About Volt & Valley

Volt & Valley is an independent buying guide to portable power stations and solar generators. It exists because working out which unit actually fits a trip — what it will run, what it weighs, how fast it takes solar — is harder than it should be, and because the pages that currently answer those questions are mostly written by the companies selling the answer.

Who publishes it

Volt & Valley is published by The First Buyer, an independent publisher of buying guides. The First Buyer's hub is at thefirstbuyer.com. We are not owned by, funded by, or affiliated with any manufacturer or retailer in this category.

Who writes it

Every page on this site is written by Michael W., the hands-on owner behind The First Buyer. He started Volt & Valley because working out which portable power station actually fits a trip — what it will run, what it weighs, how fast it takes solar — is harder than it should be. Every recommendation here is chosen against the criteria set out in How We Choose.

That is the whole bio, deliberately. You will not find a claimed engineering background, a count of years in the industry, a number of units owned, or a testing-fleet origin story on this site, because none of those would be true. The competitor sites in this category are full of them.

What we claim, and what we do not

We read manufacturer specifications, cite them, and do watt-hour arithmetic in the open so you can check it against your own equipment. We do not run instrumented tests, we do not measure delivered capacity, and we do not claim first-hand use of products we have not used. Where another publisher has done real measurement, we cite them by name rather than absorbing their work into ours.

This is a genuine limitation and we would rather state it than write around it. How We Choose sets out the method in full, including what it cannot tell you.

How it is funded

Reader purchases, through the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. When you buy through a link here we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Every link pays the same rate, so no model on this site earns us more than any other — which is why several pages recommend the cheaper or smaller unit. No manufacturer has paid for placement or seen a page before publication. Full affiliate disclosure.

What you will not find here

• No testimonials or reader ratings. We have none, so we display none.
• No product star ratings. A score implies a measurement we have not made.
• No prices. We have no live price feed, and a stale price is worse than no price.
• No sponsored content, ever. If that changes, it will be labeled on the page, not buried here.
• No fabricated field-testing narrative. Not on any page, in any phrasing.

Getting in touch

Corrections, questions and disagreements all go to the same place: contact@voltandvalley.com, or through the contact page. If something on this site is out of date or wrong, telling us is genuinely useful — being correctable is the only credibility available to a site that does not run a lab. Our corrections policy is on the editorial policy page.