off-grid living is becoming more and more popular as both a way to combat the
rising cost of housing and to clock out of this increasingly connected world
even if it's just for a little bit but sometimes you need technology to get
away from technology so when jackery reached out to sponsor this video
featuring their explorer line of power stations my writer colin immediately
thought of his friend morgan he's a photographer who's been living that van
life in a ski resort parking lot for about a year now with some serious tech
deficiencies so we're gonna drop a tech
bomb on his van and bring his mobile editing rig slash living accommodations
into the 21st century and we're gonna learn a little something about van
living while we're at it
first things first this is the star of the show the jackery
explorer 1500. this little machine is
absolutely stuffed with genuine panasonic 18650 cells just like these
ones 130 of them to be precise that
means there is a veritable buttload of power crammed into this package slightly
under 1500 watt hours and these 110 volt
ac outlets are honestly they're just insane we took the
little brother of this the explorer 1000 and hooked up an rtx gaming rig an HDR
monitor and filming lights all at once
as for the explorer 1500 it'll do 1800
watts of sustained load and up to 3 600
watts of peak load so toast no problem
blended avocado for your toast
kind of awful sounding i prefer sliced but theoretically possible
then over on the dc power side of things we get one of my favorite features usbc
power delivery up to 60 watts worth along with two usb type a's for good
measure now let's talk about what we're gonna hook up to it initially we considered
building a pc to replace the current setup in here but seeing is morgan's
living that mobile life oh and he's a mac user we opted for a shiny new m1
macbook air sorry pc guys the truth is
apple silicon really does offer class leading power efficiency and with the
thermal pad mod which we have pre-applied of course the air manages
just about identical performance to the m1 macbook pro we did kind of blow the
budget on this but morgan's a cool guy right
okay then for a monitor we went with an lg 27gl850
i actually named this the best monitor of 2019 it's
absolutely overkill i mean it sports a one millisecond response time for that
extreme gaming but it's an engineering sample that we
were able to spare and for a 14400 display it is remarkably color accurate
colin calibrated this one for morgan and we've got the delta e's down to just
2.85 that is going to be worlds ahead of this
old macbook and should handle photo and video editing comfortably but where's
all that video to go ah that's where lucy's rugged rage
shuttle comes in this is a big step in the right direction for morgan it's like
baby's first data redundancy inside there are two four terabyte drives along
with a raid controller that means you can either run it in raid 0 for a
relatively speedy 8 terabytes of storage
or you can go big galaxy brain and use
raid 1 giving you 4 terabytes of fully redundant storage that means that one of
the drives inside could outright fail without losing any data and this is
something most folks might not consider but in a mobile read vibration heavy
environment hard drives are just plain not going to last as long even with a
rubber bumper friends do not let friends lose data and all of this is going to be
connected to this soho dock from cal digit it lets us run a single usb type-c
cable out to the macbook for charging data and video and then from there we
can run displayport up to our monitor and connect to the hard drive over usbc
and everything will of course be powered by the explorer 1500
and we threw in an amazon bluetooth soundbar for good measure
but while the outputs are awesome the inputs are where things get even more
interesting with a jackery explorer sure you can
charge from the wall with this chunky 300 watt wall charger but the last time
i checked running an extension cord out of the ski lodge across the parking lot
is mostly frowned upon mostly so for
true off-grid power the explorer 1500 can handle up to 600 watts of solar
input with solar panels like these bad boys
these turn an explorer into what jackery likes to call a solar generator so each
one of these panels will output 100 watts at peak that gives us with four of
them a total of 400 watts meaning that in theory we could fully charge our
explorer 1500 in under four hours now in
practice especially here in bc you are unlikely to get the peak output from
these but even so we're looking at comfortably being able to charge up by
day and work or watch netflix all night
and of course it can also be hooked into 12 volt power and juiced up off the
car's alternator that is a bonkers amount of flexibility so this is it hey
yeah this is it i mean i definitely enjoy that house life with you know
three kids and all so i don't know if i'd want to cram all them in
sell me on the digital nomad right well here it is
it's a lot bigger than it looks that's not
i don't uh i keep trapping myself and that's what she said things it's way
bigger than i expected i mean when you paint everything white
inside yeah it looks bigger it's like the tardis but the tardis was not white
inside oh show me around what i need all right okay well all you need is a
okay why is this seat backwards oh it's on a swivel no yeah yeah it's loud but
it's on a swivel that's sick yeah
you could sit there and like just be like hanging yeah you can discuss
business or problems of the world or anything you'd like okay now i recognize
this what have i done oh my gosh all right
you guys weren't supposed to uh yeah i'm a short guy but like
i'm easily comfortable walking around in here you're almost yeah so then there's
like vents yeah so under underneath you yeah there's a diesel heater oh it just
pumps out heat like you would not believe when it's on and what about this
one uh and that is just going a vent into my battery compartment sink
i mean what do you hook up to uh there's water tank under here and then i got my
food more storage for some camera bits and
then that's all my ski stuff and camping gear at the back show me the workflow
then so what what's your editing set right now where are you gonna sit right
now my add up my setup is this no no i don't wanna see that get that out of
here horrible are you a standing worker like you're a standing desk yeah well
like pretty active dude yeah so i figured we'd go with the stand-up desk
for now and yeah this would be it this thing can go against the wall here but
we put it on that swivel so i could sit here or i could just lean up against the
wall there right by bringing this out like that if
i wanted to get a little comfortable or you could lie in bed or i could lie in
bed and watch a movie if we faced it that way right okay the skylights you
put those in right oh the skylights were in the van already in the room or really
yeah the only thing i did not build in this van were these frames which my dad
built wow so that ended up taking up a lot less space than uh oh is that the old
one that's that's the original oh well the capacity of that would have been
dark all right that is good enough only to run the house electronics that's a
glorified car battery pretty much i still don't think i would want to have
three kids in here they could fit in oh okay yes they you know stuffing them got
all the extra blankets just in case yeah you saw my clothes or whatever like do
you worry about that like emergency supplies in case
i do have like i have a camping box down here with like a minus 10 sleeping bag
and all that sort of stuff so if i was in like a bad situation by the way can i
just say my favorite mod in this entire thing this right here yeah cause like
what is up with that right that's like that's the line this tech tips way i
like it this is freaking awesome man that's all you need so the last thing
you're gonna need to be truly on grid off the grid is like a starlink
connection or something yes well i hope you guys enjoyed this epic
van life tech makeover thanks again to jackery for sponsoring this video
thanks again to our neighbors for backing up into their unit thanks again
to morgan for you know providing us with his van to use as a set for the day if
you guys want to check out one of jackery's power stations we're going to have the link down below and if you
haven't got enough of this kind of outdoor tech then maybe check out our
ultimate camping battle station video it was a bit of a weird one but it was
super cool and i would actually kind of love to revisit it with one of these
instead of that diesel or gas generator or whatever it was getting that thing up
to the campsite was a nightmare