SolarGenLab exists because the portable power industry has a measurement problem, and almost nobody writing about it will say so.
A foldable solar panel sold as “100W” will, in bright direct sun, typically produce somewhere between 30 and 51 watts. That is not a defect. It is the category norm. Jackery, Anker and Bluetti each publish a support page titled some version of “Why can’t the solar panel reach its rated wattage?” — so every manufacturer knows. None of them puts it on the product page. Meanwhile a power station advertised with a 3,600W surge may hold 2,600W under a real load, and one advertised at 2,042Wh may hand back 1,710Wh.
We are not here to be cynical about it. Portable power is genuinely useful, and some of this gear is excellent. We are here to tell you which number is real.
What we are, plainly
We do not own a lab, and we do not claim to. We have never put a clamp meter on a Jackery, and we will never write a sentence implying we have. What we do instead is aggregate: we pull the published measurements of independent bench testers, we read hundreds of verified owner reviews per product, and we hold both against what the manufacturer claims. Where a specification has never been independently measured, we say so, in those words. Where a manufacturer does not publish a figure at all, we write UNKNOWN rather than estimating it.
That constraint is the point. A guess dressed up as a spec is worse than an honest blank.
How we make money
Affiliate commissions and display advertising. If you buy through a link here we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This creates an obvious incentive to be positive about everything, and the only meaningful defence against that incentive is to publish the criticism anyway — including the criticism of products we would earn the most from. You will find plenty of it. See our affiliate disclosure and our review process.
Who writes this
Articles are published under the byline Isacc Shah. Every verdict on this site carries the evidence behind it — the measurement, the tester who took it, and the number of owner reviews it rests on. If we cannot show you the evidence, we do not publish the verdict.
Found something we got wrong? Tell us. We would rather be corrected than be confident.