A powerhouse in every sense

Once your portable power needs exceed even the best battery banks on the market, power stations may be your next stop. The $1,400 price tag doesn’t exactly make the Anker 757 Powerhouse an impulse purchase, but there are more expensive options that aren’t quite as good. With its hefty bank of over 1200Wh in long-life LFP cells, and 1500W of AC output, the Powerhouse is ready for years of powering household appliances.

Portable power stations and solar generators have been a boon for anyone who spends extended periods away from the convenience of wall power. If you’re off-grid, or even just away from wall outlets with any regularity, you’ll know very quickly if a power station meets your demands, but it’s harder to know for sure when you’re merely preparing for disaster. It’s hard to properly simulate an emergency to know for sure, but fortunately (for you, at least), I didn’t have to simulate calamity — I lived it twice.

The Anker 757 Powerhouse is one of the best options for a power station right now, and it even costs less than most comparable devices. While it doesn’t have as high a capacity or output as some competing devices, the 1500W output is still more than enough to power the vast majority of appliances in case of a power outage or off-grid use.

Pros

• Plenty of ports and plugs
• Fast 1,000W charge speed
• High output power
• Large LED light

Cons

• Very expensive
• Very heavy
• Smaller capacity than a lot of comparable power stations

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Anker 757 Powerhouse: Design, hardware, what’s in the box

The Anker 757 Powerhouse is a decent example of a modern design. It has a similar but more premium look compared to the Ecoflow Delta 2. With a pop of blue accents on dark gray and silver plastic panels, the Anker 757 gives a pretty good impression of brushed metal. The outside may be plastic, but the entire unit feels very solid. The side vents have blue accents, which is a fun design touch. The fan noise from those vents isn’t obnoxious, but it’s definitely noticeable when charging or discharging. The white stripe across the front is an LED light strip with low, medium, high, and SOS modes.

The display on the front shows pertinent info like charge and discharge rates, charge level, and remaining battery percentage and time. In addition to the button for the light strip, the 12v DC and AC plugs also have dedicated power buttons. Since they have a passive power draw, turning them off keeps them from draining the Powerhouse while it’s sitting idle. Additionally, there’s a power saver switch next to the display.

In power saver mode, the Powerhouse will cut power to any plugs from which it doesn’t detect a draw after a few minutes. However, with the power saver turned off, power will keep going to those plugs until you turn it off yourself. This is a necessary feature if you have a CPAP machine or are using the Powerhouse for anything that runs intermittently, like a refrigerator.

You’re spoiled for choice with ports on the Anker 757 Powerhouse. The ports are divided into three blocks underneath the display. On the left is a single 12v DC car outlet; USB ports are in the middle, and plug outlets are on the right. The six USB ports come in three forms: one 100W USB-C, one 60W USB-C, and four 12W USB-A ports. It would have been nice to shift some of those type-A ports over to type-C (like Jackery and Ecoflow have done), but that is a relatively minor complaint.

The six plug outlets are divided into three 2-prong and three grounded 3-prong outlets, capable of providing 1500W of “Pure Sine Wave” power at a stable 60Hz (it can be set to 50Hz if needed, though). That could be across all the outlets or just through one outlet if you have something particularly power-hungry plugged in. Compared to the Jackery Explorer 1500, Anker offers twice the USB ports and AC outlets for maximum flexibility.

The box the Powerhouse comes in is massive and filled with high-density foam. That’s a necessary sacrifice to make for the sake of secure shipping, given all the regulations around shipping lithium batteries. Once it’s out of the box, the 757 Powerhouse is just a bit bigger than a car battery and weighs in at a smidgen over 40 lbs. It has handles, but it would be a bit of a stretch to call it portable. (In Anker’s defense, that’s unavoidable when you’re cramming enough lithium batteries into a box to power a refrigerator.)

One of the biggest appeals of the 757 Powerhouse is the option to use it with solar panels. Anker sells a bundle of 300W worth of its foldable solar panels for an extra $900 — comparable to most other foldable panels on the market — but the Powerhouse includes a three-into-one splitter for your solar panels, even if you didn’t buy them from Anker. While the 300W solar charging isn’t particularly impressive compared to the competition, any solar charging is a must-have if you want to take things off-grid for more than a day or two.

Anker 757 Powerhouse: Charging and performance

While it isn’t the fastest on the market, its charging speed is one of the most impressive features of the 757 Powerhouse. With a 1000W draw from your wall, it can go from zero to about 80% in just an hour on AC. It takes considerably longer on a car outlet, limited to just 120w, so be sure to charge it before you take it camping. If you spring for the $900 solar panels set, you can get up to 300W of charging. According to Anker, that can get you to 80% in a bit over three and a half hours, but expect it to take longer if you don’t readjust them frequently. Solar panels quickly drop in charge rate if they aren’t perfectly aligned with the sun, so thankfully, Anker’s solar panels have a sundial to make that easier.

With over 1200 watt-hours of juice, the 757 Powerhouse is no slouch, having twice the capacity of the Energizer PPS or Duracell Power Source and 20% more capacity than the Jackery Explorer 1000 Pro.

The battery life depends entirely on what you’re using it for. I know that sounds reductive, but let me elaborate. If you go camping and only need to do things like power a fan in your tent, recharge your phone and laptop a few times, and power some LED lanterns, you can probably easily make it the better part of a week on your initial charge. If you wanted to replace your gas camping stove with an electric one on that same trip, however, you could expect less than an hour of use before running the battery down.

This isn’t to say the Powerhouse isn’t impressive, though. Things like heaters and stovetops are made to draw the maximum continuous load that your home’s wall outlets can safely allow — managing that with something this size is damn impressive.

To be clear, the amount of power I’m talking about here is about what your refrigerator uses in a day to a day and a half. This is one of the few places where Anker has fallen short of the competition. Similar power stations, like the Jackery Explorer 1500 and the Ecoflow Delta Max 1600, have closer to 1600Wh of power at their disposal. Still, the 757 Powerhouse has more than enough advantages to be the one I’d recommend.

The Powerhouse allowed me to do some truly ludicrous things, like bring a high-powered blender to the park to make some Orange Julius for a few friends, and drive my espresso machine over to my mother’s house for Mother’s Day, so I could make her a fresh affogato out of the back of my wagon. These are far from practical applications, but if you can think of any reason you might want power when you’re away from an outlet, the 757 Powerhouse can handle it.

The Powerhouse was also super useful with reasonable tasks. I switched from gas to electric tools a while ago, and I don’t have a long enough extension cord to get my pole saw to the end of my driveway to trim low-hanging branches, so I usually have to use hand tools. The Powerhouse made this a trivial job since it gives you an outlet wherever you want one.

I also have a shed in my backyard with no power, but I have a workbench set up in there for projects. The Powerhouse has more than enough juice to run heavy equipment like a table saw or drill press for hours at a time.

Then there’s camping. The Powerhouse is a campsite champ. While the solar panel upgrade is definitely highly recommended for that use case, you can still make it a couple of days if you’re just using a kettle for coffee and rehydrating freeze-dried meals.

Anker 757 Powerhouse: When the worst occurs

Due to the Texas electrical grid’s inability to cope with freezing and scorching temps (combined with harsher than normal winters and summers the last few years), I’ve had more than a few black and brownouts. This summer even included a few days with a high of 115 degrees (46 Celsius for the metric crowd). As a result, my power briefly blinked out every time the AC unit kicked on. Power instability like this isn’t just annoying; it’s also harmful to certain electronics.

When it felt like any extra power draw could be the difference between having AC and light, the Anker 757 Powerhouse was exactly what I needed. While the air conditioner could barely bring the inside temperature down into the 80s, I just needed to play some Skyrim to distract me from feeling like I was melting. After plugging my PS5 and TV into the Powerhouse, I had almost four hours of uninterrupted power to use, which was more than enough to wait out the heat wave for the day.

The disaster I couldn’t just wait out this year was a flood. When my living room had over an inch of standing water, I couldn’t use the living room outlets to run wet vacs. Once the standing water was gone, the next hurdle was the high humidity. The 1000W recharge speed made it easy to get back up to 100% battery. At the same time, I rented a commercial dehumidifier, and it even managed to power that 1500W unit for 45 minutes, which was more than long enough to rearrange furniture and run an extension cord to it.

Anker 757 Powerhouse: Should you buy it?

Since the initial review, other power stations with higher outputs and faster recharge speeds, like the Ecoflow Delta 2, have hit the market with lower prices. The Anker 757 Powerhouse has a higher battery capacity than most options in this price range. Still, most alternatives also support faster solar charging, which is important if you plan to take it off the grid.

It’s possible to get a full charge from the sun in a little over four hours, but that’s not likely to happen if there’s too much tree cover. Nevertheless, it still has plenty of flexibility, even though it’s over 40 lbs, so it has the potential to be the right pick for plenty of use cases.

FAQ

Q: How does the Anker 757 Powerhouse compare to the Jackery Explorer 1500?

The Jackery Explorer 1500 is one of the better power stations on the market. With an 1800W output, over 1500Wh of capacity, and a higher max solar charging rate of 400W compared to the 300W of the 757 Powerhouse, Jackery beats out Anker on total capacity, total output, and off-grid recharging. The Powerhouse has twice as many USB ports, twice the AC outlets, can reach 80% charge in a little over 1/4th the time as the Explorer, all for $300 less. The Explorer supports up to four 100W solar panels compared to the three the powerhouse can handle, but whether you buy your solar panels from Anker or Jackery, they’ll run you about $300 each.

Q: How does the Anker 757 Powerhouse compare to the Goal Zero Yeti 1500X

The Goal Zero Yeti 1500X has a 2000W output, and just over 1500Wh of capacity, and has a selection of different first party solar panels designed for different use cases to choose from, if you want to use it as a solar generator. These advantages will run you 2 grand, making it almost as much as the 757 Powerhouse with solar panels. Despite the fact that the Yeti 1500X has 25% more capacity, and a third more power output, Goal Zero doesn’t give you very many outlets. You only get two AC outlets, 2 USB-A ports, and 2 USB-C ports, and only one of those is high powered. With the Powerhouse, your type-c ports come in at 100W and 60W respectively, while the Yeti 1500X does sport a 60W type-C port, the other is only 18W.

Q: How does the Anker 757 Powerhouse compare to the EcoFlow DELTA Max 1600?

The EcoFlow DELTA Max line of power stations is more of a “money is no object” approach to power stations. The DELTA Max 1600 comes in at $400 more than the 757 Powerhouse, and holds an extra 400w of charge. It also has the ability to daisy chain more DELTA Max batteries together, and its solar charging limit is 800W as opposed to the 300W max input of the Powerhouse. That being said, you’re paying extra for the ability to expand into those features, even if you have no intention of springing the extra few thousand bucks to get them.