UGREEN PowerRoam 1200 Power Station

With the rise of wild parties, camping, and road trips, more secure outdoor power stations may be coming into common people’s lives. If you’re a wilderness explorer or camper, you are probably familiar with what I am talking about. The UGREEN PowerRoam 1200 power station is one of our favorite tech products recently. It features the latest LiFePO4 EV-rated batteries that offer a pretty large capacity of 1024Wh. Even so, it’s amazingly portable and compact to ease our outdoor shooting work, as well as our outdoor parties.

UGREEN

Here I have to introduce the brand UGREEN just in case some of you may not have heard of it. Actually, it has quite a big reputation in China as it has been supplying wide categories of electronics since 2012. I bought quite a lot of their products like power banks, expandable hubs, and adapters. Last year they started a cooperation with the leading electric vehicle manufacturer – BYD, and the PowerRoam series is one of their representative works of the cooperation. So let’s check out how it offers high-performance and safe power for private households.

What’s included

The package we received is pretty compact. It shows the look of the Power station at the front and some important features at the back. Unboxed the box, we can see the PowerRoam 1200, with the manual and warranty cards. In addition, the accessory pack offers a few cables for various kinds of power inputs and supplies, including an AC power cable, A DC car charging cable, A DC5521 to DC5525 cable, and another Solar parallel adapter. Yes, apart from the AC wall outlet and DC car outlet, it also supports fast solar charging for outdoor uses.

The fast solar charging capacity is one of the most surprising features of the new power station. We also prepared two UGREEN SC200 solar panels in this review to test the clean charging method. Later we will show you how it works if we don’t have any DC or AC charge sources.

And I really like the input cables here without any bulky adaptors. It gets the input management module built inside the station, which is really convenient for us on the go, and no more worries about forgetting the adaptor.

Design & Output

Looking back at the power station. The PowerRoam 1200 has a classic grey-black design with decent built quality. Judging how good a power station is, we first look at whether it has been designed and built with effort about safety. With this in mind, we found it’s indeed solid and reliable.

The shell is made almost entirely of PC and ABS plastics, which are frame-retardant and leak-proof for high electrical safety. There’s another inner layer made of steel to protect the power station from damage from falls or crushes. And it’s almost the best protection that we can see on a portable power supply.

Some detail here is pretty impressive. For example, the handle on the top is solid and not removable, while UGREEN adds thickened rubber footpads to the bottom. There’re only two moving parts on the surface. One is the dust plug of the car-charging port, and the other is the magnetic dust cover for the side charging panel. Considering UGREEN guarantees a 5-year warranty, the power station is likely to be a durable piece of equipment in our studio. It weighs about 12kg, which is actually light compared to other power stations at the same level.

You can see there are several buttons and output interfaces that we used a lot at the front. The LED light on the far left is pretty useful for dark environments, with 4 modes to choose from: low light, high light, Flash, and SOS modes. By the way, designed for emergencies, the light can still work even if the battery level is 0.

There’s a loT button below the LED light, which helps you connect the phone and manage it on the PowerRoam app. And we will talk about the app and phone control later.

There’re two USB-C ports and 2 more A ports for digital devices, which can work at the same time for various devices like your smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other devices that require USB output.

The C ports support up to 100W power output respectively, while the maximum output of the A ports can reach 22.5W. The USB-C ports have excellent compatibility. We measured that the USB-C ports support quite a variety of charging protocols, including FCP, SCP, AFC, QC3.0, MTK, QC5, PD3, PPS, DCP, and Apple 2.4A.

The info-screen over the USB ports carries all the information about the power station. You can check out the working mode here with overload and temperature warnings, current input and output power, any working outputs, remaining recharge and discharge time, and WiFi or Bluetooth connection. As I said earlier, you can check all the information from your phone. But even from the screen alone, you can still monitor the complete status of the power station without anything else.

Below the USB interface is a master power switch. On the right, there’s a Car outlet and 2 more DC outlets supporting a maximum output power of 120W in total.

But we still use the AC outlets most often with the power station. The outlets are integrated on the right-side panel below the built-in fan. It offers 6 AC outlets with a maximum 1200W output for a total, which is widely compatible with various electronic devices, most appliances, and power tools. And actually, some power-hungry appliances may require instantaneous power exceeding the rated power, which is also taken into account by UGREEN with their latest U-Turbo power-conversion technology. The U-Turbo ensures that devices requiring higher power can also be safely run with the PowerRoam 1200. It can actually drive 2500W devices and reach an insane peak of 3000W output. It is supposed to drive high-power appliances by the solution of reducing the voltage and increasing the current, which can meet most of the supper-high-power appliances, but here I recommend that users only access one AC device to avoid malfunction.

So now let’s make a small summary of its output. The PowerRoam 1200 can support a total of 9 outlets and 4 USB ports, including 6 AC outputs that support up to 1200W total output, 1 car charger and 2 DC outlets that support 120W total output, and 4 additional USB ports that provide up to 245W total output. So in this compact power station, you can theoretically get a maximum output of 1565W. And if your device requires AC power exceeding 1200W, it still can handle it safely at up to 2500W and a peak of 3000W.

Here we did a small discharge test with a shooting light featuring an output power of 160W, although we couldn’t ensure that the light runs at an exactly fixed power. Until the power station ran out of power and shut down, it lasts more than 4 hours and discharged about 942Wh of power.

Charge

To charge the Power station, the fastest and the most common way is certainly to plug it into the household AC Wall outlet. It supports the brand’s latest high-power charging technology – PowerZip. Using the included charging cable, it only took 30mins to collect back 50% of the power and took 79mins to be fully charged, which is even faster than the official claim of 90-min full charging time.

Charge it with UGREEN Solar Panels

Or if you are on a long road trip or engaged in outdoor activities, you can also recharge it with your car charger or Solar Panel. Using the two 200W Solar Panels, you can get nature’s most generous energy source to fully charge the power station in as little as 4 hours, while the charging time would be a bit longer if you connect it to your car with the DC port. If you need to keep sufficient power outdoors, I highly recommend you buy these additional solar panels from UGREEN. As for the battery durability, the power station uses the latest LiFePo4 battery and the brand claims it has a 3000-cycle lifetime.

UPS – continuing power supply

In addition, one more of my favorite features is the UPS to support continued supply power. In events like a power outage or electric grid shutdown, the power station can continue supplying power to connected devices within 20ms of a power outage. If you are afraid that a power outage would destroy your unsaved work, trust me, keep your devices connected to the Power station, and it will save you from the chagrin of wasting your life.

APP

Finally, I must commend UGREEN for its efforts in the software. Even a novice who’s never used a power station before can still easily have full control of the power station on the App, where you can check all essential data of it, adjust power settings, run diagnostic checks, and confirm the remaining charge.

Verdict

As tech reviewers, to be honest, it seems that we have been difficult to feel the real convenience and pleasure with most tech products. But on the PowerRoam 1200, we have almost no complaints. It’s highly integrated, safe, and fast. And most importantly, it can benefit your team or your family, instead of just an individual.

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