Portable Power Stations Keep Getting More Powerful – Check Out These Ones From EcoFlow

Batter-y up! Punchy all-in-one power stations are getting more powerful and user friendly. It’s easier than ever to stay juiced.

I know, I know, I should be staring into the campfire and singing kumbaya with my homies. But I’ve got a secret: it’s 2025 and everything uses power. My smartwatch, my camera, my phone (of course), they all make my adventures better. Being able to charge them up is safer and allows me to focus on enjoying more time off-grid. The same goes for running my wife’s hair straightener from the boot of the car.

It wasn’t long ago that portable power was a complicated bit of tech that was wired into a 4WD or van. Installation was costly and it was attached to the vehicle or caravan it was installed in. Realistically you’d only bother if you were taking your rig for a lap of Australia or some other extended adventure.

The compact RIVER 3 Plus

Things have changed though, and nowadays standalone portable power stations can come in under 5kg, and that’s including the tech needed to quickly charge them back up, and an inbuilt inverter to run your 240V appliances, like, y’know, an espresso machine. This also means they’re easier than ever to take along for the weekend, move between different cars, or even use at home (WFH on the balcony all day? Yes please).

EcoFlow was started in 2017 by a group of battery engineers and has a huge range of portable power options available. For Explorers, the new RIVER 3 Plus and DELTA 3 Plus are the latest compact yet powerful options – I’ll help you choose the right one for you.

RIVER 3 Plus

I’m going to do something I don’t normally do, and start with the price. The RIVER 3 Plus comes in at $499 and was actually created to make it easier for people to get into the portable power game. Safe to say they used to start bigger and way more expensive.

For your money you’ll get a power station that puts out 600 watts, or can boost up to 1200 for heating devices like a kettle. On the flipside, devices under 100 watts like LED lights or even a WiFi router get twice as much runtime, thanks to something tricky called X-GaNPower.

It’s tiny too: 23cm x 23cm x 14.5cm is 30% smaller than the industry average and at under 30 decibels, it runs pretty incognito. At 4.7kg it’s no haul job either, and there’s a meaty handle to swing it from.

So what’s it good for? You’d buy a RIVER 3 Plus for weekends away. You might want to recharge phones, cameras, run lighting and some simple appliances (smoothies, anyone?) without having to worry about running your car flat or even being near your car at all. 

There’s a USB-A and USB-C port, three separate AC outlets (like you find in your house) and your classic DC ‘car socket’ outlet. On the input side, you’ve got options to charge it at home via the wall (in 1 hour, thanks to X-Stream tech that protects the battery while it fills it up ASAP), via solar panels, plugged into your car, or even a petrol generator.

There’s even a simple way to clip multiple units together, boosting your power capacity for longer trips. How good is that? The RIVER 3 Plus starts at 286 watt hours if you’re doing the maths on your devices, with a potential of up to 858Wh in the Max Plus package.

All sound good but not quite enough power for your needs? Let me tell you about the DELTA.

DELTA 3 Plus

Oh lawd he comin’. The DELTA 3 Plus is the big brother (or sister, I’m really not sure with batteries) of the RIVER 3 Plus and offers so much capability that you may as well install plumbing at your campsite and call it a house.

Instead of 1200 watts you’re able to put out 1800, with an X-boost to 2400 and surge of 3600! EcoFlow reckons this will power 99% of household appliances (yep, pack the Thermomix). It’ll even run a microwave or power tools if you need.

Like the RIVER 3 Plus, the 12.5kg DELTA 3 Plus is portable and can be transferred between cars, or even to a campsite, and has the same whisper quiet operation below 600 watts. It’ll crack 30dB above this, but it’s likely whatever you’re powering will too.

What got me excited was the charge time. 56 minutes! Even if you forget to charge it until the morning you’re leaving the fact that a 1024 watt hour (the RIVER 3 Plus starts at 286) battery like this can charge to 100% so quickly is frankly mind boggling.

Your charging input options are the same as the RIVER 3 Plus but more powerful, and if you’re installing it in a car, EcoFlow recommend adding their 800 watt Alternator charger to rapidly speed up charging from your car as you drive.

On the output side, you get 4 AC outputs (your home sockets), two USB-C and USB-A ports, your classic car socket output and two DC5521 outputs. I challenge you to use them all at once (you can).

Oh and not that it’s outdoorsy, but you can even use both batteries for backup power with a 10 millisecond switchover to battery power – perfect for intermittent blackouts. I joined the EcoFlow Australia Official Facebook Group (yep, people froth these things) and read countless stories of EcoFlow batteries helping people through Cyclone Alfred, where power has been very hard to come by.

The DELTA 3 Plus starts at $1599 but is on sale right now for $1399 and comes with a 5 year warranty.

Read more: EcoFlow Launches the DELTA 2 Max to Power Your Adventures