I'm Dale Harmon — a residential electrician from Charlotte, NC with 18 years of hands-on electrical work behind me. I've wired houses, installed transfer switches, and dealt with more power outages than I can count.
The obsession started in September 2018. Hurricane Florence knocked out power in my neighborhood for nine days straight. I had a cheap generator I'd bought on impulse two years earlier — it lasted about six hours before it started running rough, and I never trusted it again. I spent the rest of that outage at a neighbor's house.
After that I started doing what I should have done the first time: actually testing equipment before trusting it. I buy everything at retail price with my own money. Every generator and power station on this site has been run through real load tests — measured runtime, real appliances, a calibrated load bank for the bigger units. No press samples. No affiliate-first rankings.
I built this site because the reviews I found when I went looking were mostly garbage — spec sheets rewritten as opinions. PoweredUpReviews is what I wished existed. I hope it helps you make a better call than I did in 2018.
How I test: Every product is purchased at retail and run through a standard set of tests before I write a word. For solar generators and power stations, that means structured discharge at fixed load levels, measured charge times from 0% with a wall timer, and real-appliance tests (fridge, window AC, CPAP, laptop). For gas generators, I use a calibrated resistive load bank for controlled wattage testing plus a real outage simulation with actual household appliances. Runtime numbers in my reviews are measured, not manufacturer estimates.
On affiliate links: This site earns a commission when you buy through Amazon links. That does not affect rankings or recommendations — I've written negative sections on products I still recommend overall, and I've declined to feature products that didn't clear my bar regardless of margin. The only thing that goes in a recommendation is what I'd actually buy.