The PowerStation PSX3: A portable multifunction vehicular powerhouse with a beefy battery

As regular readers may already recollect, I’ve got two vehicles in outdoor storage, which (at minimum) I start once a year to reorder them and drive the one now in front to a nearby emissions testing center.

Stored-vehicle batteries inevitably drain, and their tires slowly-but-surely also deflate. Which is why the PowerStation PSX3 has long had a rarely-but-repeatedly used prized place in my gadget stable. I’ll start with some stock shots of the product:

As you can tell, it’s (among other things) a portable recharger and jump-starter of vehicles’ cells. It’s also a portable tire inflater. And it’s an emergency light and USB power source, too:

all of which makes it handy to have with me at all times in my Eurovan Camper, for example:

Here’s my unit in all its dusty, dirty glory:

Cables, etc. inside the “door”:

along with closeups on those stickers you saw in the overview shots:

Here’s the thing, though. If you visit the product page, you’ll find that the PowerStation PSX3 is no longer being sold. And after many years of occasional use, in combination with deep discharge cycles between uses, the embedded sealed lead-acid battery in mine had become effectively unusable; it’d take forever to charge, if I could get it to fully charge at all, and its ability to inflate tires and jumpstart vehicles was a shadow of its former self.

My first “bright idea” was to pick up one of those newfangled chargers you may have noticed often on sale at Amazon and elsewhere, which I’m assuming are all Li-ion battery-based (since NiMH cells wouldn’t deliver the necessary “punch”). For tire inflation purposes, I alternatively had a nifty adapter in the garage that leveraged my stock of Black+Decker 20 V MAX multi-purpose batteries:

It wasn’t as powerful as the PowerStation PSX3 had been in its prime, but I had a bunch of batteries and they’re easy to transport, so I figured a jumpstart-only device would suffice as a PowerStation PSX3 successor.

I tried three of these widgets, one claiming to deliver 1200 A of “peak” cranking juice:

Another spec’ing 1500 A:

And a third that promised to deliver 2000 A:

They all promptly went back to Amazon as full-refund returns. Now granted, if someone had left their interior dome light on too long and the battery was drained too low to successfully turn over the engine but still had some “life” one of these might suffice, which is why this combo jump-starter/tire inflater/USB charger/light still resides in the back of my wife’s SUV:

And I’ll grant them one other thing: they’re certainly small and light. But 2000 A of cranking current? Or even 1500 A? Mebbe for a fraction of a second, the time necessary to drain an intermediary capacitor, but not long enough to resurrect a significantly drained battery. Therefore, the quotes I put around the word “peak” earlier. Such products exemplify the well-worn saying, “mileage may vary”. Give me an old-school lead acid battery instead, any day!

At that point, I had another idea, which ended up being brighter. As I wrote about last summer, uninterruptable power supplies (UPSs) often have replaceable embedded batteries (unless the manufacturer has intentionally designed them otherwise, of course). Could the PowerStation PSX3, with user-accessible screws on its backside, be similar?

Yes, hope-inducing YouTube videos like this one reassured me, it could!

(I too hate throwing things out if it wasn’t already intuitively obvious)

At this point, I had maybe my brightest idea of all, if I do say so myself. In that earlier UPS writeup, I’d mentioned that I’d bought six replacement batteries for $49.99 total on sale (they’re now $119.99 for six as I write these words). They were purchased through Amazon but were shipped directly from the manufacturer, Mighty Max. The thing is, though, the first shipment delivered to me was not six smaller batteries but one much larger one.

The Mighty Max rep promptly apologized, sent me the correct ones, and told me to hold onto the first one in case I ever found a use for it. Hmmm…Where in the garage did I put that box?

And hey, it’s not only got the correct dimensions, but the terminals’ polarities match!

Additional included hardware, which I didn’t end up needing to use:

Cool, let’s remove those screws and crack this device open!

At this point, I need to beg for forgiveness from you, dear readers. Were this a proper full teardown, I wouldn’t stop at this point. But the objective here was not to fully dissect the product. It was instead to resurrect it to full health. So, squelching my own curiosity, not to mention all of yours’ in the process, I stopped here. That said, for example, you can clearly see the massive-percentage-of-total-volume motor that implements the air compressor function:

And here’s our patient on the other side:

The negative battery terminal was corroded, so I cleaned everything up in the process of disconnecting it:

The positive terminal was more pristine:

At this point, however, after wrestling the old battery out of its captivity:

I realized I had a problem. Here’s the final shot of the old cell:

And here’s another perspective on the new one:

See what’s different? The two batteries are the same size. And the terminals’ polarities do match. But the terminals’ exact locations are not the same. Force-fitting the negative terminal re-connection was fairly straightforward, since I just had to stretch a few wires already with sufficient slack. The positive terminal reconnection, on the other hand, was admittedly more of a MacGyver move (and I admittedly almost skipped on sharing this image with you, out of embarrassment and fear of your mockery…but hey, at least no duct tape was involved!):

But at the end of the day, I ended up with a good-as-new PowerStation PSX3. Huzzah!

Comments are as-always welcomed…just please be gentle about my MacGyver move…

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.

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The PowerStation PSX3: A portable multifunction vehicular powerhouse with a beefy battery

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