The market for backup batteries has tapered off since... you know. But this solution isn't designed to be a minor Eskom stopgap. It would fit in well with stepping away from the grid entirely, but with the versatility that comes from being able to bung the fully-charged unit into your car and go fishing. While a projector streams your favourite Netflix shows into the side of your car. You'll come up with some way to use it, we're sure.
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Price
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Ease of Use
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Battery
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Practicality
Eskom’s having a pretty good run but there are more reasons than just ”State power utility bad” to want to kit your home out with an alternative energy solution. It all boils down to stepping off the grid and the Lumo Powerall 1.5 looks like a decent enough boulder to start your journey.
Unlike other power stations we’ve tested before, this hunk of metal and rare-earth elements isn’t entirely intended to be a multi-role device. The Lumo Powerall 1.5 might make it along on a camping trip (if there’s no hiking involved) but none of the South African company’s other devices are set up for that. But that doesn’t mean you can’t consider it portable — it’s in the device’s full name — but you’ll probably want to leave it where it is.
Block wars
Lumo’s power station is an unapologetic block of electricity, more of a rhomboid than a cube in shape. Regardless of the geometric terminology, this is as close as you’ll get to a power-station-as-appliance. Competitors go for curves, carrying handles, and various finishes. The Powerall 1.5 is put together like a retro washing machine, its plain white layered on top of a metal skin. Regardless of its size — you can carry it with one hand using the handle on top of the unit — this sucker is heavy.
Why? The battery capacity offers a clue, while the metal epidermis is another contributor to your upper body workout. The 1,280Wh battery at the heart of this sucker adds more than ten kilos to the weight while also making up a substantial portion of the purchase price.
There are ports and switches on three of the four vertical faces. Up front is a pair of Type D sockets. Just to the left of this is a mysterious LED display and some indicator lights. There’s also a collection of USB ports (A and C) in between these two. The right-hand edge has a couple of switches — main power and the Battery Management System — and a breaker for those rare times when you overload the AC power. The right is a little more complex. There’s a reset button, a switch for the USB ports, and a couple of more arcane ports that we’ll get to. This is also where you’ll plug the Lumo Powerall 1.5 into the mains.
RTFM
The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed the dual connectors at the rear of the left-hand vertical panel. Included with the Powerall 1.5 are the connector bolts needed to make use of those terminals. There’s no convenient little orange port for plugging in a portable solar panel here. It’s also part of what puts this Lumo power station in the ‘industrial’ category. It would be quite at home sitting in a cupboard and slurping up sun juice all day as part of a fully installed solar setup. It’s just… also portable. The design ethos is industrial, which carries through to the operating system. Such as it is.
For a change, we’d recommend reading the short manual with the Lumo Powerall 1.5. Most of the usage is intuitive enough, though we had to check what BMS stood for and when to flick that switch. But you’ll find yourself referring to the manual when the LED indicator throws up status numbers.
It’ll do this during operation as a matter of course but unless you know what 4, 15, or 30 actually means, you’ll have no idea what it’s doing. You don’t, strictly speaking, need to know unless something’s gone wrong. The charge status indicators offer enough information for most folks to fire-and-forget but if the power station has shut down or isn’t charging, you’ll have to know the error code to rectify the issue.
Mostly optional
Most times, you won’t have to do anything other than plug stuff in and flip them on. When it’s running and connected to the mains or a solar setup, all you have to do is wait for the power to drop and it’ll pick up where you left off, running up to 1,500W of gear constantly until you finally manage to deplete that gargantuan battery. Do something silly and one of the many safety features will jump in to stop you from frying R12,500 worth of power gear.
‘Silly’ includes something like trying to charge it from a little generator. Overvolt protection is perhaps a little too enthusiastic but we can see why the Lumo Powerall 1.5 does that. The battery is pricey and the output too effective to let you do whatever you want with this thing. Drop the battery too low and discharge protection also kicks in. It’ll take some time to learn the ins and outs and you’ll likely have a few numbers memorised by the end. You may also have new muscles if you insist on moving the Powerall 1.5 from room to room.
Why would you opt for this over, say, an Ecoflow or something similar? Lumo reckons its portable battery is rated for 6,000 cycles, something we couldn’t test but have no trouble believing having seen the other features in action. Assuming a full charge/discharge cycle a day it’ll operate once a day for sixteen years. That’s an awful lot of uptime.
Lumo Powerall 1.5 verdict
The Lumo Powerall 1.5 isn’t built like its competition. It’s heavier, stuffing loads of capacity into a well-protected frame. It dispenses with fluff, which some folks will love, but there’s also a learning curve when using it. Properly set up and stashed away, you’ll forget you ever owned it until the lights go off but your rugby game and bar fridge continue uninterrupted.
That’s why folks buy these things and Lumo’s setup could form the starting point for a much larger solar backup to come later. It’ll handle itself using nothing but the mains but why tether yourself to Eskom when free electricity comes out of the sky (provided you’re willing to buy the equipment)? Lumo has a few places you might like to start making the changeover.
