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off-grid living is becoming more and more popular as both a way to combat the

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rising cost of housing and to clock out of this increasingly connected world

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even if it's just for a little bit but sometimes you need technology to get

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away from technology so when jackery reached out to sponsor this video

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featuring their explorer line of power stations my writer colin immediately

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thought of his friend morgan he's a photographer who's been living that van

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life in a ski resort parking lot for about a year now with some serious tech

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deficiencies so we're gonna drop a tech

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bomb on his van and bring his mobile editing rig slash living accommodations

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into the 21st century and we're gonna learn a little something about van

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living while we're at it

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first things first this is the star of the show the jackery

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explorer 1500. this little machine is

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absolutely stuffed with genuine panasonic 18650 cells just like these

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ones 130 of them to be precise that

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means there is a veritable buttload of power crammed into this package slightly

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under 1500 watt hours and these 110 volt

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ac outlets are honestly they're just insane we took the

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little brother of this the explorer 1000 and hooked up an rtx gaming rig an HDR

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monitor and filming lights all at once

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as for the explorer 1500 it'll do 1800

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watts of sustained load and up to 3 600

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watts of peak load so toast no problem

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blended avocado for your toast

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kind of awful sounding i prefer sliced but theoretically possible

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then over on the dc power side of things we get one of my favorite features usbc

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power delivery up to 60 watts worth along with two usb type a's for good

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measure now let's talk about what we're gonna hook up to it initially we considered

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building a pc to replace the current setup in here but seeing is morgan's

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living that mobile life oh and he's a mac user we opted for a shiny new m1

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macbook air sorry pc guys the truth is

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apple silicon really does offer class leading power efficiency and with the

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thermal pad mod which we have pre-applied of course the air manages

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just about identical performance to the m1 macbook pro we did kind of blow the

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budget on this but morgan's a cool guy right

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okay then for a monitor we went with an lg 27gl850

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i actually named this the best monitor of 2019 it's

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absolutely overkill i mean it sports a one millisecond response time for that

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extreme gaming but it's an engineering sample that we

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were able to spare and for a 14400 display it is remarkably color accurate

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colin calibrated this one for morgan and we've got the delta e's down to just

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2.85 that is going to be worlds ahead of this

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old macbook and should handle photo and video editing comfortably but where's

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all that video to go ah that's where lucy's rugged rage

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shuttle comes in this is a big step in the right direction for morgan it's like

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baby's first data redundancy inside there are two four terabyte drives along

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with a raid controller that means you can either run it in raid 0 for a

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relatively speedy 8 terabytes of storage

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or you can go big galaxy brain and use

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raid 1 giving you 4 terabytes of fully redundant storage that means that one of

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the drives inside could outright fail without losing any data and this is

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something most folks might not consider but in a mobile read vibration heavy

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environment hard drives are just plain not going to last as long even with a

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rubber bumper friends do not let friends lose data and all of this is going to be

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connected to this soho dock from cal digit it lets us run a single usb type-c

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cable out to the macbook for charging data and video and then from there we

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can run displayport up to our monitor and connect to the hard drive over usbc

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and everything will of course be powered by the explorer 1500

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and we threw in an amazon bluetooth soundbar for good measure

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but while the outputs are awesome the inputs are where things get even more

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interesting with a jackery explorer sure you can

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charge from the wall with this chunky 300 watt wall charger but the last time

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i checked running an extension cord out of the ski lodge across the parking lot

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is mostly frowned upon mostly so for

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true off-grid power the explorer 1500 can handle up to 600 watts of solar

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input with solar panels like these bad boys

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these turn an explorer into what jackery likes to call a solar generator so each

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one of these panels will output 100 watts at peak that gives us with four of

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them a total of 400 watts meaning that in theory we could fully charge our

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explorer 1500 in under four hours now in

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practice especially here in bc you are unlikely to get the peak output from

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these but even so we're looking at comfortably being able to charge up by

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day and work or watch netflix all night

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and of course it can also be hooked into 12 volt power and juiced up off the

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car's alternator that is a bonkers amount of flexibility so this is it hey

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yeah this is it i mean i definitely enjoy that house life with you know

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three kids and all so i don't know if i'd want to cram all them in

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sell me on the digital nomad right well here it is

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it's a lot bigger than it looks that's not

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i don't uh i keep trapping myself and that's what she said things it's way

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bigger than i expected i mean when you paint everything white

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inside yeah it looks bigger it's like the tardis but the tardis was not white

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inside oh show me around what i need all right okay well all you need is a

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okay why is this seat backwards oh it's on a swivel no yeah yeah it's loud but

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it's on a swivel that's sick yeah

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you could sit there and like just be like hanging yeah you can discuss

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business or problems of the world or anything you'd like okay now i recognize

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this what have i done oh my gosh all right

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you guys weren't supposed to uh yeah i'm a short guy but like

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i'm easily comfortable walking around in here you're almost yeah so then there's

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like vents yeah so under underneath you yeah there's a diesel heater oh it just

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pumps out heat like you would not believe when it's on and what about this

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one uh and that is just going a vent into my battery compartment sink

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i mean what do you hook up to uh there's water tank under here and then i got my

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food more storage for some camera bits and

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then that's all my ski stuff and camping gear at the back show me the workflow

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then so what what's your editing set right now where are you gonna sit right

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now my add up my setup is this no no i don't wanna see that get that out of

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here horrible are you a standing worker like you're a standing desk yeah well

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like pretty active dude yeah so i figured we'd go with the stand-up desk

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for now and yeah this would be it this thing can go against the wall here but

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we put it on that swivel so i could sit here or i could just lean up against the

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wall there right by bringing this out like that if

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i wanted to get a little comfortable or you could lie in bed or i could lie in

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bed and watch a movie if we faced it that way right okay the skylights you

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put those in right oh the skylights were in the van already in the room or really

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yeah the only thing i did not build in this van were these frames which my dad

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built wow so that ended up taking up a lot less space than uh oh is that the old

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one that's that's the original oh well the capacity of that would have been

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dark all right that is good enough only to run the house electronics that's a

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glorified car battery pretty much i still don't think i would want to have

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three kids in here they could fit in oh okay yes they you know stuffing them got

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all the extra blankets just in case yeah you saw my clothes or whatever like do

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you worry about that like emergency supplies in case

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i do have like i have a camping box down here with like a minus 10 sleeping bag

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and all that sort of stuff so if i was in like a bad situation by the way can i

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just say my favorite mod in this entire thing this right here yeah cause like

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what is up with that right that's like that's the line this tech tips way i

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like it this is freaking awesome man that's all you need so the last thing

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you're gonna need to be truly on grid off the grid is like a starlink

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connection or something yes well i hope you guys enjoyed this epic

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van life tech makeover thanks again to jackery for sponsoring this video

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thanks again to our neighbors for backing up into their unit thanks again

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to morgan for you know providing us with his van to use as a set for the day if

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you guys want to check out one of jackery's power stations we're going to have the link down below and if you

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haven't got enough of this kind of outdoor tech then maybe check out our

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ultimate camping battle station video it was a bit of a weird one but it was

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super cool and i would actually kind of love to revisit it with one of these

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instead of that diesel or gas generator or whatever it was getting that thing up

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to the campsite was a nightmare