When I donated my previous camper van to Forgotten Angels, I sent with it the AGM battery I’d been using to power the inside of my cargo trailer. After that, I had a small power station to run some lights, but that’s about it. I figured I would just charge power tool batteries and the like from the inverter in my van. It’s not as convenient as having everything related to my tools in the trailer, but it would work.
Then BougeRV contacted me about reviewing some of their products. After some discussion, they sent me their FORT 1000 portable power station to try out. With 1120 watt-hours of capacity, it has more than four times as much storage as my previous unit. Its 1,200-watt built-in power inverter is five times more powerful than my other power station!
Clearly, this is serious overkill for my original trailer electrical plans. So I’m going to upgrade those plans a bit. I’m going to charge all of my tools off this power station in the trailer, rather than off the inverter built into my van. With so much power available, I can now run tools using hundreds of watts that you’d normally have to plug into a traditional outlet. All of my current power tools run off Ryobi batteries, but that may change in the future.
But even that won’t fully demonstrate what the BougeRV FORT 1000 is capable of. I plan to put it through its paces, running a bunch of tests to show how it works in the real world as a portable power station for camping, not just running a few accessories in my trailer. For example, I wanted to know if it could run my microwave oven, an accessory I went without for years until I engineered Smokey II’s electrical system specifically to handle it. Can the FORT 1000 run my microwave straight out of the box?
Yes, it can! Without even topping off the 66% charge it came with, I plugged my microwave in, turned on its built-in inverter, and made myself a bowl of popcorn. It pulled over 1,000 watts of power with no trouble at all. When my friend Chang visited last winter, he had to connect his inverter to his van’s battery and run the engine to make us microwave popcorn. This was so much easier! Best of all, it only used 5% of its battery capacity in the process, bringing it down to 61%. That leaves plenty of power to run everything else you need.
We’ve established that it has enough power to run a small microwave, but most people in van life aren’t concerned about high power outputs. What they want to know is how long it will run their refrigerator or Starlink. I plan to put the FORT 1000 through some endurance tests as well and will tell you how it does. First, I need to give it a 100% charge to make it a fair test. Then I plan to see how many days, or even weeks, I’ll be able to run various items that the average camper or van dweller might want to have on hand.
Ultimately, what I want to find out is whether the BougeRV FORT 1000 is a viable option for a vehicle dweller who needs a fair amount of electrical capacity (a digital nomad who works on the computer all day, for example), without having to go through all the work of installing separate batteries, outlets, and other components like I did. I want to give you facts and figures from these tests, not just wild claims from some stranger on the internet. That way, you can decide for yourself if the FORT 1000 is right for you.
Smokey Da Van 