Review: Anker PowerPort 5 40W Multi-Port USB Charger

Picture the scene. You're on a self-supported tour and happen across a single power socket in a ferry terminal waiting room. What will you choose to charge for the next hour?

I'm sure that ours can't be the only household now with a box, cupboard or 'man drawer' full of assorted cables, many of them proprietary, a good few probably bespoke to pieces of long-since-obsolete technology, in a tangled PVC-and-cheap-Chinese-copper mess. For years, we had a plethora of different connectors and currents used for charging different brands of electronic device. Throw in having a toddler who loves nothing more than to chew on the end of a cable or two (Rhoda loves Lightning leads, but can't eat a whole one) and charging things becomes a right old nuisance, before you even leave home.

Things have at least been simplified somewhat since the advent of USB, which seems now to have lasted much longer than most of the other connectors. On tour we are now carrying USB headlights on our bikes, USB tail lights on the trailer, a USB GoPro charger, an iPad mini, two or three Kindle paperwhites, and three iPhones. On top of that, there's the battery packs we use when we're 'off the grid', which also charge via a 2A USB supply. That's four on Lightning, six on Mini USB and three on Micro USB, and if Katie has to take her work Blackberry with her (heaven forbid!) that's another Micro, although if you can't make a Kindle Paperwhite last a fortnight on a bike tour, you're not doing the cycling right.

Replacing the previous plethora of unique leads, we now have the world and his wife's take on the 'Plug for the mains socket that creates a USB output for our product' bit. Some really don't like being plugged in adjacent to anything else, they can have vastly different current outputs; the 'Universal' bit has become anything but! Packing for a touring trip, especially to a country using different plugs to ours, has tended therefore to include having to work out the best permutation of plugs for the tasks required. They become the sort of 'bogey item' that serves to fill your panniers by stealth, in terms of weight and cube. Being pointy and not tessellating makes it worse!

It was as I was looking for another battery pack for our trip to Brittany in the summer that I discovered a stroke of genius, in the form of the Anker Powerport 5, which by the power of Amazon Prime showed up the night before we left. It worked a treat.

iPhone, iPad, two GoPro batteries and a pair of 20,000Ah battery packs. One socket!

At the time of writing, you give Amazon £18 (the penny's price rhetoric) and they give you a five outlet USB charger, which automatically tailors the output of each port to the device it is charging, so you can plug a USB lead for anything into it and charge it as fast as the device can handle. The unit is capable of supplying up to 2.4A to any single port, up to a total of 8A across all five. With the right USB lead, everything is catered for - indeed, you can also use it to charge your USB battery pack whilst topping off the devices themselves. Doing all this with one mains plug makes it much easier to take advantage of mains electricity wherever you find it on your travels - on public transport, in hostels and private homes, eateries... You only need one socket and you're in business, still only drawing 1.1A from the mains.

Not only is the PowerPort 5 efficient to use, but in replacing multiple plugs it takes up less space and potentially weight in your bag, and if you're going abroad, one plug means far fewer mains convertors you'll need, too. In our case we took a Continental 'Figure of 8' C7 lead with us to France, which was very handy.

The weight savings are not enormous. Ignoring the USB leads (the common element), I weighed a few chargers:

Five into one...

Smatree adaptor for GoPro charger (Twin 5v output, 2.1A total): 97g

Apple 10W iPad adaptor (5.1v, 2.1A output): 92g

Apple iPhone adaptor (5v, 1A output): 43g

Amazon Kindle adaptor (5v, 1.8A output): 70g

The PowerPoint weighs in at 255g with a UK mains lead, but is much, much easier to pack. If you are going to need socket adaptors, the savings are naturally much greater.

'Do you mind if I plug in my charger' is a lot more likely to be a successful request than 'Do you have five sockets I might use, please?'. Being able to charge multiple devices quickly and without fuss dramatically increases the prospects of success. Fewer items to carry, easier to pack, the prospect of cube and a little weight saved, it 'just works', and the Anker build quality is supported by a decent warranty and Amazon's customer reviews for the product are very strong indeed.

We have no connection with Anker other than as satisfied purchasers of this and other products; the first thing we did when we got back from France was to order a second one. Highly recommended.

Power is everything

"Power is everything" - so goes the quote from 'Apollo 13'. Much of today is about power, as we prepare to set off.

I used to be a motorsports photographer - oddly enough, one who didn't drive a car and cycled all over the place to photograph people who did! Photography is important to me and all the more to us as a family because of the very limited time we get to spend with Thomas Ivor. As such, we are in the business of creating and recording memories that will encourage and inspire him.

Inescapably, trying to take pictures and film, whilst using modern technology to navigate and sometimes to entertain the residents of the trailer, all uses power. We take it for granted at home and yet when we're on the road, whilst not life-or-death, it does become a preoccupation when battery levels are running low. We are always on the lookout for the next socket, and rationing our usage to match our charging expectations. Depending on the circumstances, it swaps places with food in the hierarchy of needs!

Hub dynamos would be nice, but putting out maybe 500mA and only whilst travelling at a decent pace, isn't enough on its own. Solar chargers are a lovely idea, but they do seem a bit of a faff and very expensive. I keep looking at them but I've yet to be totally convinced.

Last summer, we made it through the Hebrides with just one 15,000mAh battery pack, which takes all night to charge on a 2 amp charger. We also had the benefit of being able to use all our regular chargers without adaptors.

This time, we want to shoot more film, and with a DSLR rather than a separate video camera. I've bought some more GoPro batteries and a twin charger, which will daisy-chain off the camera battery charger, for which I found a continental mains lead in our household's 'box of random cables that came with various things and might come in handy one day'. Meantime, I'm waiting on two important items from Amazon - a 20,000mAh battery, and a 40 Watt, 5 gang USB charger, so that our other USB-charged devices can be hooked up to a single socket and juiced up as the opportunity arises.

It sounds like a lot, and it may even look like it as Ruth and Rhoda sagely survey the tech stuff before it is packed away into various places on our bikes, but we've managed to slim the weight down significantly from previous trips whilst still having some useful fire-power, and if Amazon Prime is as good as it usually is, before long I will have some confidence that we can last the distance!

Meantime, I am working on navigation, which these days is intrinsically linked with power, too. At Darren Alff's suggestion, we are going to run Maps.Me on our iOS devices, with GPX data hacked from Google Maps in there, and also on Cyclemeter, which is my weapon of choice when out riding.

Some accommodation to tie up at the end of the trip, which has got a little messy, but we're getting there. It looks like Katie and I can celebrate our wedding anniversary tonight by finishing off the packing of the panniers, and we can get this show on the road.

Come on, Mr Amazon Prime. Let's have that knock on the door, and I can breathe easy...