Goal Zero Yeti 1000X Portable Power Station review: Expandable back up power, at a premium

Best Prices Today

$1,749.99

Goal Zero’s Yeti 1000x Portable Power Station is impressive. It better be, for the price. At $1,400, the 1000X has plenty of capacity to power small appliances, and if you purchase a $250 Yeti Home Integration Kit from Goal Zero, you can connect the 1000X to your home’s electrical system to power essential devices. Additionally, you can purchase a $400 Yeti Link Expansion Module and a Yeti Tank Expansion Battery that starts at $450 for extra capacity beyond the 983Wh the 1000X offers.

In total, you can get around 5KWh of power through Yeti Power Stations and expansion packs. That’s a crazy amount of power (it won’t power an entire house for too long, but you’ll be able to power essentials like lights and a refrigerator for a while).

Note: This review is part of our roundup of portable power banks. Go there for details on competing products and our testing methods.

Features

But back to the Yeti 1000X as a stand-alone portable power station. It has a total of 12 ports. There’s a 60W USB-C Power Delivery port, an 18W USB-C port, two standard USB ports, three different 6mm barrel ports, a 12V car charger port, a 12V High Power Port (180W max), and two 120V outlets with 1500W of output, with a peak output of 3000W.

The station weighs just under 32 pounds, but has two sturdy handles that make it easy to carry around. It’s roughly the same size as a small cooler. There’s a storage compartment on the top of the station where you can store the included charging cable, and it has spots that make it easy to route any wires or cables out of the compartment and to an outlet.

There are three different ports dedicated to charging the 1000X itself or connecting the station to the various accessories I mentioned earlier. Included with the Yeti 1000X is a wall adapter that charges the 1000X at 118W, which equates to going from empty to 100 percent charge in 8 hours and 32 minutes.

A small display on the front shows you current input, output, charge level, and the amount of time until the battery is fully charged. Each section has a button that turns on the specific type of port below it. For the screen, there’s also a units button that rotates output between watt-hours, volts, amps, and watts.

Performance

The Yeti 1000x has a hefty capacity of 983Wh, which is just slightly lower than the Jackery Explorer 1000‘s capacity of 1,002Wh. And the two power stations perform almost identically. The Yeti 1000X put out 839.7Wh for a score of 85.42 percent, just edging out the Explorer 1000’s efficiency of 84.47 percent.

I measured the capacity by connecting a PortaPow power monitor and DROK load tester to a standard USB port on the Yeti 1000X. I also connected a 4W desk lamp to one of the standard outlets and used a Wyze Cam to create a timelapse until the lamp powered off. The Yeti 1000X was the last power station on my desk by the end of the test, lasting 4 days, 15 hours, and 29 minutes.

Bottom line

At $1,400, the Yeti 1000X is an expensive piece of kit. But it’s also a powerful one. And if you were to combine it with the available accessories, you could literally power your home with it. That’s just crazy to think about. However, if you want a long-lasting power station that can power anything from a microwave to a full-size refrigerator, the Yeti 1000X will surely get the job done.