Portable Power Options

I have been looking at two companies that sell external power supplies and batteries, The Battery Geeks and Tekkeon.

Lets start with The Battery Geeks offerings. First off, they offer a free battery audit. You fill out a simple form and they will email you with recommendations. For my Acer C110, they recommended their external battery and portable power supply. The external batteries come in two capacities, 118 and 130 WH. Since my Acer battery has a 27 WH capacity, theoretically these will increase battery time four or five fold. Since I get 2 hours with the Acer battery I should get about 10 hours with these models. The prices are $170 and $200 for these two batteries. They weight about 1.7 pounds and the dimensions are 7.75x4.5x.75(in).

The external power supply offered by The Battery Geeks also come in 118 and 130 WH as well as 200 WH. These power supplies are only a tad bigger (8.93x4.84x.87(in) 1.87 lbs) but offer more voltage outputs, 3 - 28 Vdc as opposed to only 15 - 21 Vdc for the batteries. The advantage is being able to power other devices other than the laptop. As you can guess, the prices are a bit more, $250 and $300 for the 118 and 130 WH versions.

Tekkeon offers the myPower All 3450 external battery which is rated at 50 WH which would theoretically last 4 hours when used with my Acer C110. Its a bit smaller than the battery geek devices (3.28 x 6.80 x .92) and much lighter weighing just under 1 lb. Also, with the smaller capacity its less expensive $120. And unlike the Battery Geeks external batteries the myPower All has a USB port so anything you can charge via your computer USB port you can charge with this device. The disadvantage is that the 3450 will not charge my Acer internal battery. The Acer C110 is rated for 20 Vdc and the 3450 only charges devices that are rated for 16V or less.

Currently I am leaning toward the myPower All 3450 mainly because of the lower price and smaller size but may hold off right now. In the two weeks I have been using the Acer I have not had a need for the extra juice. At home and at work I am mostly plugged in and at the end of my daily train commute I usually have 30% left on the internal battery. Where this device would be needed is when I travel for off site training or conferences.

I'll keep you posted.