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Power Up Your Pack Trip

When assessing your power needs for a packing trip, it is important to first figure out what your power needs are, examine your power options, and last, decide what will work best for your trip (or trips!). Here are our recommendations on how to power up your pack trip.

1. How much power do you need to bring? 

Start with a list of all the electronic devices you plan to take with you, look up their battery capacity, estimate how long you will use them each day and for how many days you plan to be on your trip.
That may sound daunting, but let’s look at an example: 
Let’s say you plan a four day trip and decide to carry

  • iPhone 13 Mini with a battery of 2406 mAh. And let’s assume you use 50% of your battery each day, that’s 1203 mAh a day, for a total of 3,609 for the trip if you charge it up each night for 3 nights.
  • An Apple Watch SE that has a battery of 245 mAh, assume you need to charge it every day – you use 100% of your battery. That’s 980 mAh for the trip. 
  • Garmin inReach with a battery of 3100 mAh., Assume you use the default mode with 10-minute tracking send interval and 1-minute log interval for 10 hours using 10% of the battery each day.

For your trip, you wouldn’t need to charge your inReach but would need to charge your watch every day and you’ll most likely top off your phone each night. Thus, you would need 4,589 mAh in battery capacity for the trip. 

To reduce the amount of power you need, you could also consider bringing solar powered lights like our Luke Lights for a more specific “task oriented” light or the Luci Light for ambient light.

2. What does it weigh?
With battery banks and solar chargers, there is a direct correlation between the capacity and size of the power source and its weight. So this is another reason to calculate how much you need so that you don’t lug around 20000 mAh of power (which can weigh nearly 1 pound!) when you only need 5,000.

3. What are the power options? 
Next, you should examine the different types of power options available. There are battery banks, battery banks with solar, or solar panels on their own. 

If you have a short trip, or few power needs, you can opt for a simple battery bank. This is also a good option if you’re going to be hiking under a dense tree canopy, where sunlight will not be intense enough to charge a solar battery bank. Anker is well regarded, lightweight. You can check them out here. 

The Nitecore NB 10000 is also a popular choice. 
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If you are going to establish a camp for a few days, and have the ability to charge your devices during the day, then it might make sense to save the weight of the battery pack and bring some solar panels with you. Goal Zero has a collection of solar panels that you can see here. 
For longer trips, you should consider a battery bank that has solar panels! In general, you will need full, direct sun for optimal charging, so consider the environment that you’ll be traveling in when making this decision. A key factor here is ensuring that the solar panels and the bank are large enough to meet your power needs. The benefit of this option is that it gives you the best of both worlds: the weight savings of a smaller battery bank, but the ability to refill that bank as you use it. 

Unfortunately, many of the solar battery banks available have a solar panel that is much too small to be effective at refilling the bank. That is why our Chandler Charger has three, foldable solar panels. This generates approximately 2000 mAh per day to refill the 8000 mAh battery. Given the example above where you need approximately 1500 mAh per day, this size of solar panel would keep your battery pack full most days, and you’d have excess capacity for any rain or extra use. 

Time to Shop!
Taking all of these options into account, you now need to make a decision. Every trip may be different but in general, you should think through your most common use cases. Are you hiking in the high Sierras of California where there is ample sun exposure? Or are you hiking through the woods in New Hampshire, where tree cover is significant? Do you normally trek for a weekend, or are you embarking on a much longer journey?

Thankfully, power options are becoming more and more affordable, and over time, you may acquire a variety of solutions for different types of trips. 
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We hope these tips help you find the right power source to keep you safe and powered up on the trails.  When deciding on a battery bank, we hope you consider our Chandler Charger. We are a nonprofit organization with a mission to light the world and for every Charger we sell, we donate one to someone living without electricity. To learn more about our programs, visit this page. 

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