooler bag. That you'd, you know, put a picnic in or loads of beer. I think I'd die if I drank the amount of beer that this would hold like. Click. And on the top we've got self-sealing zip and in here we can put all the various chargers with room to spare and then below that we put the actual generator itself. Again I've seen people online complaining about these bags saying they're a lot of money for what they are. I think it's pretty much worth it, you know, the fittings. On metal, it's impeccably made, it's got good insulation, it's just a useful good bag and if you didn't want to take this out with you, yeah, it will double up, you know, as a picnic bag or a beer bag or something. Dual use. The dust off it keeps it clean, keeps the dust off it, it keeps it, it just helps to keep this expensive acquisition. Clean. So I can't understand why you wouldn't want to buy a bag at the same time as all this stuff, but each to their own. I'm sure you'll get some people who, you know, invest in all this beautiful kit and then just wrap this up in an old bin bag or something, which is pretty sackless. Yeah, so the sun's back out again and it's back up to over 120 watts going in there. Now I'm sure there's some people are looking at this and thinking, I have no idea what a thousand watts is or what one kilowatt is. Well, one kilowatt is a thousand watts. So, in essence, this holds a hell of a lot. How would you understand the capacity of it? Well, yeah, this thing, this charger, this charging up my 20-volt battery for my pressure washer is pulling roughly 50 watts. So really, if you had something else similar to this that was drawn 50 watts out of here, it would do it for about 20 hours. So you'd have 20 hours of 50 watts feeding out. If you had 100 watts feeding out, you would have about 10 hours of storage in here. If you had 200 watts being drawn out of here, you'd have about five hours of life power to pull out of here. If you're using something that was 500 watts, this would provide that thing that was drawn 500 watts for two hours. If you were drawing 1,000 watts, that would give you one hour from whatever it is that you're drawing 1,000 watts. I've seen people setting these things up with electric hot plates and so on and demonstrating them, but that's just going to absolutely devour the battery life out of this. Unless you had a charge and at the same time as you were actually using your hot plate, you don't really want to be using something that's too heavy on the electric. With this, otherwise it's not gonna last long, you know. I would say for cooking outdoors, you wanna be using wood or gas. That's much more efficient than something electric. But as far as your appliances in the house that could run off this, you could run your TV. In fact, you could run multiple TVs. You could run your gaming consoles, your internet. You could probably run the majority of the lights in your house at the same time, as well as all the stuff I've previously mentioned, and you'd still get a good few hours out of this. So really in an emergency situation I would say use this to power maybe your phone if you've got a landline, your internet, your lights and small appliances. You know, don't go plugging electric hot plates or food mixers or toasters or you know kettles or anything like that into it. There's not enough power in here to handle that heavy load. Or if the electric wasn't going to come on for a while, forget about all that other stuff. Don't bother powering all that crap. Power your fridge or your freezer, that's what's going to go bad and then you're going to have to replace all that food if the power doesn't come on for a couple of days, you know. Now where my chest freezer is, is in my shed which is at the bottom end of my garden, there's no reason why I couldn't connect that to here and have the panels outside so during the day it would actually be feeding more in than it was drawn out and then I'd still have enough left over to go all the way through the night right out into the next day and cover me even if it wasn't perfectly sunny, you know. That would be the priority. So really, I'll just conclude this first video about this lad with a few positives and a couple of negatives as well. So, positives are that it works, and it works well. It has a really good storage capacity for a small unit. And obviously this has got an inverter and everything built into it. It's got your charger, your battery backup, your inverter, all your outlets, it's got everything all in one neat package. That is its main selling point and it's not super heavy either. It's super easy to set up. It literally takes two minutes from the time you bring it outside and take it out of the bag and set these up, connect them up and it's charging. It's got pretty much every outlet you could need and you can just switch those on and off. From up here, I don't think I mentioned that before, so even if you've got everything all plugged in at the same time, and you want to just switch everything off, but leave them connected, you just press that button, or that button. Knock your DC or your AC off. Exceptionally easy. The bag is, to me, an essential, and it's really good quality. Strong as well, you can drive on with it, it's not going to break. The panels, they're well made. You know, the stands work well, they set it at a good angle. That's more or less Flat onto the sun. The conversion rate seems pretty good. As I say, we live far north. I think most we've had is 165 watts between the two. That's pretty good. The further south we went, the more we would get. These peak out at 100 watts each. That's enough to charge this fella up pretty quick. When these panels are folded up, they don't take up much space at all. Reasonably impact resistant as well. Although, the manual says they aren't waterproof. Imagine they're shower proof though, don't quote me on that, but I cannot see why they wouldn't be shower proof, you know, if you had this outside, you went away and you thought, oh my god, it's started to rain, you raced back, I think they would just wipe off, they should be fine, you know. Now the fact that these aren't classed as being waterproof doesn't really bother me, because generally, on a sunny day, it's not chucking it down with rain, rain just doesn't come out of nowhere, you know, and if you're on a campsite, or you're away, you know, just anywhere, and you have this set up, You're not then gonna go miles away from it and just leave it because opportunists are all over the place and the chances are when you got back none of this would be there waiting for you. All the necessary cabling and connections are included, it really is just plug and play. Really there's nothing else that you need for this system to work for you so that is another positive. It's pretty much all positives really, it's a bloody good system you know. If I can't think of any more, I'll put them in the video description. I will do a written, shortened review in there. As far as the negatives go, well, maybe the fact that these aren't waterproof. We've covered that before. That doesn't bother me. I can hear some people screaming at the screen going, the cost of it, the cost of it. Panels, good panels cost a lot of money. Good storage units cost a lot of money. Inverters tend to cost a canny bit of money. You put all that together in one usable package. And if your grid goes off in your local area and you need to power your sockets or your lights or whatever, you cannot put a cost on something like this, you know? I mean, you're better spending, like, what was this, at the time round, about 1,500 quid or something. See, it might be slightly more, it might be less. I think there's vouchers available. If there is, I'll put it in the video description. I think we've got a 5% voucher, whatever. I'll put it in the video description if there's any vouchers available. Ehh... You know, you could spend 1,500 quid. on a whole pile of crap that would be no use whatsoever and really with the way battery technologies come on over the years this is going to last a hell of a long time it's not like something you would buy 15 years ago which you might get four or five years out of it you know this is a sound investment even if i didn't have all of the other stuff that i've you know saved up for and bought over the last few years knowing that some sort of nonsense would be pulled in 2020 I would have started with this. This wasn't really on my radar because I went with the, you know, the big solar system and so on. We had to leave the house in some sort of ultra-nonsense situation. We couldn't take 38 massive solar panels with us or all the battery back up and all the cabling and everything, unless we had an arctic to carry it, whereas with this it'll go in the boot of the car, you know. We've always got power wherever we would be going to. If you found this useful, check out the video description, and I'll put links to where I got this from, which was Amazon, it's also available, well it's available all over the place, eBay, a lot of outdoor shops do it, a lot of like prepping places do it, a lot of camping places are starting to stock these sort of things as well, could have bought all the gear separately, made up my own system, but I was worried that the various connections and bits wouldn't be compatible. This is all from the same manufacturer so I know it's compatible that's why I went for this really and also because of the big storage in a small space and also because of the reviews as well some of the reviews are folks that don't show anything connected up they're pretty much useless reviews other ones are from people who have like a you know a camper van lifestyle they're there they're better than my review I mean this is just like a prepping sort of thing that I bought you I'm pleased with it. The people who do the proper reviews, where they're out on the road using these things, you know, you bug out vehicles, that sort of thing, they know what is good gear, and this is the gear they use. You cannot really get much more recommendation than that. Thanks for watching. I shall see you in the next video. Well, would you believe it, within half an hour of receiving my solar generator, the electric goes off. So, I've got a petrol generator running my shed here. And I've got the solar generator in the house supplying my internet machine distributor thing so that I've got internet in the shed so I can still process my orders for my job. As you can see, we've still got the boxes here. I literally got the panels out of the box, put the little Y piece on, connected the battery bank here and then our grid went off. So I took the battery and I put it in the house. As you can see, we're still without power. That's my fridge, that's my cooker, no display on there. But what I have got is this little fella, and that's supplying power to my internet thing, my home hub, and also to the phone as well. First day, first hour of the first day, and I need it, and it's there, and it works. You can see it's currently on 62% charge. And the output is between 20 and 23 watts. That would give me power for long enough. Especially since this thing holds one kilowatt. Obviously, if it's only 62%, it's only got 600 watts of power left in it. But 600-odd watts divided into 20 or 23 watts? That's a lot of hours of usage. A lot of hours of internet. Hey, I thought you said you had like a 12 kilowatt off-grid solar system. Well, I thought I did until the grid went down and then my solar system wouldn't work. Apparently it needs some sort of automatic switch on it that I didn't ask for. And yet the brief that I gave the guys putting it in was that if and when the grid goes down, I want power from the sun. That's why I've spent a fortune on solar panels and 11.6 kilowatts of battery power, all of which is sitting in my shed. Undrained. It's not feeding back into the house. Hence the little petrol generator to run my shed where I work from. And I'm so lucky that this arrived today and was charged up to about 60 odd percent when it arrived. Because that feeds my internet. So the internet feeds out. I can pick it up in the shed. The petrol generator supplies power to my things in there. Which enables me to carry on my work. So I haven't lost a day of work. And therefore I haven't let any customers down, which is awesome.