Jackery Explorer 500 - Review 2023

If you are new to portable power stations, the Jackery Explorer 500 is easy to use and covers the important categories for a portable power station, such as size, weight, price, and battery capacity. Less than a foot long in any dimension and weighing just over 13 pounds, it’s a convenient size without sacrificing too much battery capacity or output power.

Appropriately named, the Jackery Explorer 500 possesses just over 500W of battery capacity and pumps 500 watts of output power, allowing it to run a laptop for up to 30 hours or a mini-cooler for 9 hours.

The biggest downside to the Jackery Explorer 500 is its lack of variety and quantity in outputs. Although it supports DC, AC, and USB charging, it only has one AC output and three USB outputs.  Furthermore, the USB outputs are all USB-A.  There are no USB-C outputs or Quickcharge 3.0 options.

Despite its shortcomings in output types, the station is a solid choice overall. It can be easily moved around by almost anyone.  Its reasonable size also makes it easy to bring along in the truck or in the car, where it can be charged through an input to 80% capacity in just 5.5 hours, which is much faster than many of the car charging speeds we’ve seen in other portable power stations.  Finally, its price point of a little over $400 puts it in the much more affordable range for many users compared to several other portable power stations on our list.