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Power All Your Tech Anywhere: Jackery Explorer 240 V2 Full Review

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[Jackery are huge offering some huge savings for my readers – see bottom of this article!)]

The Jackery Explorer 240 V2 is a super compact portable power station with a 300W AC outlet, super fast charging and a 256Wh long lasting LFP battery.

I’ll run through its capabilities, thoroughly test all its claims and at the end of the article I’ll compare it to its closest rival. All to help you decide if this is the right power station for you.

So let’s take a closer look.

Overview

The Jackery comes very nicely packaged, but all you get in the box is the power station itself, a charging cable and a user manual. It’s disappointing to not see a car or solar charging cable included.

Jackery SolarSaga 40 Mini

Jackery sells these separately, together with a small 40W solar panel and a slightly oversized carry case that I’ve also been testing.

The power station is pretty well built, made almost entirely of a hard plastic with the none-too-subtle orange branding synonymous with Jackery.

It’s a very compact portable power station – only the Bluetti AC2A is smaller and lighter – out of the ones I’ve tested at least. It’s 3.8kg – you can see its dimensions on screen. (231 x 153 x 168mm).

It is heavier than the original Jackery 240 I tested years ago – but that’s because Jackery is now using a long lasting 256Wh LFP battery, rated for up to 3000 charge cycles and backed up with a 5 year warranty. 

The Jackery also now has a flat top with a folding handle. There are no wireless charging pads on top, which would have been nice.

Most of the ports and controls are around the front. There’s just the mains charging port on the right hand side underneath the exhaust vents.

Around the front along the top, there’s the car outlet, power button, 2 colour display, button for the LED light and the LED spotlight itself.

Underneath there’s a 15W USB-A port, a 15W USB-C port and a 100W two-way USB-C port that can also charge the unit. Then there are buttons to turn on the DC and AC subsystems and the single 300W AC outlet.

Charging

The Jackery can charge via mains just using a standard mains cable – no AC adapter is needed. Even if you somehow lose the bright orange cable, any so-called kettle lead will work fine.

You do need to enable Emergency Charging in the accompanying smartphone app to get the fastest speeds. As its name suggests, Jackery doesn’t recommend using this mode regularly, and it automatically switches to standard charging once the unit is charged.

But I was able to charge the unit from completely empty to 100% in under one hour, charging at over 300W. I’ll discuss the temperature and the noise of the unit shortly. A standard charge is around 2 hours.

You can also charge the Jackery via the USB-C port at up to 100W. This works with any 100W USB-C Power Delivery charger and cable. I was able to top it up with a portable charger at close to 100W which takes 3-4 hours for a full charge.

Jackery also sells a car charging cable, but oddly you’ll need the USB-C adapter that comes with the solar charging cable to plug into this USB-C port. A car charging icon appears on the display. This charges the power station quite slowly at around 50W with a full charge taking up to 5 hours.

Finally you can charge the unit via solar. I tested it with their super compact 40W SolarSaga 40 Mini that comes with a proprietary solar charging cable with the USB-C adapter.

Even on a sunny day I only got around 15W from this panel. You might be able to top up the unit with this panel, but it would take a couple of days of sunshine for a full charge. 

The panel is really intended for travel and has karabiners to hang it off a rucksack. The cable also has a 12W USB-A and 15W USB-C port to charge your phone directly.

Jackery is very vague around what voltages and current are supported so it was a little tricky testing the maximum input via solar. But using my bench power supply I found it supported up to 28V at around 4A or around 110W. So theoretically you could charge it via a standard 100W solar panel, but you’d need to find a suitable adapter or make one up yourself.

I would much prefer Jackery used a common DC input like Bluetti and EcoFlow with their standard XT60 ports.

You can charge the Jackery via mains and solar at the same time. In this case, it will prioritise solar over mains taking as much as it can off the solar input and topping up with mains.

Performance

The Explorer 240 has a single 300W AC outlet with a pure sine wave output, important for sensitive electronics. I confirmed its pure sine wave output with a graphical multimeter.

I was able to run it continuously at just over 300W, charging another power station that lets me set its maximum charging speed. I then ramped this up in 50W increments until I overloaded the Jackery at just over 470W. That’s not bad for a tiny unit like this.

Using an energy monitoring plug, I checked the real capacity of the fully charged 256Wh LFP battery running a 100W light bulb until the unit shut off. The unit ran for 2 hours 13 mins and I measured 193Wh. That’s a disappointing 75% efficiency running off AC. I really like to see at least 80% efficiency and ideally more. Its rather poor results are partly due to the parasitic drain of the AC inverter. I measured this drain with the AC inverter on and nothing plugged in. The unit lost around 4% of its capacity per hour which is not very good. If you accidentally leave the AC inverter on, you could come back to an empty unit after just one day.

You really want to ensure Energy Saving mode is turned on most of the time. But even then, running even low powered devices off AC is not going to be very practical.

Next I tested the power station running off DC. Using a load tester set to 8A which was around 92W at just over 12V, I measured 219Wh which is a much more respectable 86%.

Together with the far smaller parasitic drain of the DC subsystem, you’re far better off running devices that can be run on DC like fridges for example, using the DC output if at all possible. 

I would typically use a small power station like this for charging my MacBook, phone, cameras and drones – and perhaps my portable fridge at a pinch, although the battery capacity might be a little on the low side. 

The AC outlet is useful for mains devices with relatively low power requirements like a laptop with a mains adapter for example, but it also has a useful UPS function.

Above I ran my 3D printer off the Jackery. The 3D printer runs off mains, bypassing the battery until there’s a power cut. In less than 20ms it then switches across to the Jackery until power comes back on. This works perfectly and is a little bonus feature of power stations like this.

Like pretty much every unit I’ve tested the Jackery supports passthrough charging, so you can charge the power station whilst you’re using its outputs.

To test noise levels and check for any overheating issues, I charged the unit at full speed and ran the AC outlet at just over its maximum output. I measured around 44dB one metre from the unit. Background noise was 36dB. You wouldn’t want to sleep right next to it with the fans at full power, but it’s pretty quiet in general use.

And it doesn’t get at all hot – even fully loaded. I measured under 40°C with my thermal imaging camera.

The Jackery has a useful selection of USB ports. The legacy USB-A port supports up to 15W, as does the left USB-C port but both these ports don’t support any fast charging standards, only 5V at up to 3A. Fortunately the two-way 100W USB-C port does support fast charging via USB Power Delivery. I confirmed all their maximum outputs with my load tester and as a real life test I could charge my MacBook Pro at over 90W.

The 5cm display on the Jackery is on the small side but sharp and clear, at least indoors, and shows the battery level and the current total input and output power. You also get a useful estimate of the remaining charge time when it’s charging and run time when it’s powering your devices, both adjusted in real time.

The Jackery smartphone app also shows this information and lets you remotely control the unit too. And it’s a lot easier viewing your smartphone outdoors. It has Bluetooth for a direct local connection, but it also has WiFi so if you connect it to your local WiFi network, you can monitor and control the unit anywhere. And you can configure the unit. You can change the screen display timeout, toggle Emergency Charging as I mentioned earlier, configure the Energy saving mode and update the firmware. You can change some of these settings via the unit itself with various button combinations but it’s easier doing all this via the app.

The only other feature of note I’ve not mentioned is the LED spotlight which also has an SOS mode. A lamp is not so common on smaller units like this and it v could be handy. But a floodlight would be more useful – it’s pretty heavy to carry around as a torch.

Conclusions

The Jackery Explorer 240 V2 has pretty much every feature you’d want in a compact portable power station. And together with its long lasting LFP battery, 5 year warranty, USB-C charging and easy to use app it’s competitively priced – especially when it’s discounted.

If I was being picky, a wireless charging pad would have been nice, and I would have preferred a second USB-C port with fast charging and at least 30W of output for charging my phone, drones and action cameras.

I do also think Jackery should at least include a car charging cable and I’m not a fan of the clunky USB-C adapter that you need to connect to the unit. But it does make the unit uncomplicated and easy to understand for new users. Most people are familiar with USB-C charging and might never need or want to charge the unit using solar or their car.

It performed well in most of my tests, apart from the usable capacity with an AC load and the parasitic draw of the AC inverter.

Probably its closest rival is the Bluetti AC2A. The AC2A is cheaper, a little lighter and most importantly to me has a standard XT60 input for car and solar charging. But it has less capacity, just one USB-C port and no WiFi for remote monitoring and control.

Don’t forget to take a look at my YouTube video at the top of the page, and again please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I’m releasing videos every week on the latest technology and how to get the most out of it. If you tap the bell icon when you subscribe you’ll get a notification as soon as I release a video, and there’ll be a link to my site here for the written article. YouTube is also the best place to leave a comment. I read all of them and respond to as many as I can!

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