Portable power station

A portable power station is a battery you can carry. It has ordinary power outlets, USB ports and sometimes a 12 volt socket, and it recharges from a wall socket, the car or a folding solar panel.

It runs appliances, tools and devices anywhere there is no mains power: the van, the boat, the campsite, the job site. At home it can keep the fridge, the modem and a few lights going during an outage. It is silent and carries no fuel.

It is not a home battery. It is not wired into the house, and it does not store your solar for the evening. For that, see Battery storage + emergency backup.

Portable power is step ten of ten, the last. Nothing else in the plan depends on it, and it changes nothing about how the house uses energy.

It sits on the list because households ask about it, and because knowing where it fits stops it being bought in place of something that belongs earlier. If what you want is backup for the whole house, that is step three, Battery storage + emergency backup. If what you want is power away from home, this is the right step.

We claim no saving for a portable power station, by design. It does not change your power bill. It stores energy you already paid for, or made, and carries it somewhere else.

What it does instead is give you power where there is none: on the road, on the water, on site, and at the fridge during an outage. That is a convenience and a comfort, and we describe it as that, not as a saving.

Nothing. A portable power station plugs in and needs no installation. That is one reason it carries no saving claim: there is no system design, no tariff and no wiring behind it.

If you want a fixed inlet so the station can feed a home circuit during an outage, that is wiring work. It must be done by someone holding a Queensland electrical contractor licence, who provides that licence number before taking a job through SaveTonnes. Your plan treats that part as general electrical, step eight.

We do not install, and we are not owned by anyone who does.

For the station itself there is usually no quote to get. You buy it as an appliance, and your plan notes the capacity that suits what you want to run.

If a fixed inlet is part of the job, one enquiry brings up to three quotes from local installers, and each quote should show:

The inlet type and where it goes.

Which circuit it feeds and how the changeover works, so the station and the grid are never connected at the same time.

Any switchboard work needed.

The warranty on the work.

If a quote is missing any of these, ask for it before you choose.

Start with a few questions about your home and we will tell you whether portable power is what you need, or whether backup belongs earlier in your plan.

Battery storage + emergency backup, for backup that covers the whole house. General electrical, for a fixed inlet. Solar PV, if you want to recharge the station from the roof.