Why Your Outdoorsy Friend Suddenly Has a Gummy Bear Power Bank

You can have a backup paper map inked on your skin.

Personally I'm not into paying a premium for "ultralight" and similar so I might have misinterpreted something when glancing at people that seem to be. For me part of the hiking experience is getting used to carrying weight and living off equipment that would work in a crisis or adjacent to armed conflict, i.e. my basic gear clocks in at about twenty kilos or so, though that's enough to feed and 'house' about four people. Two field kitchens, teepee-style storage tent as well as a large pyramidal tent for sleeping, field spade, handheld radio units for the family/team, fishing equipment, &c. Usually I carry ~10 liters of water, a liter of ethanol, food, spare clothes and whatnot on top of it.

I find that lowering weight into the single digits doesn't give me that much extra range consistently over several days so I'd rather set up camp close to the area where I'd need it and leave some weight behind while I take on the more demanding trail or climb. At the end of the day it's going to be an endurance activity rather than a sprint anyway, at least for a non-athletic button pusher in his forties, like me.

Clearly people that mostly roam areas close to cities or that have joint issues or similar would have reason to make other decisions.

I'm no ultralighter, but I rarely carry water aside from a 16oz bag to sip on while I'm heading towards my destination. Water is crazy heavy. I make sure that the route I'm taking, and my destination, have water nearby that I filter and drink.

Surely the hunting knife you use to kill your dinner when combined with the mirror you use for starting your forraged twig fires, that would be the ultimate solution.

...or just not shave for a few days. I guess you could do that too.

This seems off, either nitecore is putting a very heavy premium on their products while not using obvious weight saving options, or the Haribo pack simply will not deliver on capacity

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/23/24326077/i-asked-chatgpt

But watt-hours would make infinitely more sense for all batteries.

Technically speaking, the pack voltage as well as Ah rating should be that of the pack and not cumulative total of the pack; two NMC 18650 in series should be 7.4V 2600mAh, not 3.7V 5200mAh. But denoting as if all cells are in parallel allow this figure to be maximally inflated and so that's what manufacturers do.

High voltage charging etc are not relevant. Though, high voltage assembled battery packs should be marked in that high voltage amp-hour ratings.

The technical reason why amp-hour rating exist is because there are parameters dependent on amperage than energy or voltage, such as thickness of the wire to be used in the device or cycle life of the cell. Voltage of a battery also kind of change proportionate to remaining energy in it, and values like 3.7 for NMC or 1.5 for Alkaline is a 50%, averaged, state.

...this is why we should measure the total energy in Wh, not Ah.

Alternatively, since this is USB-C, and we assume the marketing copy is honest, use the max voltage USB-C can deliver: 20v.

So, draw 20V from this device and measure the amp hours it outputs.

Wh is really the only sane way to go.

This is absolutely not true at all. 'Ah' is a measure of capacity and 'amps' is a measure of current. Batteries typically have three measurements: nominal voltage, capacity (Ah or mAh), and rated continuous current (amps).

> watt hour measurements are path dependent

Watt hour is a normalized measurement of the battery's capacity. For example, it lets me compare a 12v/100Ah LifePO4 battery versus a 3.7v/3Ah Li-ion 18650 battery in terms of each batteries capacity (in this case 1200Wh versus 11 Wh).

Most lithium batteries can drain themselves much faster than an hour.

Even if you assume you're charging a phone with that, you first need to subtract 25-40% total losses. And then consider that phone batteries are LiHV with 3.85-3.9V nowadays.

(Though for American hikers it would be somewhat fun to use a unit of 'pound feet'.)

Charge/discharge current capacity is constant throughout, at least so battery manufacturers say, at 1-20x the amp-hour capacity depending on the cell. Usually 5x or less.

Since energy = voltage x current, instantaneous W capacity is higher at first, reducing as it becomes supply side limited rather than load side limited.

But all those is irrelevant to why everyone uses mAh, it's because products with biggest numbers sell fastest. Marking capacity in Wh is noble, but it's a clearance worthy sin if you ask the shelves.

(This is the absurdity of using Ah to measure the capacity of consumer-oriented power banks. They usually output 5v over USB A or a variable voltage over PD, but measure current at the cell level. Of course this fact or the precise voltage is rarely stated anywhere.)