What Size Power Station Do I Need? (UK Sizing Guide 2026)

What size power station do I need?

For most UK buyers a 1,000Wh (1kWh) power station is the right size: enough to charge phones, tablets and a laptop for several days, run camp lights and a compressor cool box, and keep a fridge, router and lights alive through a short power cut, while still being light enough to carry. A unit like the Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2 (1,024Wh, 2,000W output) sits right in that sweet spot.

Drop to around 300Wh if you only ever charge phones, tablets and a laptop for a weekend and never plug in a heating element. Step up to 2,000Wh or more for a campervan, a powered fridge running full-time, or home backup that has to last beyond a few hours. For a full-size kettle or a fan heater you are looking at 3,000W of output and a 3,000Wh-plus battery to feed it.

How to work out your own number

Two figures decide everything, and they answer different questions.

Watt-hours (Wh) are the fuel tank. Capacity tells you how long the station lasts. Watts (W) are the size of the pipe. Output tells you what you can plug in at all. A 300Wh unit and a 3,000Wh unit will both charge the same phone; only the big one will boil a kettle, because the small one's inverter cannot pass enough watts at once.

To size the tank, do this sum:

1. List everything you want to run and note each device's wattage (it is on the rating plate, the charger, or the manual).
2. Multiply each by the hours you will run it in a day to get watt-hours.
3. Add them up for a daily total.
4. Add 15 to 20% headroom for conversion losses. A power station only ever delivers around 85% of its rated capacity to your devices, because the inverter and the battery lose the rest as heat, so build that in.

A worked example, a single day at camp:

• Two phones, about 12Wh each: 24Wh
• LED lantern, 8W for 5 hours: 40Wh
• Laptop for an evening film, 45W for 3 hours: 135Wh
• Bluetooth speaker, 5W for 4 hours: 20Wh

That is 219Wh a day. Add 20% headroom and call it 265Wh. Over a two-night weekend you are drawing roughly 530Wh, so a 1,000Wh station covers it comfortably with margin to spare for a dull day when solar barely tops it up.

Notice the swing factor: none of the items above is a compressor cool box or fridge. Add one of those averaging 45 to 50W across the day and it alone pulls around 1,000 to 1,200Wh every 24 hours, which is what pushes a lot of campers from the 1kWh tier up to 2kWh. Work out your number with and without the fridge, because it changes the answer more than anything else you carry.

Power station capacity tiers, and what each one runs

The tiers below map rough watt-hour classes to what they realistically run. The runtime and recharge counts are calculated estimates, not lab tests: rated capacity multiplied by an 85% usable-efficiency assumption, then divided by each load. Phone figures use a 14.4Wh handset, laptop figures a 53.8Wh MacBook Air, and the cool box figure a steady 50W draw.

Sanity-check the output column as well as the capacity. A 600W inverter (the River 3 Plus) handles phones, laptops, lights and camera chargers but no heating elements. Around 2,000W (the C1000 Gen 2) covers most mains appliances, travel kettles and power tools. A full-size UK kettle draws around 3,000W, so only the F3000 tier feeds one without a boost mode.

What size power station for camping and weekend trips?

For most weekend and multi-day camping, a 1,000Wh power station is the right size. It carries phones, lights, camera batteries, a laptop or tablet for an evening film and a few days of topping up, with enough headroom that one dull, low-solar day does not leave you flat.

Go smaller, to around 300Wh, if you are packing light and everything you run charges over USB: phones, a head torch, a camera, maybe a tablet. At 4 to 5kg these units go in a rucksack rather than the boot, and the EcoFlow River 3 Plus can be stacked with an extra battery later if your needs grow.

Go bigger, to 2,000Wh, only if you run a compressor cool box or fridge around the clock. As the maths above shows, that single appliance can double your daily draw, and it is the one thing that reliably pushes a camper up a tier.

What size power station for a campervan?

For a campervan, size up to 2,000Wh or more and check the DC outputs before you check anything else. A 12V compressor fridge, water pump and van lighting want a proper 12V DC feed, and running them through the AC inverter wastes power converting 12V to 230V and back again.

A 2,000Wh unit like the Anker SOLIX C2000 Gen 2 carries a fridge, lights and device charging through a long day and expands to 4,096Wh with a second battery for extended off-grid stints. Not every model has a useful 12V output, though, and it cannot be added later, so confirm the DC ports for your specific kit. The full buying guide flags which models carry a dedicated high-current 12V socket.

What size power station for home backup or a power cut?

For home backup, 2,000Wh is the sensible minimum and 3,000Wh or an expandable system is better if outages in your area run long. What a unit this size genuinely does in a power cut is keep the essentials alive: a fridge freezer, the router, lights, phones and a laptop for the best part of a day or more. It does not run electric showers, cookers or central heating, which stay out of reach of anything portable.

Two things matter as much as raw capacity here. First, look for a UPS or EPS mode that switches to battery within about 10 milliseconds, so a desktop, router or home office never notices the mains drop. Second, favour a unit you can grow: the Anker SOLIX F3000 starts at 3,072Wh and expands to 12,288Wh, enough to carry a fridge, lights and comms through a genuinely long outage, with professional changeover wiring if you want it feeding your circuits.

Let the finder size it for you

Not sure which tier is yours? Answer a few questions in the Power Station Finder and it will size it for you, then shortlist the current models that fit.

FAQ

Where to next

Got your number? The complete portable power station buying guide ranks every current UK model against the same fact base, so you can match your size to the right unit. Or answer a few questions in the finder and let it shortlist for you.