I'm only half kidding. I'm a bit of a prepper and I have lots of powerbanks and devices that charge from USB but besides idling my truck I really had no other way to charge any of them in case of a long-term power outage which seemed a bit of an oversight on my part.

Not like this solves the issue. 30 watts (under ideal conditions) isn't much but it's a start.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

When I said inline I meant like charging a powerbank while another device is charging from it. And by dual charging I mean if it has two or more outputs it can charge multiple devices at once. In either case, each device you add to the load is going to require more wattage (or it'll just charge slower)

And yeah, a power station is like a powerbank but larger. A powerbank might have 10,000mAh and fits in your pocket, can probably charge a phone 3 or 4 times on one charge. A power station is like the size of a lunchbox or a small cooler, might have 30,000mAh or more, and could probably charge a phone a dozen times on one charge. They usually have more output options too, instead of just USB. Some even have an A/C adapter.

Still not enough to run a whole house on, but great for camping and power outages. If you wanted to run appliances on it you'd be looking at larger home batteries designed for rooftop solar, or even upcycled EV batteries.

The main specs you want to look at are input wattage (will tell you what size solar panels are required to charge it), output wattage (will tell you what's safe to plug in where), and milliamp-hours (mAh, basically how much juice it can hold at full charge)