What Size Power Station for Camping?
Four common trips, the arithmetic for each, and the capacity that actually covers them. Find yours and stop reading.
The short answer
| Your trip | Daily draw | Capacity to buy |
|---|---|---|
| Weekend, devices and lights only | About 90Wh | 250-300Wh |
| Weekend with a 12V fridge | About 500Wh | 1,000Wh |
| 3 nights, CPAP, humidifier off | About 340Wh | 1,000Wh |
| 3 nights, CPAP with humidifier | About 800Wh | 2,000Wh, or 1,000Wh plus solar |
| Weekend with fridge and electric cooking | About 900Wh | 2,000Wh |
| A week off-grid with a fridge | About 500Wh | 1,000Wh plus 400W of solar |
The table above is the answer for most people. The rest of this page shows the working, because the arithmetic is simple and knowing it means you can adjust for your own gear instead of trusting a table built around someone else's.
Profile 1: a weekend with devices only
This is the most common actual requirement and the one people most often over-buy against. If this is your trip, go to the lightweight roundup rather than the 1kWh units — you will carry it more and use it more.
Profile 2: a weekend with a 12V fridge
Note how completely the fridge dominates: 864Wh of a 1,039Wh total. Everything else on a camping trip is noise next to a compressor running for two days. Best power station for a camping fridge covers the duty-cycle detail and how to reduce it.
Profile 3: three nights with a CPAP
Turn the humidifier on and that 280Wh a night becomes roughly 680Wh, the three-night total becomes 2,040Wh, and no single 1kWh unit covers it. That is not a small adjustment — it changes the purchase entirely. CPAP watt-hours in detail.
Profile 4: a week off-grid
Past about three nights the arithmetic stops being about capacity, because nobody makes a portable battery that holds a week of a fridge. It becomes about whether your daily harvest covers your daily draw.
This is the insight that saves the most money in this category: for long trips, panels are cheaper and far lighter than battery. A 1,000Wh unit with 400W of solar outperforms a 3,000Wh unit with none, and weighs a fraction as much. Check the unit's maximum solar input before buying the panel — how much solar input you need explains why that spec, not the panel rating, is the ceiling.
Then check the output rating separately
Capacity tells you how long; output tells you what. If anything on your list heats — a kettle, a griddle, a coffee machine, an induction hob — you need 1,500W or more of continuous output regardless of how small your daily watt-hour total is. A 288Wh unit with 300W of output will not boil a kettle even though it could theoretically supply the energy. What a 1000W power station runs has the full appliance list.
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