Hello everyone, I found a cool way to make the ExtremeQ portable and thought some of you might be interested. I do a lot of offgrid camping so my electrical system is DC and I wanted a way to power the EQ directly without firing up an inverter. In the process discovered that USBC-PD 100W chargers can directly power the EQ with the help of a
special cable that signals what voltages the charger should send. My power station has the usbc-pd charger built in so I just plug it in, set the voltage on the cable to 20v, and turn on the EQ.
Some
cheap battery banks with the 100w usbc charger built in ive seen on amazon are about 50$.
Heres a picture to the setup
Some things to note. While I know the 100W pd chargers work for certain, the 65W PD chargers probably also work for this as they can also deliver 20v up to 3.25A pretty much the same values the stock arizer power supply outputs. The power banks with 65W PD chargers built in instead of 100W are cheaper for those who are on a budget, but I have not personally tested 65W chargers so cannot say for certain if it does work only that it should.
And just to clarify what the 'special cable' does thats important to this setup. The jist of it is that usbc-pd requires communication between device and charger. The device knows what voltage it needs and tells the charger to give it that voltage. The EQ has no way of telling the PD charger it wants 20 volts, so that special cable tells the charger to deliver 20v instead.
So how long does the EQ work on battery? Well that depends on how much power its eating over how long of a time, and how much capacity the battery has.
According to the power station, the EQ uses about 55w heating up over about 2 minutes then tapers down to 15w as the glass becomes fully heat soaked. The fans add about 10 extra watts at f3 for a max power usage of 65W.
For ease of calculation lets assume the eq uses about 25wh of power on average. The EQ actually uses much less after heat soaked + no fan around 15wh. My small powerstation is rated at 268wh so 268wh battery capacity divided by 25wh power draw is 10 hours expected runtime. Taking into account real world inefficencies its probably closer to 8-9 hours. I want to do a real world test sometime to see how the math holds up to reality.
Those cheap 50$ 20000mAh batteries by my calculation might run an eq for even longer. since according to my calculations 20000mAh@20v is 400Wh.
So in short, to mod the eq to be portable with multi hour sessions using todays technology requires a 50$ power bank and a 10$ specialized cable from amazon. I am suprised at just how little power the EQ seems to use once properly heated up, its comparable to a laptop. It is amazing that USB-C technology advanced in recent years to the point we can convert old appliances to use our new universal chargers with such ease.
This is my first post on FC! If you want to know specifics feel free to message me.