Review: EcoFlow Delta 2 joins power back-up options for load-shedding:
Portable power stations suitable for camping and the outdoors have grown in popularity over the past couple of years as rolling blackouts intensified. There’s no shortage of brands available, including Jackery, Gizzu, Power4Less, Bluetti, and Magneto.
Earlier this month, EcoFlow officially launched in South Africa with three new models. Previously, the brand was available through distributors, with international plug points, so an adaptor was needed to use their products in this country.
EcoFlow is now selling portable power stations equipped with South African plug points, has a support channel and plans to open an office in Waterfall City, Gauteng.
Its range includes: the River 2 with a 300W output and 256Wh capacity; the River 2 Max with 500W output and 512Wh capacity and the high-end Delta 2.
The Mail & Guardian reviewed the Delta 2, with a 1 024Wh/1kWh battery capacity, which can be expanded up to 3kWh, and has a total output of 1 800W (pure sine wave), but through its X-Boost mode, goes up to 2 400W.
The units have high-capacity lithium-ion phosphate batteries, which the company says last up to 3 000 full charge cycles until they hit 80% capacity. It has four USB-A ports with two fast-charging ones; two 100W USB-C fast-charging ports; two three-pin plug points; two two-pin plugs and a 12V car charging port. It also supports Bluetooth and wi-fi connections — and you can pair the app to it.
The unit itself can be recharged from a wall socket, through a car’s 12V connector, or with solar panels, available separately. Inside the box, you get the portable battery, an AC charging cable, a car charging cable, a user manual, a warranty card and an app starter guide.
EcoFlow boldly states that the Delta 2 and River 2 series have the “fastest charging speed in the industry”. This means it will be fully recharged to 100% in less than two hours, using its X-Stream fast-charging capabilities.
I put this to the test. When I received the unit, it had 30% power and, within 55 minutes, it had recharged to 100%. For the purpose of testing, I drained it to 1% (although it is not recommended to drain a lithium-ion battery to flat if you want to prolong its life), and within 50 minutes it had recharged to 80%, getting to 100% in 80 minutes.
The LCD screen is pretty accurate with its estimates of when the battery will be charged to 100%. Being able to recharge a 1kWh battery in less than 2 hours is ideal for stage six rolling blackouts because it ensures it can be fully charged before the next cut.
I tested a few appliances with the Delta 2, including a 1 100W hair dryer that used 9% of the battery, and then a more powerful 1 600W hair dryer that used 4% of the battery — because my hair dried faster.
I also did multiple loads of laundry in a washing machine. For a quick-30 load with extra spin, which took 37 minutes to do a cycle, it used 9% of the battery, consistently for all loads.
You can also see the number of watts being used in real time via the LCD display.
I also plugged it into my 65” 4K TV for 30 minutes and it used 10% of power. With my 850W microwave plugged in, it used 2% of the battery for heating up food in 1 minute.
I connected it to an air conditioner for 30 minutes and it went from 46% down to 1%. I wouldn’t do this again, though. Using a battery-powered fan would be more economical in the heat.
I didn’t test appliances such as a kettle and an airfryer because of how much power they would draw. However, using the 1 800W as a guideline will help you decide what you can connect to it.
Linking the app to the Delta 2 unit is straightforward, however, I used the battery as a portable one, so monitoring it didn’t really help me. But, if you have it wired to your DB board, you might be interested in monitoring those stats. I have a solar set-up wired to my house and therefore couldn’t connect the Delta 2 to it.
The dashboard will provide additional info once linked to a DB board, such as power from the grid or back-up power, and options for which rooms to switch to the battery back-up when there is no power.
The app is useful if you want to change the max 1 200W charging speed, and it calculates how long it will take to recharge if reduced. It can also adjust the car input from 4/6/8A, and lets you choose the charge and discharge levels.
You can set the auto-timeout levels on the app between 30 minutes and 24 hours and in between, or never, including a screen timeout, AC timeout and 12V DC timeout. The app displays all the specifications for the unit so you don’t need to refer to the manual.
The Delta 2 is portable and weighs about 12kg. It has built-in grips on either side, so you can carry it around. The unit is pricey at R24 999.
It might be most suitable for those who are renting and cannot make permanent changes to the property or for those living in smaller apartments in developments that don’t allow generators or solar installations.
Considering the price, you need to weigh up what’s important to you. If it’s portability and being able to recharge it in the shortest amount of time before the next power cut — under two hours is tough to beat — then this is for you.
EcoFlow offers a five-year warranty on the unit.
The Delta 2 can be purchased directly on the EcoFlow website.
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Cities are key to tackling climate change:
The Earth has become a “planet of cities” that are hotspots of climate impacts but are also a huge opportunity for ambitious climate action, said a leading climate scientist.
“Cities concentrate people, power and resources and if you want a global change and we do need a global change rapidly, that’s where you need to act,” said Debra Roberts, co-chair of the Working Group II of the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Africa is on the front lines of climate change. It has been a largely rural continent, but 60% of its population will be living in cities by 2050. She said it was the most rapidly urbanising continent “so if you’re going to see society as a course for change and all those levers for change exist in your urban areas, that’s where you need to get active because that’s where you have the greatest ripple effects”.
Roberts, the acting head of the sustainable and resilient city initiatives unit at the eThekwini municipality and its chief resilience officer, recently spoke to the Mail & Guardian. She is the South African candidate for the chairpersonship of the IPCC during its seventh assessment cycle.
Changing a city means changing everything it connects to. “Certainly, in our Working Group II report, we pointed out that although urban areas only occupy this really small percentage of the global surface … urban activities and related infrastructure consumption impacts on all of the related ecosystem services and non-urban communities.”
Although cities can be part of the solution, they are also an obvious part of the problem. Globally, they account for about 70% of carbon emissions. “If you look at consumption and production, two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions come from urban areas, so that’s where we need to act.”
In building climate-resilient cities, the equity and justice element can’t be lost, Roberts said. “Many of the big cities are in developing parts of the world, the global south, and there’s a real need to ensure people have access to basic services. There’s an opportunity to drive multiple development agendas in urban areas.”
Last week, the IPCC released its latest Synthesis Report on the climate crisis, which summarises five years of reports on global temperature rises, fossil fuel emissions and climate impacts. It found that human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have caused global warming, with global surface temperature increase now reaching 1.1°C.
Without drastic and immediate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, global warming may breach the agreed 1.5°C limit before 2035. Current climate policies put the world on track for 3.2°C of warming by 2100, the report said.
In urban settings, climate change has caused adverse effects on human health, livelihoods and key infrastructure. Hot extremes, including heatwaves, have intensified in cities, where they have also worsened air pollution events and limited functioning of key infrastructure. Urban infrastructure, including transportation, water, sanitation and energy systems have been compromised by extreme and slow-onset events, with resulting economic losses, disruptions of services and impacts to well-being.”
The effects are concentrated among economically and socially marginalised urban residents, for example, those living in informal settlements, the report said.
In the near term, at 1.5°C global warming, the principal hazards and risks are more intense and frequent extreme rainfall and associated flooding in many regions including coastal and other low-lying cities, and increased proportion of and peak wind speeds of intense tropical cyclones.
Urban systems, the report said, are critical for reducing emissions and climate resilience.
The biggest challenge of the moment, Roberts said, is that climate and development can no longer be kept separate. “Every individual, household, community, business and industry has to be asking the climate question of everything they do, if we’re to affect the kind of turnaround that is needed.
“So when you put a pipe in the ground, where is it going? How close is it to a river that might flood during a storm surge or an unstable slope that may collapse during heavy rainfalls? We need to be doing that and we need to build the capacity for our service providers to do that.”
The Climate Change Bill legalises the requirement of local government to engage in climate change, she said. “At the moment, it’s an elective thing for local government. You pick it up if you have the vision and resources to do so but it’s not an obligation. You’ve got to structure it in, use the tools of government to say this is so important.”
And local government officials need to be made “less scared of science”, she said. “Somehow science is this threatening thing … and science bears a responsibility for that because we talk in acronyms and produce graphs that no one can ever understand.
“We need to do a lot more work in making that science available and accessible to people who need to use it, who don’t have the time to go away and do a four-year degree to be able to understand a 3?000-page report that you’ve just produced.
“We need that capacity building within the cadre of people who are the doers to pick up the science … to enable that transition of their knowledge. We all hold different knowledge and we need to let that flow in a two-way form from science to [local government] practitioners but back from practitioners to science so the scientists also need to be open to hearing these different forms of knowledge.”
This is the decade of action, she noted, describing how the burdens or benefits of decisions being taken now will be carried by future generations.
Said Roberts: “We’re literally beginning to make choices on behalf of people who are either new to the world or who haven’t entered it, which is an enormous responsibility.”
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