TESTED: Dometic PLB 40

Editor’s Note:  This article was updated on 2/10/2020 to include cold weather testing, as requested by our members.  Find it below.  -Chad

Dometic’s PLB 40 is a truly plug and play portable battery solution that allows anyone to have a dual battery system in any vehicle.  That’s right – no custom wiring or additional purchases required.  As long as you have a 12V outlet in your rig that can supply 100W, you can plug in the PLB 40 and enjoy an additional 40 Amp-Hours of power that can be used to power whatever you want.  This means that you can power 12 V cigarette-style devices like an electric cooler, your USB devices, and two-pin 12V appliances without pulling from your vehicle’s starting battery.

Dometic certainly isn’t the first company to make a portable battery, but the ease of use and a few electric cooler-specific optimizations to the PLB 40 make it a great choice for folks who want to be able to use their electric coolers in just about any vehicle, or have a versatile supply of power in anywhere they may need it.

The number one reason I hear from folks against getting an electric cooler is that they don’t want to have to deal with wiring in a second battery or a adding a dedicated circuit for their electric cooler.  While a second battery certainly isn’t required to run an electric cooler in a vehicle, having a constant supply of power is.  Since most vehicles have all of their 12V circuits switched by the ignition (for obvious reasons), adding a non-switched circuit has been the minimum effort required to keep an electric cooler powered up when your vehicle is not running.  A switched circuit, a quality battery, and utilizing the low voltage cutoff on your electric cooler will work, but you’re still limited in how long you can stay out by the capacity of your starting battery.  Yet, by adding a PLB 40 to your system, you don’t have to touch your vehicle’s wiring, and you’re able to add a considerable power reserve.

Literally all it takes to use the PLB 40 to power an electric cooler is to plug it into a 12V outlet on the vehicle and to plug your electric cooler into to the PLB40.  The end.

It’s really that simple.  While the vehicle is on, the PLB 40 charges up, and once the vehicle is parked, the PLB 40 becomes the power supply for your cooler and anything else you want to plug in, leaving your vehicle’s starting battery topped off.  The PLB 40 means that you can run an electric cooler in any vehicle that has a 12V outlet, so whether you’re traveling in your buddy’s rig, or even a rental car, the PLB 40 lets you bring all of the benefits of an electric cooler into any car with a 12 V outlet.  Want to use your fridge in the wife’s car for a grocery run on a hot day? Add a PLB 40 and you’re all set.  No need to worry about groceries spoiling in the back of a hot car while you’re running errands.

If you’re wondering how long 40 Amp Hours lasts, the answer is – it depends.  The size of your electric cooler, how efficient it is, how hot the environment is, and how much you’re getting into your cooler, and what you’re putting into your cooler are all things that will impact the runtime you’ll see from the PLB 40.  Dometic advertises 40 hours of runtime when powering a CFX 40 electric cooler for a baseline reference.  I’ve been running my PLB 40 with my CFX 75 DZW and as you would expect that with nearly twice the volume of the CFX 40, my runtimes are considerably shorter.  I’m also typically running one compartment as a freezer, which requires even more power than a refrigerator temperature setting.

All that being said, PLB 40 is able to keep my Dometic CFX 75 powered up without being replenished for at least 24 hours.  If you know the average draw of whatever you want to power, doing the Amp-Hour math is pretty easy, just divide 40 Ah by your total draw.  If I’m going to be in the same place for longer, I’ll plug in a solar panel to the back of the PLB 40 using the Anderson SB 50 port, or I’ll plug the PLB 40 into an always energized 12v outlet in one of my trucks.  The PLB 40 also accepts AC charging, so if your destination for the night is a hotel or someplace with grid power, you can charge the battery from a 120V source so it’s ready to go in the morning.

The charge controller on the PLB 40 will continue to accept DC input all the way down to 8 VDC, so if you have your PLB 40 drawing from your rig’s starting battery through an always-energized circuit, make sure that you’re keeping an eye on your starting battery’s voltage.  Depending on how large your vehicle’s starting battery is, pulling 30 + Ah from it could make quite a dent in your starting battery, and it’s ability to crank your rig over.   Having a jump start battery with you is also always a good call.  Dometic has this 8 VDC cutoff in place to allow for solar charging the Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery in the PLB 40.  This LiFePO4 battery has a couple of advantages over other types of Lithium batteries found in other portable batteries, namely an increased lifespan and the chemistry is more stable (safe) than other lithium designs.  Being powered by a lithium battery also means that the PLB 40 is lightweight, and very portable.

The PLB 40 is so easy to move around thanks to its beefy top handle, that you’ll find yourself using it all the time, and you’ll never have to convince yourself to go lug your battery around.   Tipping the scales to just past 16 pounds, the PLB can easily be moved anywhere it’s needed by almost anyone.  Not only it is lightweight, but it has a small footprint that’s less than eight inches on a side, so it can be stashed in all kinds of places where power is needed.

This size and weight opens doors for how this thing can be used.  No power outlets in reach of the kid’s seats in the family hauler?  Stick the PLB with the kids, and let them run their devices for the entire duration of your drive (if that’s your thing).  Need power someplace in camp that’s not your rig?  Grab your PLB.  Hosting a BBQ in the backyard, and want to use your electric cooler for easy to access beverages, but don’t feel like dealing with all of the extension cords? You get the idea.  If you’ve been lugging around other battery battery boxes where you supply a car battery – you need to experience the PLB’s size and portability. It’s a game changer.

That ease of use however, does come with a price tag and the PLB 40 isn’t cheap.  Googling the PLB at the time of this writing turns up prices from $765 USD, and up.  With that money, you’re in striking distance of other solutions out there, so just make sure that you’re getting the product solution that best meets your needs.  If you’re shopping the PLB 40 against other portable batteries, Dometic has this handy chart that helps potential customers assess the return on investment of a PLB 40 vs. other popular options:

Speaking of value, it would be awesome to see Dometic offer a version of the PLB 40 that had two 12 V cigarette-style ports instead of one 12 V cigarette and one 12 V two-pin.  Or at least a two-pin to cigarette-style dongle with the current PLB 40.  If you’ve ever unscrewed the 12 V plug from your Dometic electric cooler, you’ve no doubt discovered the two-pin connector hidden inside, but I have far more 12 V cigarette style devices than two-pin devices, so it would be nice to have the added flexibility of 2 cigarette-style ports.  The one redeeming part of the 2-pin connectors is that they screw in, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally knocking your plug out.  Depending on how you pack your rig however, this may be a clutch feature or it may not make that much difference for you.  A screw in connection definitely adds piece of mind, but I have yet to knock out a 12 V cigarette style plug – and I’m probably jinxing myself by saying that.

Yet, for a plug and play, as easy as it gets, “I just want the thing to work”, you can’t go wrong with the PLB 40.  Other solutions are going to require purchasing other chargers, adjusting cut-offs, or taking other steps to get the function that the PLB 40 comes with out of the box – and it’s just so nice to just be able to plug two things in and go.

Dometic’s PLB 40 is a pretty awesome piece of technology.  Based on conversations I’ve had with other folks who’ve shelled out for one, it’s been exactly the thing that they were looking for to be able to get into the electric fridge game, and they couldn’t be happier.  It doesn’t have all of the outputs that other portable batteries have, but it’s true plug and play functionality, portability, and reliable performance make it any easy choice for folks who don’t want to touch their vehicle wiring to be able to run an electric cooler.

The PLB 40 hasn’t missed a beat in my use, which has included multiple trips to Phoenix in the middle of summer.  Even when the unit was well heat-soaked with a surface temperature that meant the unit would start to experience diminished performance, the PLB 40 didn’t slow down or indicate on it’s display that it was getting too hot.  It’s small size and weight means that you can actually take the unit to just about anywhere you need power, and the PLB 40 is flexible enough to power all kinds of DC and USB powered devices.

Cold Weather Testing:

It’s important to set the stage when it comes to talking about battery performance in cold weather.  Most folks figure that cold weather will severely impact the performance of their batteries, based on past experiences starting (or attempting to start) a vehicle in cold weather with a Lead-Acid or other common car battery chemistries.  When you attempt to start a vehicle in the cold, your vehicle’s starter needs hundreds of amps from your battery to crank a cold motor over, and at lower temperatures the chemistry of a given battery cannot provide as much current as it can when it’s warm.  This is the exact reason that there is a Cold Cranking Amps (CCA) spec on vehicle batteries.  When it comes to a high current load, you’ll absolutely notice a difference in battery performance when it’s cold out.

Powering an electric cooler in cold weather is completely different, as an electric cooler is only going to pull a couple of amps or less, no matter how cold it is outside.  Plus, the colder the outside temperature is, the lower the temperature difference is between the compartment(s) of your electric cooler and outside, which means that your cooler’s compressor is going to have to run less often to keep your electric cooler temps where you want them. This means less energy is required from your battery.  In my testing, I was able to get longer run times out of a PLB 40 with temps near freezing than I was when temps were in the 70’s, and I attribute this to the compressor running less often.

To quantify exactly what kind of difference temperature has on the PLB 40, I ran two tests.  In the first test, I used the PLB 40 at 70 degrees F, and applied a constant load of 100 watts, which I pulled through a power meter to see how many kilowatt-hours I could get out of the battery before it hit 50% state-of-charge.  I then repeated this experiment with the PLB 40 being cold-soaked and held at 32 degrees F.  The warm battery was able to provide a few hundreths of a kilowatt-hour more power before hitting 50% state-of-charge.  So yes, the the cold does impact the power output of the PLB 40, but the devices that you’re most likely powering with a PLB 40 don’t pull enough current and will require less energy when it’s cold out, so the difference will come out in the wash.

The PLB’s LiFePO4 battery will hold up to thousands of charging cycles, which means that you can have that many adventures fueled by whatever awesome stuff you can keep in your electric cooler.  If you’ve been looking for that missing link in the power supply chain for an electric cooler, or for charging media devices or drone batteries, the PLB 40 is definitely worth checking out.

Full Disclosure: Dometic provided a sample PLB 40 at no charge to the author for the purposes of this review.

LTR: Goal Zero Lithium Yeti 1400 and Boulder 100 Solar Briefcase

Goal Zero knows a thing or two about powering gear in the field.  From backpacking-friendly solar panels that can keep your phone topped off on a through-hike, to much larger solar panels and batteries that can run Hollywood-caliber film productions in the bottom of the Grand Canyon for 21 days, the Goal Zero ecosystem can power all of the things.  I’ve been using their Lead-Acid AGM-powered Yeti Portable Power Stations for years, so when Goal Zero released a line of Yetis with Lithium-Ion Nickel-Manganeese-Cobalt (NMC) batteries, I had to get my hands on one and put it though a long-term test to see how it compared to the OG Yeti’s that have proven themselves with me.  To round out the test, I also got a Boulder 100 Solar Briefcase to harvest the sun for the new Yeti.

Meet the Lithium Yetis

The Lithium Yetis are available in four sizes, with the 1400 being the second largest battery behind the Lithium Yeti 3000.  The Lithium Yeti 1400 packs 1,425 Watt Hours (Wh) into a unit that weighs 43.7 pounds, which is less than half the weight of the Lead Acid-powered Yeti 1250 (1,200 Wh) that weighs 103 pounds.  Power outputs on the 1400 are: a two-outlet 120V pure sine wave AC inverter rated at 1500 W (3000 W surge), a 12V 10Amp car-style (cigarette-style) port, two 6mm ports at 10 Amps, a Power Pole port at 20 Amps, and four 2.4 Amp USB ports.  Goal Zero has since revised the Lithium Yet 1400 and 3000, adding Wi-Fi connectivity that will allow you to remotely monitor your Yeti with the Goal Zero app, and reconfigured the USB ports – you now get a USB-PD (Power Delivery), a USB-C at3.0 Amps, and two USB-A ports at 2.4 Amps.  In other words, the Lithium Yeti can charge all kinds of things in the field.  But enough tech-talk, lets discuss how the thing actually works.

Bring the Power

Bringing a Lithium Yeti 1400 Portable Power Station with you on your adventures is almost like bringing the power grid with you.  So don’t be surprised if you find yourself thinking about powered gadgets not on the “needed” ended of the spectrum, but on the “wouldn’t it be fun if” end of things.  Case in point, this big bad Yeti can run your Margaritaville blender, or other AC-powered gadgets that might make consumer grade cigarette lighter style DC-AC inverters emit magic smoke.  The pure sine wave inverter also means that sensitive electronics can safely be run from the Yeti’s AC outlets.  (Just remember to do the energy math before you hit the switch – running a 1500 Watt appliance will use power quickly.)  For those of us not trying out for Overland Bartender of the Year, the Yeti 1400 will handle days of recharging your essentials like a phone, comms, GPS, and camera batteries, while still having the power on tap to keep a fridge cold throughout your trip.

The Yeti 1400 can also be moved around easily thanks to it’s very manageable weight, so bringing the unit into your tent, out to a table, or really anywhere you need power isn’t a major hassle, or a team lifting exercise.  Once you have the Yeti where you want it, the spectrum of power outlets allows you to power so many different things.  Modern USB standards enable phones and other devices to charge just like they would with their factory chargers, which means more time using gear and less time charging in the field.  From charging power tool batteries for that backcountry cabin you’re working on, to running mission-critical equipment as a first responder, or keeping the lights on at an aid station for an Ultra – the Yeti can bring the power reserves, and the power outputs you need to run your equipment. Anywhere.

Even when you’re at home and the power goes out for an extended period of time, the Yeti can power appliances around the house.  Goal Zero has even taken this concept a step further with a dedicated add-on breaker panel for your house which will allow your Yeti to supply power directly to your home breaker panel – so you don’t have to drag the fridge out to keep it powered up when the grid goes down. This is an impressive feature that adds unique value to this unit.

Harvest the Sun

Recharging the Yeti 1400 can be done from either an AC power source or from the Sun using a number of different Goal Zero solar panels, and I’ve been using the Boulder 100 Solar Briefcase to keep the Yeti 1400 powered up while I’m out in the field.  The Briefcase part means that the panel is actually two 50 Watt panels that fold up back-to-back which reduces the footprint of the panel when stored.  Setting up the Boulder 100 Solar Briefcase can be done in a matter of seconds, and I’ve really come to appreciate the legs on the panel that help me get a better angle to the sun as opposed to having to constantly hunt for something to lean the panel up against, like I watch many of the folks I travel with having to do.  The free-standing ability of the panel really helps when you’re trying to collect every last Watt possible from the sun, as you can simply turn the panel to track the sun across the sky, as opposed to having to constantly adjust your support like you would with a other panels.

Another thing that I really appreciate about Goal Zero is that their products are designed to work together in as many ways as possible.  We’ve all run into a situation where a given cable is too short, which is why I always make sure that I’ve got an 8mm extension cable with me in the field.  This way, I can put the Boulder 100 where it is going to get the best sun exposure, and I can keep my Yeti wherever I happen to be using it, instead of having to move closer to the panel.  Goal Zero also makes a 12 V battery charger called the Guardian, which turns your solar panel into a lead acid battery charger that works great for keeping your vehicle batteries topped up if you’re going to be parked for a few days, or keeping the battery in your boat or other toy ready to go.

Gear That’s Grand Canyon Rated

The Grand Canyon is a wonderful place to destroy gear.  Cameras, electronics, even analog items like life jackets, cam straps, and boats all suffer serious wear and tear in this environment.  Here you’ll find some of the biggest whitewater in North America combined, with sand that gets into everything, and wind that can reshape an entire beach in a few hours… You get the idea.  Despite this challenging environment, Goal Zero equipment has held up to multiple trips and been our mission critical system for powering cameras, hard drives, and laptops used on our film expeditions.  Our production boat uses six Boulder 90 (older generation panels) solar panels piped into two Yeti 1250s, each of which has additional deep cycle batteries chained in, giving our productions thousands of Watt Hours to use (chaining in additional battery capacity is a feature of the Yeti 1250).  This setup has handled multiple river trips in the Grand Canyon without so much as a hiccup, so I’m sold on this gear holding up to real adventure use.

So What’s The Catch?

The Lithium Yeti 1400 and the Boulder 100 Solar Briefcase are both awesome pieces of gear.  The Yeti is like the battery equivalent of a swiss army knife or your favorite multi-tool – it can do so many things and will last you for a long time.  From powering your house when the power goes out to keeping almost anything powered up in the field, the Yeti is an incredibly powerful piece of gear that’s well complimented by the Boulder 100 solar panel for general use.  Yet, the biggest pain point for folks looking to pick these items up is the price.  The Yeti 1400 will set you back $1800 USD, and the Boulder 100 Briefcase is $300 USD.  The Boulder 100 Briefcase can also be somewhat tedious to fold up, as you need to ensure that the latch loops stay up and out from between the two panels, and that the cables don’t go where they can get pinched.  However, with a bit of practice checking for these things when stowing the panel will become automatic, so they’re certainly not a deal breaker.

The Bottom Line

Buying into the Goal Zero ecosystem with a Lithium Yeti 1400 Portable Power Station and a Boulder 100 Solar Briefcase is an investment that will provide some very dynamic and long-lived utility.  The Lithium Yetis harness the increased energy density of the Li-Ion NMC battery chemistry to provide power outputs that let you run all kinds of devices and appliances in the field.  The Boulder 100 is a great option for keeping the Yeti topped up in the field, or when paired with the Guardian to keep your rig or your other toys ready to go.  Goal Zero’s product ecosystem allows products of different generations and capacities to work together, meaning that nearly any Goal Zero solar panel with an 8mm plug can be used to charge the Yeti 1400, which is a huge value add.  (More on product selection to follow.)

From a basic single power station and panel setup to a complex multi panel, multi Yeti power system, Goal Zero’s products can be configured to meet almost any power need you can come up with.  These same products have held up to Grand Canyon backcountry and River trips, and thousands of miles driven all over North America.  They’ve reliably charged hundreds of camera batteries, drone batteries, and V-Lock batteries, powered laptops and hard drives, charged and run power tools, kept the lights on at remote aid stations, and of course a house and a Margaritaville once in a blue Moon.  As folks continue to bring more and more battery powered gadgets into the field, power and charging needs will only increase, and Goal Zero’s Lithium Yetis and Boulder Solar panels are hard to beat for meeting that need.

A Word On Product Selection

The first step in choosing the right size Yeti and panels is taking an honest look at what your power needs really are.  If you have lighter power needs when you’re in the field, a Boulder 100 and maybe a Yeti 1000 will do the trick for you.  Yet if you’re like me and unable to escape technology, going for a bigger panel such as a Boulder 200, or having multiple panels feeding a larger Yeti (1400 or 3000) will help prevent you from outrunning your power supply.  Doing the math is easy, so take a few minutes to outline what gear you’re going to charge, and how often you’re going to charge it (or run it constantly, like a fridge), and how you’re going to recharge your system to get an idea of what you really need.  Take comfort in the fact that if your needs grow, you can simply add more charging capacity in the form of more panels to keep up with increased energy demands.

Full Disclosure:

American Adventurist nor the author were paid for the contents of this article.  Goal Zero provided the Yeti 1400 and Boulder 100 Briefcase for review.  All other products are owned by the author.