This is a very poorly researched article. A few things worth considering:
- 20,000 mAh is the rated capacity. Anyone who has tested 18650 batteries (which are the cells typically used in these battery packs) knows the rated capacity != tested capacity.
- Watthours is more important than amp hours
- Tested watt hours as typical loads is more important than amp hours
- It's very normal to see tested capacity to be roughly 70~80% of rated capacity.
- This commenter said they got "At 18W average, I pulled out 55.4Wh" on the Haribo [0]
- The generally considered "gold standard" for ultra light batteries in this range is the Nitecore NB20000 Gen 3, which regularly tests around 56 Wh.
So yes the conclusion is correct - you get roughly the same amount of capacity for a typical load (18W phone) for a cheaper price and slightly less weight. Very curious what battery cells the Haribo uses.
It's consumerist advertorial, which is why most of it is filler. 'Decent seeming new power bank happens to look cute' isn't that interesting of a sotry, so it has to be spun into a phenomenon that will allow the article to link out to 10 different products.
I'd go a step further and say that amp hours is meaning less since voltage is not specified. The only valid battery capacity unit of measure is watt hours.
While most battery packs use a single 3.7 lithium ion battery, Apple's first gen MagSafe battery pack used two internal batteries in series, throwing off everyone's amp hours only comparison.
I don't think this power bank uses 18650. You could fit 3 18650 in it, but the highest capacity 18650 out there is less than 15Wh and this advertises 77Wh. Even the tested capacity of 55Wh is higher than the before-loss 18650 capacity you could fit in it.
you're never going to construct a lightweight pack with cylindrical (18650/21700, whatever) cells.
a real light weight battery construction isn't going to have redundant casings and fuses; it'll be the bare minimum pouch/plate style construction, the bare minimum fuses at main junctions, and as light a protective shell as can be produced to house it all in. It probably won't have a BMS of any kind on board, with the functions handled up-stream from the battery.
While that's technically true for highly specialized applications such as an F1 car such as the one you listed, the parent article is discussing USB compatible consumer battery banks. Consumer battery banks are worth building with cutting edge-but-still-mass-produced cells, multiple layers of redundancies, and integrated BMS.
"Power bank cells are mainly divided into 18650 cells and polymer cells. The most common one on the market is 18650 lithium-ion batteries, with a market share of 70%."
Although that is completely true, pretty much all discussion, speccing, and marketing of batteries and power banks is done in Ah. So the article working in that unit is logical and consistent.
The bit that annoys me always (and what makes Ah a meaningless measurement for power banks) is whether the amp-hours rating is just the internal batteries' spec summed together, or is it as measured at the 5V outlet? Huge difference!
Why your [ultra-light hiker] friend suddenly has [the world's lightest] power bank.
I remember Colin Fletcher, years ago, writing in The Complete Walker about trimming the borders off his paper maps to save weight, which seemed like an insane over-optimization to me. But then, I'm not an ultralight hiker.
I am impressed folks are getting their loads down to 10 pounds though.
Tangent: as a web performance consultant, I've sometimes used "shaving down half the toothbrush handle while carrying a bowling ball in your backpack" as a metaphor for misguided performance optimization efforts.
That insane over-optimization is how folks are getting down to (and below) 10 pounds.
I'm not even remotely an ultralight backpacker, but I do count ounces (no matter what your weight limit is, you can't escape making tradeoffs to stay within it). Your hiking load is a great example of how quickly apparently insignificant quantities can add up. Saving fractions of an ounce multiple times gets you large savings far more quickly than you'd think.
I'm down to around 10 lb base load. And then I hike in the desert where I carry 5 - 7 liters of water (11 - 15 lbs). And food. Saving a pound here and there is totally worth it, but there's a large part of the country where prudent hiking means the majority of your weight is water.
I'm surprised that the gram weenies are carrying a battery at all. Carrying a phone at all must be galling, but you really need it for emergencies (and final pickup).
A guy I knew biked across part of Europe and borrowed a travel book of mine. He bought me a new one when he got back because he would tear out the pages of places he visited in order to lighten his load.
There's a point past which it becomes a number game without any practical utility. But there's a lot of people (especially hereabouts!) that find this kind of thing very enticing. Think of min-maxing D&D builds... it's kind of like that, but your rulebook is basically physics.
I recall reading about mountain climbing and some experienced climber was joking about the folks who are all about the weight and gear and so forth. He didn't say it was unimportant, but he did say that everything that makes him better than the amateurs, or even amateurs better than other amateurs had nothing to do with gear or weight fixation.
It was the same thing when I got into photography. It's always easy to talk about the easily measurable things. This lens is better than that and so on. Gear is cool and fun...
But the old guy with the beat up camera and not optimal lens shooting next to me ... he will take better photos almost every single shot.
The trick to lighter packs for many was weighing everything. Not uncommon to break everything down by grams - which tells you what could be improved. No point in spending $50 on a .5oz spoon, if your pack is coming in at 4lbs. Does help optimize where things could be cut and where the faf is. Lets you focus on what you really want to bring in when you have a breakdown of everything you bring. I really like lighterpack.com for my trip planning.
Very easy to bring crap you don't need as well. Always surprised me how much an extra hoodie or something would add to what was on my back. Also there is a 'stupid' light, where shaving grams is silly. Was shrinking down my hammock tarp and discovered my setup was not great when the wind shifted direction.
When it comes to power bricks, smaller things like this is great for the normal laptop bag or purse. This is cheap enough that I'd send it off to be black holed with all the other bricks I lend my kid.
This is so true it's not even funny. I keep a spreadsheet for each trip, and among other things, I record which of the items I actually used on the trips. It was very surprising to me how many things I thought I used and therefore needed, but when reviewing the records, I never (or very rarely) actually used.
Probably not. The community is always hungry for ways to trim weight, any new offering in the field is interesting, but since the battery is one of the most critical items, well, people tend to be conservative and stick to established models.
Most ultralight folks go light so they can cover more ground while being more comfortable. Experienced ultralighters consider how a weight reduction introduces risk against that goal, rather than simply "lighter is always better". Aka, don't go "stupid light".
An ultralighter is basically guaranteed to use their phone for navigation. A surprise battery failure may cut a trip short and possibly risk their well-being, both of which go against the goal.
It's not recommended to use battery models that haven't been extensively tested because there are conditions in the backcountry that you may not think about or be able to test beforehand, such as performance in cold conditions, whether the IPX rating really holds up, whether it's possible to brick the device accidentally by pressing the wrong button combination, etc.
A common recommendation is the Nitecore nb10000[1] for 10k of battery, and if you want 20k then bring two. (One of the Anker 20k models is also popular.) Bringing two 10ks is ~0.3 oz heavier than one 20k (per manufacturer specs), but it gives you charging parallelism (shortening down your recharging time by N hours, if your trip requires that you recharge midway) and device redundancy, both of which help you move faster with more reliably.
Related, it is also recommended to only use a battery bank that you have personally used for a few full charge cycles beforehand, to smoke out manufacturing defects.
> Ultralight culture seems a little nuts to the uninitiated.
I prefer "Durable, but as light as possible", not the other way around. Most ultralight gear breaks after a few uses or when it is mishandled in anything-less-than-perfect conditions, which, happens a lot outside.
My ultralight gear has been sufficiently durable for my backpacking and hiking, even off trail. I'm not hunting or repairing trails but stuff lasts a while. The only exception I've found is inflatable pads which get punctured but no more often than bicycle tire inner tubes and they can similarly be patched with some effort.
I feel like advances in manufacturing and materials science have really made some massive strides in the past 10 years or so—my sub-2lb 2p tent feels just as durable as my 7lb backpacking tent from the late 90s did.
Jury is still out on my new lightweight tent vs my 34 year old Eureka that still gets used when weight doesn't matter.
My Big Agnes is treated as if it is tissue paper where the Eureka somehow survived containing teens wrestling inside. I hope my BA lasts the rest of my life.
I will agree with the advances in materials, they are amazing - I just think we've made some amount of trade-off in durability.
In my experience, the third main variable here is cost. Light gear can be durable, but that usually costs a lot more because it uses expensive materials like titanium.
Packs used to have MOLLE/PALS strips and/or external pockets. Packs made now seem to have supersonic flight aerodynamics as the primary design feature… heaven forbid we add 20 grams of stitching/webbing for expansion/versatility.
The max weight is a bunch of bullshit on the ultralight gear.
Last time I moved I showed up the day before my stuff did, I slept on a camp cot I had bought for which I was 90% of the max weight. I used it on a carpeted floor for one night, it bent in two places. If I’d put the damned thing across a root it would have looked like a pretzel the next morning.
The author of tfa refers to r/ultralight, but fails to note the capacity reported there. Then he writes (or generates) an "article" that might be advertisement, making emphasis on price and fleetingly mentioning the brand products. It doesn't feel sincere.
This is a white-label product, they likely just used lighter plastic or a cheaper frame (cost savings? white color?) and accidentally made it attractive for hikers.
The weight difference to the Nitecore pack being mentioned is only ~15g.
If a video game company can fund building a fusion reactor, maybe a stealth breakthrough in energy densities coming from a sweet company is just how things roll these days!
I'll find out if this is true. Hiking buddy of mine pointed it out on Friday, so got one on the way. Was $18 when he called it out, $23 by the time I ordered. Apparently they have a bunch of random stuff like this. They must have some outdoorsy folks in marketing.
Thru hikers just kind of find this stuff. They are obsessed with weight and recommendations spread quickly through word of mouth on the trail and on forums.
Man it drives me crazy when people/products use Ah instead of Wh as a way to specify battery "capability".
Without knowing more details about the battery, "20Ah" alone does not convey enough information to determine how long the battery could power a given load for. If I need to power a 100 watt lightbulb, will a 20Ah battery power it for an hour? 10 hours? 10 days? No way to know.
Wh is the unit of stored energy, Wh is what I want to see. Even the official Amazon product page for it doesn't list a Wh figure.
I think they really just do it because generally everything you will connect to the battery, for the most part, will be using the same voltage, and it’s just easier to do your math and in your head. Remember, most people can’t just calculate a 20% tip in their head without having to think about it for a while or use an app.
Also, in this particular instance, phone batteries are measured in miliamp hours, so it makes the thing I actually want to know, how many times can it charge my cell phone, really easy to figure out.
But as somebody who tinkers with inverters and such, I agree, it is annoying. It is still generally not that hard to do in my head, and trivial with a calculator. But I’m with you.
There's a technical reason for it: the voltage sags when the battery is discharged quickly. Ah is relatively constant, but Wh decreases significantly with faster discharge rates, so it can't specified as a single figure.
Battery capacity is always measured in amp hours not watt hours, because it’s telling you more than just capacity. The rating is a measure of how many amps the battery can emit continuously for one hour. You can estimate how long the battery will last at different loads, but it won’t match up 1:1 because of efficiency differences depending on how fast the battery is discharged, and if it has a chance to recover between discharges. Basically watt hour measurements are path dependent, and using a fungible unit like watt hours obscures the meaning of the measurement.
If your 100W light bulb is a USB bulb running at 5V (to make the math a bit easier), with 20 Ah you’ll get 100Wh, ergo it’ll run your bulb for a hour. You just need to specify the voltage. There are numerous online calculators to do this math for you.
It is there somewhat for no-name brand. For product that is actually supposed to pay something for a brand it feels low. Unless these are promotional items that fall from back of the truck...
Did the crowdfunding mention breaking a new barrier in battery technology?
Batteries are made out of components, they have a capacity, volume, weight and price. It doesn't make sense that a cheap battery with low weight has a higher capacity than the existing expensive product.
Makuake is supposed to be a crowdfunding site but it's more of Groupon now. Lots of "projects" are just rebadges from AliExpress, profiting from the fact that English proficiency of Japanese consumers as well as appetite for foreign sold product is effectively zero, virtually unexisting those websites.
The picture on Amazon says 10Ah. Not interested until there is independent verification. The Haribo licensing lends some legitimacy, but way too many fly by night companies selling a fraction of what they advertise.
I replaced all my travel electronics to be powerable from USB-C. This saved me from a lot cables and adapters.
Even re-soldered the cable of my electric shaver to use a USB-C PD adapter PCB. As long it's somehow close to the standardized voltages (5/9/12/18/etc.) there will be no problems.
I'm not trying to be gatekeepy or anything, but in 2009 (not so long ago), I did an "ultralight" 40-day on-and-off-road motorcycle trip without any electronics. A few years before that, I did a 10 week "backpacker without a backpack" trip with no electronics. This is still very possible.
The weight savings, the "escape from electronics" bonus... It's not nothing.
In some places it's no longer possible to travel without a smartphone. For example, where I live you can't buy a ferry ticket without an app. So if I want to travel to another island with a motorcycle, I'll have to bring a smartphone.
Fully committing to USB C was a wonderful move. It's much easier to pack for the day, but also for hiking, cycling and motorcycle trips. I wired my motorcycle panniers to have USB C chargers inside them.
And if soldering is beyond your optimization ambition, there's aliexpress where you can find small USB-PD adapters for most electric shavers. It's little niche innovations like this that drive my ordering flow, not saving a few cents.
For those that want to travel light the Panasonic MultiShape[1] is great as you can share one rechargeable base with multiple tools. It is annoying as it's not USB, but inexpensive cables are available[2] and work great.
Can you talk more about this? I have a waterproof Braun one and I was thinking of making. USB-C dongle for it so that I don't have to crack the case and ruin the waterproofing.
Is the manufacturer of these things trustworthy? I am especially skeptical of any battery pack manufacturers because of the inherent risk of these things.
Readit News
- 20,000 mAh is the rated capacity. Anyone who has tested 18650 batteries (which are the cells typically used in these battery packs) knows the rated capacity != tested capacity.
- Watthours is more important than amp hours
- Tested watt hours as typical loads is more important than amp hours
- It's very normal to see tested capacity to be roughly 70~80% of rated capacity.
- This commenter said they got "At 18W average, I pulled out 55.4Wh" on the Haribo [0]
- The generally considered "gold standard" for ultra light batteries in this range is the Nitecore NB20000 Gen 3, which regularly tests around 56 Wh.
So yes the conclusion is correct - you get roughly the same amount of capacity for a typical load (18W phone) for a cheaper price and slightly less weight. Very curious what battery cells the Haribo uses.
[0] - https://old.reddit.com/r/Ultralight/comments/1li5rxw/20000ma...
I'd go a step further and say that amp hours is meaning less since voltage is not specified. The only valid battery capacity unit of measure is watt hours. While most battery packs use a single 3.7 lithium ion battery, Apple's first gen MagSafe battery pack used two internal batteries in series, throwing off everyone's amp hours only comparison.
I would also accept Joules. But yes, the unit should be a unit of energy.
> This is a very poorly researched article
So, yeah, pot, kettle, all that.
> but the highest capacity 18650 out there is less than 15Wh and this advertises 77Wh.
10x 2000 mAh 18650 batteries in parallel gives you 20 Ah @ 3.7V.
> So, yeah, pot, kettle, all that.
Totally unnecessary comment but thanks.
a real light weight battery construction isn't going to have redundant casings and fuses; it'll be the bare minimum pouch/plate style construction, the bare minimum fuses at main junctions, and as light a protective shell as can be produced to house it all in. It probably won't have a BMS of any kind on board, with the functions handled up-stream from the battery.
here's something close, although with plenty of weight compromise for reliability and safeties' sake. : https://global.honda/en/tech/motorsports/Formula-1/Powertrai...
Absolutely not. Pouch cells are what most powerbanks have.
https://www.benzoenergy.com/blog/post/type-of-cells-used-for...
Although that is completely true, pretty much all discussion, speccing, and marketing of batteries and power banks is done in Ah. So the article working in that unit is logical and consistent.
I remember Colin Fletcher, years ago, writing in The Complete Walker about trimming the borders off his paper maps to save weight, which seemed like an insane over-optimization to me. But then, I'm not an ultralight hiker.
I am impressed folks are getting their loads down to 10 pounds though.
It's all literally in the hot path.
When bugs show up in the form of back pain, "pre-optimize everything" sounds like a sensible option to me.
I'm not even remotely an ultralight backpacker, but I do count ounces (no matter what your weight limit is, you can't escape making tradeoffs to stay within it). Your hiking load is a great example of how quickly apparently insignificant quantities can add up. Saving fractions of an ounce multiple times gets you large savings far more quickly than you'd think.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...
It was the same thing when I got into photography. It's always easy to talk about the easily measurable things. This lens is better than that and so on. Gear is cool and fun...
But the old guy with the beat up camera and not optimal lens shooting next to me ... he will take better photos almost every single shot.
Very easy to bring crap you don't need as well. Always surprised me how much an extra hoodie or something would add to what was on my back. Also there is a 'stupid' light, where shaving grams is silly. Was shrinking down my hammock tarp and discovered my setup was not great when the wind shifted direction.
When it comes to power bricks, smaller things like this is great for the normal laptop bag or purse. This is cheap enough that I'd send it off to be black holed with all the other bricks I lend my kid.
This is so true it's not even funny. I keep a spreadsheet for each trip, and among other things, I record which of the items I actually used on the trips. It was very surprising to me how many things I thought I used and therefore needed, but when reviewing the records, I never (or very rarely) actually used.
Those items get cut from future loads.
Most ultralight hikers optimize for low weight, I optimize for low weight and maximum leftover space to haul a ton of weight back.
https://imgur.com/a/ezPqNG1
Cuz trust me, you don't wanna leave that behind when you find it.
Most ultralight folks go light so they can cover more ground while being more comfortable. Experienced ultralighters consider how a weight reduction introduces risk against that goal, rather than simply "lighter is always better". Aka, don't go "stupid light".
An ultralighter is basically guaranteed to use their phone for navigation. A surprise battery failure may cut a trip short and possibly risk their well-being, both of which go against the goal.
It's not recommended to use battery models that haven't been extensively tested because there are conditions in the backcountry that you may not think about or be able to test beforehand, such as performance in cold conditions, whether the IPX rating really holds up, whether it's possible to brick the device accidentally by pressing the wrong button combination, etc.
A common recommendation is the Nitecore nb10000[1] for 10k of battery, and if you want 20k then bring two. (One of the Anker 20k models is also popular.) Bringing two 10ks is ~0.3 oz heavier than one 20k (per manufacturer specs), but it gives you charging parallelism (shortening down your recharging time by N hours, if your trip requires that you recharge midway) and device redundancy, both of which help you move faster with more reliably.
Related, it is also recommended to only use a battery bank that you have personally used for a few full charge cycles beforehand, to smoke out manufacturing defects.
[1]: https://nitecorestore.com/products/nitecore-nb10000-gen-2-qc...
[2]: https://nitecorestore.com/products/nitecore-nb20000-gen-3-du...
How do two independent power banks achieve this?
I prefer "Durable, but as light as possible", not the other way around. Most ultralight gear breaks after a few uses or when it is mishandled in anything-less-than-perfect conditions, which, happens a lot outside.
My Big Agnes is treated as if it is tissue paper where the Eureka somehow survived containing teens wrestling inside. I hope my BA lasts the rest of my life.
I will agree with the advances in materials, they are amazing - I just think we've made some amount of trade-off in durability.
Quite often they end up being used a lot more too.
Packs used to have MOLLE/PALS strips and/or external pockets. Packs made now seem to have supersonic flight aerodynamics as the primary design feature… heaven forbid we add 20 grams of stitching/webbing for expansion/versatility.
Deleted Comment
Last time I moved I showed up the day before my stuff did, I slept on a camp cot I had bought for which I was 90% of the max weight. I used it on a carpeted floor for one night, it bent in two places. If I’d put the damned thing across a root it would have looked like a pretzel the next morning.
I don’t think many (if any) backpackers are taking a camp cot with them? I imagine most are using an inflatable sleep pad or a foam sleep mat.
The weight difference to the Nitecore pack being mentioned is only ~15g.
Perhaps it's just their Germanity shining through?
Without knowing more details about the battery, "20Ah" alone does not convey enough information to determine how long the battery could power a given load for. If I need to power a 100 watt lightbulb, will a 20Ah battery power it for an hour? 10 hours? 10 days? No way to know.
Wh is the unit of stored energy, Wh is what I want to see. Even the official Amazon product page for it doesn't list a Wh figure.
Also, in this particular instance, phone batteries are measured in miliamp hours, so it makes the thing I actually want to know, how many times can it charge my cell phone, really easy to figure out.
But as somebody who tinkers with inverters and such, I agree, it is annoying. It is still generally not that hard to do in my head, and trivial with a calculator. But I’m with you.
Deleted Comment
https://www.inchcalculator.com/ah-to-wh-calculator/
Watt-hours won’t save you, because we don’t know what voltage your bulb needs. Don’t assume it’s 120/240V.
This was openly crowdfunded in Japan. Please explain the lie/scam for us? How does Makuake rip people off?
https://www.makuake.com/project/haribo_dcglobal/
Is this comment anything more than the normal shit HN negativity?
Nihilism is so cool, thinking is so hard, if I try I might fail.
Sure you might be right. Just want to know where the scam is here?
Batteries are made out of components, they have a capacity, volume, weight and price. It doesn't make sense that a cheap battery with low weight has a higher capacity than the existing expensive product.
Do you honestly think they are putting the most cutting edge lipo technology in a gummy bear branded battery pack?
I agree with your GP, it is unlikely.
Maybe at least consider the density vs SOTA before you accuse someone of being a nihilist.
[] https://www.cei.washington.edu/research/energy-storage/lithi...
https://www.amazon.com/DCHK-10000mAh-Charging-Portable-Motor...
https://www.amazon.com/DCHK-20000mAh-Charging-Portable-Motor...
I replaced all my travel electronics to be powerable from USB-C. This saved me from a lot cables and adapters.
Even re-soldered the cable of my electric shaver to use a USB-C PD adapter PCB. As long it's somehow close to the standardized voltages (5/9/12/18/etc.) there will be no problems.
The weight savings, the "escape from electronics" bonus... It's not nothing.
That's 16 years ago...
In some places it's no longer possible to travel without a smartphone. For example, where I live you can't buy a ferry ticket without an app. So if I want to travel to another island with a motorcycle, I'll have to bring a smartphone.
Retractable C to C cables are also worth it.
[1] https://shop.panasonic.com/pages/multishape [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMGQWM1B
(Coincidentally, the Nitecore power bank briefly discussed in the article supports that.)
Seems like this article is skipping something important. What's the point of a light battery if it won't hold enough charge?