Lazy Daze Owners' Group

I don't see these as cost-effective for most people. Look at the specs. Even if your plan is to charge the Yeti battery pack at home and then take it on a short camping trip, It takes 25 hours to charge with their 5 A wall charger. Once you're out boondocking and need to use their 100 W solar panel, they say recharging will take 28 - 56 hours (and you can bet they are being optimistic). By the way, their solar charge controller is PWM, not MPPT, so you'll be wasting a significant portion of the power from that solar panel.

Let's break down what you're getting: 100 watts of solar power, about 110 amp-hours of lithium battery at 12 VDC, and a 1,500 watt pure sine inverter, plus a few USB charging outlets. The battery is in a 44-pound box with handles, and the solar panel is another 26 pounds (for 100 watts? Sheesh! Most 100 W panels weigh 15-17 pounds.). You pay $2,100 for this outfit.

Let's match these specs with separately purchased components. Renogy 100 W "Compact Design" solar panel: $98. Battle Born 100 Ah lithium (LiFePO4) battery: $949. Victron 75/15 MPPT solar controller: $115. 1,500 W pure sine inverter w/ cables and fuse: $268. USB charging adapters: a dime a dozen.

That's $1,430 total, or two thirds of the Yeti system's cost. Now, I'll be the first to admit this isn't strictly apples to apples. You don't get a suitcase powerpack and a suitcase solar panel. But I put forth these numbers to show how much of a premium you're paying for Goal Zero to put it all in a box with handles. In fact, if you went to an AGM battery instead of a LiFePO4 battery, the cost would drop to $827, or a little more than a third of the Yeti system's cost. The AGM battery weighs 65 pounds, so it would no longer be a portable system, but if you could find a place to stash the battery in your Pleasure-Way, you might not care.

So... now let me ask the question that I should have asked in the first place: what are your intended uses? How long do you expect to be dry-camping at a stretch?  What kinds of devices will you need to power while you're boondocking?

Some things to think about:

A hundred amp-hours of lithium battery means about 80 Ah of usable power. Is that enough?

Do you really need that big inverter? 1,500 watts sound great until you consider that that's over 100 amps when used at full power (e.g, to run a portable water distiller). Your battery won't last very long at that rate. And if you're just going to run a CPAP, Water Pik, MacBook charger, etc., you don't need more than a couple hundred watts. A smaller inverter will be more efficient when idling.

Perhaps most important, do you really need this outfit to be hand-carryable... or would it make more sense to beef up the Pleasure-Way's 12 VDC system instead? That way you'd have only one system to manage instead of two. If your rig's house batteries get too low, you can't just power its outlets from the Yeti powerpack, so things will get awkward.

I understand that an off-the-shelf portable system like the Yeti 1400 is appealing in its simplicity. But in return, you'll pay a high price, and you'll have to juggle two separate electrical systems.