About OutageBench
OutageBench tracks what backup power actually costs, and what it actually does.
Most buying advice for portable power stations and home batteries is written once and left to rot. Prices on this equipment move constantly — a station can swing several hundred dollars in a month — and a recommendation that ignores price is half an answer.
OutageBench does something narrower and, we think, more useful. We track the published price of every product we cover, every day, and we keep the history. When we say a unit is at a good price, we can show you the last ninety days and let you decide whether we're right.
We pair that with the manufacturer's own published specifications — capacity, continuous and surge output, battery chemistry, rated cycle life, charge time, port configuration — normalized into tables you can actually compare across brands, which the brands themselves make deliberately difficult.
What we don't do
We don't run a lab. We haven't put these units on a load bank. When you read a runtime figure here, it is the manufacturer's claim or an arithmetic estimate from published capacity, and we say which. If you want teardowns and instrumented testing, there are people who do that well and we'll link to them.
We think knowing exactly what a site does and doesn't do is worth more than a vague claim of expertise.
Who writes this
Pages are published under the byline Ross Calder, a pen name for OutageBench's editorial desk. The site is published by Pangea Immersive LLC. Pen name, real accountability: corrections and questions reach a human at the address on our contact page, and we answer them.
More on where the numbers come from is on our methodology page, and how we're paid is on how we make money.