 Off-grid living is becoming more and more popular as both a way to combat the rising cost of housing and to clock out of this increasingly connected world. And if it's just for a little bit. But sometimes you need technology to get away from technology. So when Jackery reached out to sponsor this video featuring their Explorer line of power stations, my writer Colin immediately thought of his friend Morgan. He's a photographer who's been living that van life in a ski resort parking lot for about a year now with some serious tech deficiencies. So we're going to drop a tech bomb on his van and bring his mobile editing rig slash living accommodations into the 21st century. And we're going to learn a little something about van living while we're at it. First things first, this is the star of the show. The Jackery Explorer 1500. This little machine is absolutely stuffed with genuine Panasonic 18650 cells just like these ones, 130 of them to be precise. That means there is a veritable buttload of power crammed into this package, slightly under 1500 watt hours. And these 110 volt AC outlets are honestly they're just insane. We took the little brother of this, the Explorer 1000 and hooked up an RTX gaming rig and HDR monitor and filming lights all at once. As for the Explorer 1500, it'll do 1800 watts of sustained load and up to 3600 watts of peak load. So toast, no problem. Blended avocado for your toast. Kind of awful sounding. I prefer sliced, but theoretically possible. Then over on the DC power side of things, we get one of my favorite features, USB-C power delivery up to 60 watts worth along with two USB type A's for good measure. Now let's talk about what we're gonna hook up to it. Initially we considered building a PC to replace the current setup in here, but seeing as Morgan's living that mobile life, oh, and he's a Mac user, we opted for a shiny new M1 MacBook Air. Sorry PC guys. The truth is Apple Silicon really does offer class leading power efficiency and with the thermal pad mod, which we have pre-applied of course, the Air manages just about identical performance to the M1 MacBook Pro. We did kind of blow the budget on this, but Morgan's a cool guy, right? Okay then. For a monitor, we went with an LG 27GL850. I actually named this the best monitor of 2019. It's absolutely overkill. I mean, it sports a one millisecond response time for that extreme gaming, but it's an engineering sample that we were able to spare and for a 144 Hertz display, it is remarkably color accurate. Colin calibrated this one for Morgan and we've got the Delta E's down to just 2.85. That is going to be worlds ahead of this old MacBook and should handle photo and video editing comfortably. But where's all that video to go? Ah, that's where Lacy's rugged range shuttle comes in. This is a big step in the right direction for Morgan. It's like baby's first data redundancy. Inside there are two four terabyte drives along with a RAID controller. That means you can either run it in RAID zero for a relatively speedy eight terabytes of storage or you can go big galaxy brain and use RAID one, giving you four terabytes of fully redundant storage. That means that one of the drives inside could outright fail without losing any data. And this is something most folks might not consider, but in a mobile read vibration heavy environment, hard drives are just plain not going to last as long, even with a rubber bumper. Friends do not let friends lose data. And all of this is going to be connected to this Soho dock from CalDigit. It lets us run a single USB type C cable out to the MacBook for charging, data and video. And then from there we can run display port up to our monitor and connect to the hard drive over USB-C. And everything will of course be powered by the Explorer 1500. And we threw in an Amazon Bluetooth soundbar for good measure. But while the outputs are awesome, the inputs are where things get even more interesting. With a Jackery Explorer, sure, you can charge from the wall with this chunky 300 watt wall charger, but the last time I checked, running an extension cord out of the ski lodge across the parking lot is mostly frowned upon, mostly. So for true off grid power, the Explorer 1500 can handle up to 600 watts of solar input with solar panels like these bad boys. These turn an Explorer into what Jackery likes to call a solar generator. So each one of these panels will output 100 watts at peak. That gives us, with four of them, a total of 400 watts, meaning that in theory we could fully charge our Explorer 1500 in under four hours. Now in practice, especially here in BC, you are unlikely to get the peak output from these. But even so, we're looking at comfortably being able to charge up by day and work or watch Netflix all night. And of course, it can also be hooked into 12 volt power and do stuff off the car's alternator. That is a bonkers amount of flexibility. So this is it, hey? Yeah, this is it. I mean, I definitely enjoy that house life with, you know, three kids and all. So I don't know if I'd want to cram all them in there. Sell me on the digital nomad life. All right, well here it is. It's a lot bigger than it looks. That's not, I don't, I keep trapping myself and that's what she said things. It's way bigger than I expected. I mean, when you paint everything white inside, it looks bigger. It's like the TARDIS, but the TARDIS was not white inside. So show me around. Show me what I need. All right. Okay. Well, all you need is a... Okay, why is this seat backwards? Oh, it's on a swivel. No. Yeah. Yeah. It's not out, but it's on a swivel. That's sick. Yeah. You could sit there and like, just be like hanging. Yeah. You can discuss business or problems of the world or anything you'd like. Okay. Now I recognize this. What have I done? Oh, oh God. There's all the different lights. Sorry, sorry. You guys weren't supposed to... Yeah, I'm a short guy, but like, I'm easily comfortable walking around in here. You're almost, yeah. So then there's like vents. Yeah. So under, underneath you is a diesel heater. Oh, seriously. It pumps out heat like you would not believe when it's on. And what about this one? And that is just going vent into my battery compartment. Sink? I mean, what do you hook up to? There's a water tank under here and then I got my food, more storage for some camera bits and then that's all my ski stuff and camping gear at the back. Show me the workflow then. So what's your editing setup? Right now? Where are you going to sit? Right now, my setup is this. No, no, I don't want to see that. Get that out of here. Horrible. Are you a standing worker? Like you're a standing desk? Yeah. Like a detective dude? Yeah. So I figured we'd go with the stand up desk for now. And yeah, this would be it. This thing can go against the wall here, but we put it on that swivel so I could sit here or I could just lean up against the wall there. Right. By bringing this out like that if I wanted to get a little comfortable. Or you could lie in bed. Or I could lie in bed and watch a movie if we faced it that way, right? Okay. The skylights. You put those in, right? The skylights were in the van already in the room. Really? Yeah. The only thing that was installed in this van were these frames, which my dad built. Wow. So that ended up taking up a lot less space than, oh, is that the old one? That's the original. Oh, well the capacity of that would have been dog shit. All right. That is good enough only to run the house electronics. That's a glorified car battery pretty much. I still don't think I would want to have three kids in here. They could fit in. Oh, okay. Yes. You could stuff them. Got all the extra blankets just in case the diesel heater. Yeah. Just all my clothes and whatever. Do you worry about that? Like emergency supplies in case? I do have like, I have a camping box down here with like a minus 10 sleeping bag and all that sort of stuff. So if I was in like a bad situation. By the way, can I just say my favorite mod in this entire thing? This right here. Yeah. Cause like what is up with that, right? That's like, that's the Linus tech tips way. I like it. This is fricking awesome, man. This is all you need. So the last thing you're going to need to be truly on grid, off the grid is like a star link connection or something. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this epic van life tech makeover. Thanks again to Jackery for sponsoring this video. Thanks again to our neighbors for backing up into their unit. Thanks again to Morgan for, you know, providing us with his van to use as a set for the day. If you guys want to check out one of Jackery's power stations, we're going to have the link down below. And if you haven't got enough of this kind of outdoor tech, then maybe check out our ultimate camping battle station video. It was a bit of a weird one, but it was super cool. And I would actually kind of love to revisit it with one of these instead of that diesel or gas generator or whatever it was. Getting that thing up to the campsite was a nightmare.