VTOMAN Jump 1800 portable power supply - Your Moment In Tech

VTOMan has released a new portable power station called the Jump 1800. It uses lithium iron phosphate batteries and can handle temperature extremes. It has multiple outlets for AC power, USB charging, and car accessories. It can be charged from a wall plug, car, or solar panels. The power station is portable and can provide power during outages or for camping. It is safe to use and has a dashboard that displays useful information. Precautions should be taken to avoid water damage and extreme temperatures. Accessories include jumper cables, solar panels, and a power pack. The product can be found on Amazon or VTOMan's website. The following interview took place August 10th, 2023. This is a copyrighted production of the Colorado Communications Group. What are your plans for power during the next outage? Your moment of tech is next. The need for a backup power supply during an outage should be considered an emergency, especially where medical, communications, home operation, and security matters are critical. Representing VTOMan, and that's VTOMan.com, is Martin Winston. They've released the new VTOMan Jump 1800 portable power station, and it's just coming to the market space. What's going on with that, Marty? It's a wonderfully heavy, blocky, but well-engineered box with one of the newer technologies in lithium batteries, lithium iron phosphate. These things can handle temperature extremes. They have very little voltage fade, so they'll maintain a charge for a long time, and their life expectancy is pretty solid. A lot of people are dealing with it. Now, it's a 50-pound box. The Jump 1800 is 50 pounds with a handle on the top. You know there's a lot in there. It has the ability to keep powering AC with a true sine wave, 110-volt feed out of three outlets. It can handle USB charging, including power delivery. It has a 12-volt car lighter-style car accessory plug connector. It's got barrel connectors for other things. You can charge it from a wall plug, from a car, from solar panels. It is, well, one of the terms that we've been using. It's a Y.O.U. utility. When you say Y.O.U. utility, what do you mean? It's a power station you carry with you. If you need power and you're off the grid, or the more common occurrence, you need power because the grid itself is off, this provides not only the power you need, a good amount of power, 1,800 watts nominal, but it can also handle the inrush surge of things like pumps that might be pulling in, or compressors, for twice that momentary power need. And it has a capacity of 1,548 watt-hours of power, which means if you've got something like, I have a 300-watt Frigidaire three-door fridge, and I did the math, six to seven days when the power fails. By the way, the message with that isn't about, oh, my gosh, look, his fridge is on. It's look at all the meat and groceries that I don't have to throw away because my household insurance makes me pay for the first $1,000 of that loss. That's one good use case. What about people camping and going in the outdoors? Absolutely wonderful for that. In fact, it's kind of funny. As much as you might be a rugged outdoors person, one of the trends these days is to take electrical appliances with you, the coffee maker, the blender, maybe a microwave oven, or a hot plate. It's a little safer than starting fires, I grant you, but I was a Boy Scout way back when, and we learned how to start those fires. One thing that won't start a fire, this thing. The batteries have to be over 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, you don't want to leave them in the sun because it will start gassing and doing things that help reduce its life expectancy, but if you can handle the heat, it can. You don't want to throw it in a swimming pool or a lake. You don't want to keep it out in the rain if you can help it, but it's built to survive all of that. It really supports green energy with its portability, and it also operates indoors so you're not having to run a generator and being worried about CO2. Indeed not. The first thing I ever wanted to use these for, we have a sump pump in the basement. Rain that comes down the house goes down the walls, comes down to the sump pump, and needs to be pumped out in the yard. Well, the kinds of circumstances that lead to power outages often bring a lot of rain with them, and I did not want to be dealing with basement flooding, so I took my sump pump, in fact, I took two of them, plugged them into a portable power station, tested them. It does pass through powering. Well, power is there, but automatically switches in a small fraction of a second, I believe it's 25, 35 milliseconds, to providing the same AC power, true sine wave smooth power, to whatever you've plugged into it, and it can handle the inrush that happens when you're starting a big pump like those things. Talk a little bit about the ease of operation for the Voteman Jump 1800. The Voteman, yeah, it has separate switches for each section of power. You have, for example, a total of six USB charging ports, one button turns them all on and off. You have the ability to provide 12-volt power, regulated 12-volt power, to a car or car accessories you plug into it. You have a regulated and nicely moderated 110-volt AC 60-cycle sine wave power at three outlets, and on the back there's a work light with five modes, including blinking SOS if that's what you need. A lot of people are concerned about battery safety and stability. As they should be, and we've all heard the stories of fires in vehicles and so on. There are, we're talking about lithium batteries, and without going crazy, there are four basic types. Lithium ion, which this is not using, is what we heard of happening in many of those cars that caught fire. Lithium ion also has trouble at freezing temperatures. It's electrolyte, the juice inside freezes and you've got a dead battery. Lithium polymer, which is good for smartphones and so on, because you get a lot of power density in a thin package, handles a larger realm of voltage, temperature, everything else, and it's a good technology, but it's very expensive per unit volume. There's one that I almost don't want to mention, lithium manganese dioxide. Usually that's coin cells you might use in, for example, a garage door opener remote control. What we're using in these portable power stations, lithium iron phosphate. This is a very safe, unlikely to ever catch fire, unless you've put it in a fire kind of battery. It has very little fade. You might be two years out before you see 10% fade in your initial charge level you put into it, and it's good for much longer service life than most other batteries. So the fact that it has lithium as its first name should not let anybody confuse it with the other families of lithium battery power. On the front of the unit, there's a nice dashboard. Talk about that. You know, everybody who turns this on wonders, am I on? Is it live? What am I doing? So there is a little LCD panel that lights up. It tells you what outputs you're using, what voltage is on them, how much power you have left, what percentage battery charge is left, and all of the questions you might have. Is there enough juice in here to make dinner? Oh, yeah, look at that. The numbers you need are there. You might have to do a little math, but the numbers you need are on that dashboard. Are there certain precautions we should take in using this unit? Of course. They're common sense things. Number one, don't let a kid play with it. Number two, don't try to open the box and fiddle with what's inside. There's a lot of power there, and you'd be surprised at the damage you can do by shorting the wrong leads. Number three, try to keep it out of places where water could get inside. It's the same kind of shorting the leads kind of thing. You don't want to use it in a bathroom. You don't want it out in the rain if you can help it. You don't want it in extremely hot areas, 266 degrees Fahrenheit. It will catch fire, but if it's in your hands at 266, it's the least of your worries. Don't take it apart. It's a done deal. It's packaged. It's rugged. It works well, and it has a 24-month warranty. So if you have any issues at all, get in touch with VetoMan. What accessories can we get with this unit? There are several. On the utility side, there's a $30 jumper cable that you can use to jump your car and start it, jump-start a car. I've done some math. Depending on how much power the specific car's battery takes to get it started and depending on how long it takes to get started, I'll give you a round, most cars will start with 400, 600 amps in 2 to 5 minutes. Based on that, you can do a cold start on 2 to 9 cars from a fully charged VetoMan Jump 1800. There's also solar panels, and more are coming that you can plug in. It doesn't charge as fast as the wall output, but the solar powers do give you an option for charging if you're way off the grid or, again, if the grid is off. And it also has an accessory power pack that doubles the total number of watt-hours that's in there. It's almost the same size box. It looks very similar. One cable plugs it in, and it just simply is a battery capacity extender. For more information, where do we go again? Well, you can go to Amazon or to VetoMan, VetoMan.com. In either case, for this particular product, you want to look up the VetoMan Jump 1800, Jump 1800 portable power station. So, are you set for the next outage? For your moment in tech, this is Jay Melnick.