Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank

20Ah for 23 bucks? Seems like it's almost too good to be true. Wouldn't surprise me if it was just half that, would explain the price and weight.

I'll find out if this is true. Hiking buddy of mine pointed it out on Friday, so got one on the way. Was $18 when he called it out, $23 by the time I ordered. Apparently they have a bunch of random stuff like this. They must have some outdoorsy folks in marketing.

The picture on Amazon says 10Ah. Not interested until there is independent verification. The Haribo licensing lends some legitimacy, but way too many fly by night companies selling a fraction of what they advertise.

Thru hikers just kind of find this stuff. They are obsessed with weight and recommendations spread quickly through word of mouth on the trail and on forums.

It is there somewhat for no-name brand. For product that is actually supposed to pay something for a brand it feels low. Unless these are promotional items that fall from back of the truck...

Haribo specializes in making candy, not electronics. Branded swag tends to be bottom-of-the-barrel.

Also I doubt that Haribo has special light battery technology. Seems more likely that they lied on the capacity... Article doesn't test the capacity

Capacity appears to be inline with others: https://old.reddit.com/r/Ultralight/comments/1li5rxw/20000ma...

Man it drives me crazy when people/products use Ah instead of Wh as a way to specify battery "capability".

Without knowing more details about the battery, "20Ah" alone does not convey enough information to determine how long the battery could power a given load for. If I need to power a 100 watt lightbulb, will a 20Ah battery power it for an hour? 10 hours? 10 days? No way to know.

Wh is the unit of stored energy, Wh is what I want to see. Even the official Amazon product page for it doesn't list a Wh figure.

Us one-baggers also find the weirdest things, for the same reason.

There are two models, one listed at 10Ah and one at 20Ah:

https://www.amazon.com/DCHK-10000mAh-Charging-Portable-Motor...

https://www.amazon.com/DCHK-20000mAh-Charging-Portable-Motor...

Isn't that 20Ah figure always relative to the internal voltage of the lithium batteries, 3.7v? At least that's what I always assumed.

If your 100W light bulb is a USB bulb running at 5V (to make the math a bit easier), with 20 Ah you’ll get 100Wh, ergo it’ll run your bulb for a hour. You just need to specify the voltage. There are numerous online calculators to do this math for you.

https://www.inchcalculator.com/ah-to-wh-calculator/

Watt-hours won’t save you, because we don’t know what voltage your bulb needs. Don’t assume it’s 120/240V.

Yeah, but pretty much every power bank uses lithium ion batteries (or used to, at least), so you use 3.7 average volts.

I mean, I know what voltage/wattage my devices need. I have no idea what voltage the battery bank is going to offer.

10 years ago most of these battery packs were relative to the 5V output voltage, so they advertised lower amp-hours. That stopped making sense with fast charging at higher voltages so they restandardized on 3.7V.

But watt-hours would make infinitely more sense for all batteries.

If you want to quadruple your amp hours without modifying the hardware, just treat 25% of the voltage gradient of each battery as your unit of measurement.

Alternatively, since this is USB-C, and we assume the marketing copy is honest, use the max voltage USB-C can deliver: 20v.

So, draw 20V from this device and measure the amp hours it outputs.

Wh is really the only sane way to go.

Lithium NMC, which I think is the most common, is 3.7V. Lithium iron phosphate, which some power packs do use, has a nominal voltage of 3.2V.

This is a white-label product, they likely just used lighter plastic or a cheaper frame (cost savings? white color?) and accidentally made it attractive for hikers.

The weight difference to the Nitecore pack being mentioned is only ~15g.

Not necessarily, no. If you have multiple batteries in series for a higher voltage pack, then it'll be less for the same amount of energy stored. But then the marketing for these packs will happily abuse the units to get the biggest numbers.

If a video game company can fund building a fusion reactor, maybe a stealth breakthrough in energy densities coming from a sweet company is just how things roll these days!

The author of tfa refers to r/ultralight, but fails to note the capacity reported there. Then he writes (or generates) an "article" that might be advertisement, making emphasis on price and fleetingly mentioning the brand products. It doesn't feel sincere.

...by that logic if my 100W bulb is running on 10V, with my same 20Ah I'll get 200Wh, so I'll get a bulb of the same wattage, with the same battery, running twice as long? Magical double energy!

...this is why we should measure the total energy in Wh, not Ah.

And LTO, which is what I actually want, is 2.3 - 2.4 V.

> Wouldn't surprise me if it was just half that,

This was openly crowdfunded in Japan. Please explain the lie/scam for us? How does Makuake rip people off?

https://www.makuake.com/project/haribo_dcglobal/

Is this comment anything more than the normal shit HN negativity?

Nihilism is so cool, thinking is so hard, if I try I might fail.

Sure you might be right. Just want to know where the scam is here?

Then the fact we’ve “standardized” on mah as the unit is just another in our long proud tradition, same reason we still use “Watts” as the main measure of light output, even when it has to be made up for use on LED bulbs.

Because 20ah for a 5v battery is ~357 Wh/kg which is more than the highest density lipo as of 2024 [].

Do you honestly think they are putting the most cutting edge lipo technology in a gummy bear branded battery pack?

I agree with your GP, it is unlikely.

Maybe at least consider the density vs SOTA before you accuse someone of being a nihilist.

[] https://www.cei.washington.edu/research/energy-storage/lithi...

Battery capacity is always measured in amp hours not watt hours, because it’s telling you more than just capacity. The rating is a measure of how many amps the battery can emit continuously for one hour. You can estimate how long the battery will last at different loads, but it won’t match up 1:1 because of efficiency differences depending on how fast the battery is discharged, and if it has a chance to recover between discharges. Basically watt hour measurements are path dependent, and using a fungible unit like watt hours obscures the meaning of the measurement.

Did the crowdfunding mention breaking a new barrier in battery technology?

Batteries are made out of components, they have a capacity, volume, weight and price. It doesn't make sense that a cheap battery with low weight has a higher capacity than the existing expensive product.

Ah does not mean it has to be discharged over exactly one hour in some test. It's simply a unit just like kWh. And most batteries are not optimised for one hour discharge. There's batteries with insanely high C-rates for delivering a lot of power quickly, discharging in 10 minutes. And some with really low that can standby for years. They'll still indicate the Ah capacity the same way.

True and the plastics used aren't typical low weight, the attached cord also weighs (which many power banks don't have). I doubt it even uses a GaN DC-DC converter. There's no way this could be lighter than one designed specially for lightness if the capacity was real.

> The rating is a measure of how many amps the battery can emit continuously for one hour.

This is absolutely not true at all. 'Ah' is a measure of capacity and 'amps' is a measure of current. Batteries typically have three measurements: nominal voltage, capacity (Ah or mAh), and rated continuous current (amps).

> watt hour measurements are path dependent

Watt hour is a normalized measurement of the battery's capacity. For example, it lets me compare a 12v/100Ah LifePO4 battery versus a 3.7v/3Ah Li-ion 18650 battery in terms of each batteries capacity (in this case 1200Wh versus 11 Wh).

Liz is a lady, and I am confident she did not AI generate this article. Aside from it clearly having her authorial voice, here is another piece she has written:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24326077/i-asked-chatgpt

To be fair, as others have mentioned, claiming internal battery amperage compared to output amperage is a common enough fudge that they're not materially lying.

I can see why you would think that, but no, that’s not the case. My RV battery is 200aH but can discharge at 380 amps and drain itself in well under an hour. (That’s a peak rate which it cannot sustain for long enough to discharge itself but it can still be well above 200 the entire time.)

Most lithium batteries can drain themselves much faster than an hour.

I think they really just do it because generally everything you will connect to the battery, for the most part, will be using the same voltage, and it’s just easier to do your math and in your head. Remember, most people can’t just calculate a 20% tip in their head without having to think about it for a while or use an app.

Also, in this particular instance, phone batteries are measured in miliamp hours, so it makes the thing I actually want to know, how many times can it charge my cell phone, really easy to figure out.

But as somebody who tinkers with inverters and such, I agree, it is annoying. It is still generally not that hard to do in my head, and trivial with a calculator. But I’m with you.

Yeah, if you publish Ah, you should also publish voltage. Then it's just Ah * V = Wh.

Huh, I didn't get that memo so have been played a fool assuming 5v until now. Advertising mAh corresponding to a different unadvertised voltage than the output is just misleading advertising.

Batteries have different capacities at different C rate discharge. 1C is the amperage listed as the battery amp hours, but at higher discharge, batteries have a lower capacity. Some batteries handle higher discharge better than others (closer to the rated capacity). You can of course estimate the battery capacity in watt hours, but it’s not how the battery is classified (eg in a data sheet)

I understand that. What I’m saying is that the capacity is different depending on how quickly you drain it. Different battery construction can mitigate this effect to a higher or lower degree, but the battery is rated for 200A discharge in one hour. At 380A you will get less total watt hours out of the battery than you would at 200A, ie it will discharge in less than the 31.5 minutes you would otherwise expect.

The C rate still comes from the amp hour number on the battery. I’m aware you can discharge faster or slower than that, but the capacity measured will not be the same

There's a technical reason for it: the voltage sags when the battery is discharged quickly. Ah is relatively constant, but Wh decreases significantly with faster discharge rates, so it can't specified as a single figure.

Some endurance athletes do love their gummies. I'm not one of them.

Sort of. C rate discharge is just another (confusing) way of state CDR. You might as well just say the CDR in amps. C rate is really just to give a comparison on battery chemistries to illustrate how performant different chemistries can deliver power at a normalized value (to illustrate how the battery chemistry could in theory scale up)

For example, 1C is rated continuous discharge amps, which means a 1C rated battery will provide 1 * Ah. So if a 20,000 mAh battery is rated for 20,000 mAh @ 1C, it will (in theory) discharge 20,000 mAh at 20A in one hour.

> You can of course estimate the battery capacity in watt hours, but it’s not how the battery is classified (eg in a data sheet)

You're right but this is irrelevant because real life usage highly varies. Data sheets are just guides.

I assume they're using Ah at the cell level (3.7v nominal), and then maybe rounding up slightly.

(This is the absurdity of using Ah to measure the capacity of consumer-oriented power banks. They usually output 5v over USB A or a variable voltage over PD, but measure current at the cell level. Of course this fact or the precise voltage is rarely stated anywhere.)

It actually is, when you read GGP's link [1]

20000 mAh (3.85V/77Wh)

Which is consistent with what the latest mass produced batteries can do.

[1] https://www.makuake.com/project/haribo_dcglobal/

> Aside from it clearly having her authorial voice, [...]

LLMs are pretty good at imitating styles, if asked to do so. It's just their default style that's easy to recognise.

(You are probably right in everything you say! I just wanted to point out that style of an article isn't necessarily a giveaway.)

> They must have some outdoorsy folks in marketing.

Perhaps it's just their Germanity shining through?

Well, and if you are on that train: instead of Wh, why not use J?

(Though for American hikers it would be somewhat fun to use a unit of 'pound feet'.)

Could as least use Coulomb (or just count electrons), instead of taking Current = Charge / Time and multiplying by charge again.

For what it's worth: 1 mAh ~ 2.25 * 10^19 electrons. Or with SI-prefixes: 22.5 exa-electrons (= 2.25 Ee).

Is that because of internal resistance of the battery, or some other effect?

And sometimes there are items that flare up and get popular before disappearing, leaving stragglers to scour second-hand lists. I remember people talking about CostCo ultralight quilts and similar.

It sounds correct to me. Ugreen powerbank is also at the same price range.

Mine came in at 288g, which is a bit more than the 280g that the article mentioned. The nightcore NB10000 w/cable comes in around 167g. Will see this week how it does from a battery performance perspective.

…just remember V is a rather complicated function of many parameters instead of some fixed value.

Internal voltage is chemistry dependent. In other words, cell manufacturer invariant. It's 3.7V for NMC, 3.2 for LFP, 2.3 for LTO, 3.0 for Na-ion.

Technically speaking, the pack voltage as well as Ah rating should be that of the pack and not cumulative total of the pack; two NMC 18650 in series should be 7.4V 2600mAh, not 3.7V 5200mAh. But denoting as if all cells are in parallel allow this figure to be maximally inflated and so that's what manufacturers do.

High voltage charging etc are not relevant. Though, high voltage assembled battery packs should be marked in that high voltage amp-hour ratings.

The technical reason why amp-hour rating exist is because there are parameters dependent on amperage than energy or voltage, such as thickness of the wire to be used in the device or cycle life of the cell. Voltage of a battery also kind of change proportionate to remaining energy in it, and values like 3.7 for NMC or 1.5 for Alkaline is a 50%, averaged, state.

Makuake is supposed to be a crowdfunding site but it's more of Groupon now. Lots of "projects" are just rebadges from AliExpress, profiting from the fact that English proficiency of Japanese consumers as well as appetite for foreign sold product is effectively zero, virtually unexisting those websites.

That's a bit cursed mental model tbf... The voltages of batteries, in the first place, is function of state of charge. 100% = 4.2V, 0% = ~2.7V, 50% is 3.7V(by volume or something. 2.7 is also technical absolute minimums, cutoff voltage is usually more like 3.2V. Please don't abuse the battery in the ranges between 3.2 to 2.7V, let alone below).

Charge/discharge current capacity is constant throughout, at least so battery manufacturers say, at 1-20x the amp-hour capacity depending on the cell. Usually 5x or less.

Since energy = voltage x current, instantaneous W capacity is higher at first, reducing as it becomes supply side limited rather than load side limited.

But all those is irrelevant to why everyone uses mAh, it's because products with biggest numbers sell fastest. Marking capacity in Wh is noble, but it's a clearance worthy sin if you ask the shelves.

Mostly all flashlights advertise in lumen though? I suppose you mean light bulbs?

Yes, I mean the bulbs. Generally in the US at least we find them in the store labeled like "40 watt equivalent (small print: 2.1W)"

While the price is only 1/5 of the Nitecore packs.

This seems off, either nitecore is putting a very heavy premium on their products while not using obvious weight saving options, or the Haribo pack simply will not deliver on capacity

That's wrong, if they only specifiy Ah, then they usually imply cell voltage (3.7V avg.) and not the 5V you're drawing over USB.

Even if you assume you're charging a phone with that, you first need to subtract 25-40% total losses. And then consider that phone batteries are LiHV with 3.85-3.9V nowadays.

That’s a fair point. I guess I’m thinking of 12v world, like I experience in my RVs and food trucks, where the battery powers everything and it’s all 12v.

> The voltages of batteries, in the first place, is function of state of charge.

It's also a function of the rate of discharge. Have a look at this:

https://marsen.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Panasonic-N...

All that space between the black and green curves is energy being lost to internal resistance.

Yes, it's due to internal resistance.