Best portable power stations for UK homes

Watt-hours (Wh) are the size of the tank: how much energy the battery holds. Watts (W) of continuous output are the size of the tap: how much it can deliver at once. A station needs enough of both. A 34 W fridge-freezer drains the tank slowly but needs a tap that copes with its compressor; a 3 kW kettle would empty a small tank in minutes and is too much for most taps anyway.

Not all the Wh on the box reach your appliance. BLUETTI publishes the formula we use everywhere on SurviKit: capacity × 0.9 (depth of discharge) × 0.85 (inverter efficiency), divided by the load plus about 10 W the station uses itself. So a 1,024 Wh station gives about 783 Wh of usable energy: the Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2 runs a 100 W load for about 7.1 h.

The easiest way to own a station is to leave it working as a UPS (uninterruptible power supply): plugged into the wall, with the router or fridge-freezer plugged into it. While there's mains power it passes through; when the power goes, the station takes over on its own, in the switchover time its maker states, from 10 ms or less on most models here to 20 ms on some Jackery models.

• Same 14 models as our Spanish guide, checked one by one on each brand's UK store. Anker sells the C300 in the UK as the C300X; the C300 DC on the same store has no mains sockets, so it isn't here.
• Picks by fixed rules on the UK figures: the lightest above 2,000 Wh, the lightest above 1,000 Wh and 1,000 W, and the smallest above 200 Wh, with no brand twice when a close alternative exists. A model with no UK weight can't win a "lightest" rule, and a pre-order waits until it ships.
• No prices and no hands-on tests. We haven't tested these stations ourselves; we compare the makers' published figures and do the maths.