For others trying to find how many charges you actually get from power banks, because it turned out to be not that easy to find, especially with all these variables (see below) and a lot of misleading comments/posts/review from people who are mistaken. Sharing is caring, so please add your devices in comments.
Some thoughts for other lurkers:
- Amper-hours depend on voltage, so 20000mAh (why not 20Ah, god damn marketing and our monkey brains) might differ from power bank to another.
- Watt-hours (Wh) might also be a lie, according to some reviewer even known brands might sin.
- On top you have conversion loss 80-90% roughly speaking.
I bought INIU 20000mah 65w mini P62-E1 for ~50$. It says it is 73Wh. I got exactly one charge 0-100% for my Steam Deck OLED (50Wh) while it being off.
It was as fast as wall charger and thing is small and weights 320g, which is perfect for me. Also design/surface is above what I expected. Included cable is crap and does not support 65w charging, don’t ask me why. Steam deck will on repeat go full charging and then stop with that cable. I can recommend it I guess, but for sure there is something better, depends on discounts, too.
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Few things:
The Deck can’t support 65W charging either. It prefers, and maxes out, at a 45W charge, specifically 15V@3A. It can charge using 12/9/5V standards as well, but obviously does so slower.
5V charging is only recommended while the deck is off/sleeping as there is a batch with bad charging chips that can overheat and burn out otherwise (as it has to boost the 5V up to 7.4V and above for the battery)Slower chargers still work even while gaming - they just extend the time it takes to drain.
If a powebank advertises mAh, it’s using the nominal voltage of a single lithium cell, 3.6 or 3.7V. If they use Wh (and aren’t blatant scams), then that’s the only thing that matters. What you get out is always less, due to the conversion losses.
LCD has a 40Wh battery, OLED has 50Wh. Get at least 20% more if you truly want a full charge.
The deck has power passthrough, once it’s full it uses the charger only. Sometimes this means it “refuses” to charge to 100% and instead stops just shy, that’s kinda normal.
I have this Baseus power bank, which is supposed to have 74 watt-hours. The top review did some testing, and got 62 watt-hours out of it, which is about 83% efficiency.
I’ve been pretty happy with it so far. It also shows what voltage/amperage it’s charging at, which is handy for identifying bad cables.
What is the typical power consumption of the steamdeck when in use? If you wanted to get an approximation as to how long a battery would last for. Also how much is efficiency likely to matter? If it was 30W and you had a 30Wh battery how likely is a 1 hour lifespan going to be? Would efficiency just be a rounding error or something like cut in half.
I have a beefier version by that same brand. It’s somehow on sale almost all the time on Amazon. It works fine, the glossy finish of that screen is super dumb because you basically have to consciously put the cable on the back side of the power bank or it’ll scratch the screen like crazy.
Saving this, thank you for the recommendation. Usually the decks battery is fine for a mid distance flight, but some of the longer ones I find myself being tethered to seat power, which usually is a loose outlet that the plug regularly falls out of. Having a second charge would … well, take me twice the distance
I’ve had the issue with the plug falling out, actually bonked my Deck’s screen and cracked the protector while I was fishing headphones out of a bag on a flight.
I use a cable with a 90 degree tip and found that, for the outlets that are on the seat, I can attach the cable to the tray arm with a Clove Hitch to help the plug stay put and catch it if it falls.
why not 20Ah
Because when you get to smaller batteries, you’re going to get into fractions and that doesn’t look good/right for our monkey brains. lol
