Autohaus 900Amp Powerstation product reviews

I bought one of these because my car has been acting up a bit due to a short in the wiring that I can't find, draining the battery infrequently. With all the travel I do, the last thing I want is to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a flat battery. Plus, you know, it's easier to whip this out of the boot to help out a fellow motorist in need than it is to line up two cars for a jumpstart on a narrow rural road. At $130 it seemed a small investment to make to have peace of mind on the road.

When I got it home, I checked the handy battery meter and found that it did indeed come with a minimal charge, just enough to keep the battery conditioned, as stated on the box, so I plugged it in for an overnight charge and was reassured to see the charge light come on. The next day saw the battery had climbed, but it clearly needed the full 24 hour charge cycle, so I left it on the juice and went about my day. Sure enough, Murphy had a laugh and mid-way through the day I was at the other end of town when the car refused to start. So... I managed to get a jump from a kind fellow driver, and headed home with the plan of sitting tight until this beast was ready to rumble.

By the next evening, a full 36 hours after first plugging it in to charge, I checked the battery level and found it at the high end of the green zone. Perfect! Over the following week, I had three opportunities to use it and it performed flawlessly every time. Hook it up, turn it on, start the car, pack it away. Such a relief to know that no matter where I am, I won't get caught with a dead battery and unable to get the car moving again.

This little gem comes with extras too - a built-in air compressor with extra nozzles that make it perfect for those emergency roadside tyre inflations - when the spare tyre isn't quite up to full pressure - as well as air mattresses - when you want to go camping but don't want to fill the boot with unusable air space - and sports balls - for fun on the beach. The built-in emergency light works a treat when you are trying to do a jumpstart on the side of a dark rural road, or have dropped your keys and can't find them in the grass. It also has a built-in 'cigarette lighter' power port on the side that lets you take those gadgets you have in the car that use that power, and use them away from your vehicle. Personally, that would be the charger for my phone and the GPS... but I really wouldn't want to lug this power pack around with me just to use the GPS.

Overall, this is a great beastie and I look forward to many years of great use out of it. The solid construiction and rugged housing make it tough enough to handle small drops or, as I found out, the odd tumble down a hill when I stumbled and dropped it over the edge of the roadway by accident. Once I recovered it, it still worked 100%. The only thing I would like is a polarity indicator. I used this to jumpstart someone else's car, and was surprised to find that their car was an odd model that didn't have the usual red-black cables on the battery. Both cables were black, and it was only by chance I spotted the + marker on the battery and got the cables hooked on the right way round. If I had put the cables on incorrectly, and turned it on, I dare say I would have had a far less pleasant experience. 900 Amps is a lot of power to have flowing the wrong way through a car's circuits.