Best portable power station UK 2026: the hours you really get, and what has to stay on in a power cut

Almost every buying guide for these machines starts with the machine. Start with the house instead, because the answer changes the size of what you buy. In England and Wales, 73.8% of households used mains gas as their only central heating at the 2021 census. A gas boiler burns gas, but it will not light, pump or run its controls without mains electricity, so in a power cut a British house loses its heating before it loses anything else.

And here is the number that reframes the whole purchase: the boiler needs almost nothing. Worcester Bosch's own ErP data sheet for the Greenstar 25i declares auxiliary electricity consumption of 0.039 kW at full load and 0.014 kW at part load; the Greenstar 30Si declares 0.029 kW; Ideal's Logic Plus C24, C30 and C35 declare 0.042, 0.032 and 0.029 kW. Call it 45 watts once the thermostat and its receiver are in. Add a router at 10 and two LED lamps at 20 and you are running a British winter evening on 75 watts.

This is the first question a British buyer asks and the one the spec sheet answers worst. A full size UK kettle is around 3 kW; Anker's own UK guidance puts it at "about 3 kW" and says the station needs continuous output of at least that. A BS 1363 plug is fused at 13 amps, and at 230 volts that is 2,990 watts, which is why British kettles cluster just under 3 kW rather than above it. So the socket in your wall and the kettle on your worktop are both sitting on the same ceiling.

Of the eight stations in this guide, exactly two declare continuous output above 3,000 watts: the two OUKITEL models at 3,200 W. The m8d pick declares 2,400 W, which runs a 2.2 kW travel kettle and will not run a full size one. The 500 W model will not boil water at all, and for the job it is bought for, that is not a fault.

Watt hours say how long it lasts and watts say what fits. Two different questions with two different numbers, so a listing that gives one is answering half of one. The 4,096 watt hour model here declares 3,200 watts of output and will start anything you put on it; the 230 watt hour one declares 300 watts, and at 300 watts the 1,300 W microwave in the maker's own runtime table never starts, even though there is energy in the pack for nine minutes of it.

Counting the titles turns up a split you cannot see from two listings: the big names in the category headline with capacity and the lesser known ones headline with power, almost always leading with the peak figure because it is the one that impresses. Of the 64 listings we counted, 39 wrote both numbers, 19 gave only the capacity and 6 only the power.

And the cheap end of the market loses exactly one of those two. Cell quality is not what goes: there are LiFePO4 packs in that census at the very bottom of the price range. What goes is continuous power, and with it half the appliances in a house. At 300 watts you keep the router, the lights, a laptop and a cool box running; the microwave, the kettle, the toaster and anything else with an element are out. What also goes is the spec sheet: at the bottom of the range almost nobody publishes cycles, warranty or transfer time, so all you know about the machine is whatever fits in the title.

The sum looks like one line: watt hours divided by the watts of whatever you plug in. With 1,000 Wh and a 60 W cool box, sixteen and a half hours. That sum always comes out long, because between the cell and the socket sits the inverter, and some of the energy is lost there. The question is how much, and almost nobody writes it.

It is written, without being said, in the runtime table EcoFlow publishes on its own site. It is the only one in the category that gives hours appliance by appliance, which makes it the only one you can check row by row. Divide each of its hours by the watts of the appliance it belongs to and all seven rows of the DELTA 3 Max Plus column give the same answer.

The energy that goes into one of these is the cheapest part of owning it, and it is worth seeing the figure because it kills a whole category of worry. Ofgem's price cap for 1 October to 31 December 2026 puts the electricity unit rate at 26.32p per kWh for a direct debit customer on a standard variable tariff in England, Scotland and Wales. Filling the 2,048 watt hour pick at that rate is about 54p of electricity. Filling the smallest one here is about 6p.

That is the honest comparison against the other machine people consider, which is a petrol generator. A generator keeps going while there is fuel in the tank, and that is its one real advantage: a power station delivers what it holds and then has to be recharged. Everything else in the comparison goes the other way, and in a British house the decider is usually not the fuel. A combustion engine cannot run indoors, cannot run in a porch and cannot run in a flat, it is loud enough to be a neighbour problem at three in the morning, and it needs someone awake to look after it. If the reason you are reading this is a winter storm and a gas boiler, the generator has already lost on the first point.

A power station is bought once and used for years, so the figure that decides what it really costs you is not the price: it is how many times it can be charged before the battery stops giving what it gave. That figure is the cycle count, and in the 64 titles of the census it does not appear once. What does appear, in 26 of them, is the word LiFePO4, used as a stand in for it.

Chemistry is a good clue but it is not the figure. And when a manufacturer does publish cycles, there is a comparison trap nobody explains: each one measures its promise against a different threshold.

There is something about this category that you cannot see from one listing and that jumps out when you count the whole catalogue: the same machine is sold at the same time under several seller names. The PowerMax 1800SE appeared on five listings under three different seller brands in the census of 6 September 2026. The OUKITEL P2001E Pro was on two, the OUKITEL P800 on three, the FOSSiBOT F2400 on two.

And there is a second step that changes how you search entirely: in those five PowerMax titles the manufacturer's name does not appear at all. The same model is sold by two large retailers as the OSCAL PowerMax 1800 SE, with the maker's name in front, and only with the maker's name do you reach a spec sheet. So the listing that tells you least is the one that gives you a brand you have never heard of and no model number to chase.

Four cases cover nearly everything that brings someone to this page. Each one carries the reason that answer is the answer, and what you give up for it.