Always Charged, Always Connected: How One Family Made Reliability a Way of Life

The Day the Phone Dies

There is a particular kind of dread that comes from watching your phone battery drop to single digits in the middle of Manhattan.

You are on the train platform. The next train is an hour away. Your family is home in New Jersey, not sure when to expect you, not sure whether to hold dinner. And the one device that connects all of that, including schedules, messages, and a quiet reassurance of being reachable, is about to go dark.

Michelle Brown knows that feeling well.

"You'd be running into the city, you got doctor's appointments, meeting up with friends, and then you get on the train to come home, and the battery is dead," she says. "There's nowhere to reach out. Tell your family you're okay. Tell them what hour you're coming home. Maybe you need a ride from the train station."

For a family of four spread across New Jersey, running between campuses, commutes, classes, and errands, losing that thread felt like losing something more fundamental.

So they fixed it. They got Jackery. Then they got more.

Twelve Years and Counting

Michelle's first Jackery order shows up in her Amazon history dated 2014.

Twelve years ago.

Her brother had shown the family one during a visit. "He had one, he was visiting, he showed it to us," she says. "Smart. Why don't we have those?" They got them for themselves. Then for their kids. Then for their parents and in-laws. One purchase became a household system, and the household system became something closer to a philosophy.

"Once you've tried one of them, you're always going to use them," Michelle says. "You're always going to make sure you have them available."

The early devices were compact and straightforward. They were small enough to slide into a backpack, powerful enough to carry a phone through a full day, and hand it off to someone else and still have charge left. At a time when portable power banks were not yet ubiquitous, pulling one out on a train felt like a minor act of generosity. "Not everyone had such a device back then, so they were appreciative too," Michelle says with a laugh.

Over the years, the Jackery lineup expanded. Michelle's family moved into larger Jackery products, including the Jackery Explorer 500 and Jackery Explorer 1000, as the use cases grew from commutes to emergencies to full storm preparation. "You're definitely making more and more bigger products," Michelle notes, "so that people can take them camping, outside where maybe you don't have plugs, for bigger backups."

Sandy, and What It Taught Them

Superstorm Sandy arrived in late October 2012. By the time it reached Somerset County, it was technically no longer a hurricane, but that distinction meant nothing to the trees that came down across the roads, or to the gas stations without power to run their pumps, or to the families sitting in cold houses for five days with no electricity.

Michelle's family had prepared after an earlier storm. Irene had already taught them what it meant to lose power. They had a gas generator by then. They also had several of the larger Jackery products. When Sandy hit, two families came to stay with them, and a third neighbor came over because he needed to work.

"All the people who had day jobs were sitting around our dining room table plugged into the biggest Jackery that we had," she says. The gas generator handled the space heaters. The Jackery products handled everything else, including laptops, phones, and the equipment you cannot safely run off an uneven generator current without risking damage.

"You can't trust a gas generator for your tech," Michelle explains. "It's not an even enough supply of power. You really don't want to do that and then ruin your tech."

Between the Jackery products and those hotspots, a dining room full of people managed to get through a work week during a blackout. "Nobody wants you to not work all week despite a weather emergency," Michelle says. "There are jobs that have to get done."

Wherever the Day Takes Them

Last summer, the family split up across Greece and Italy. Some family members on a cruise, Michelle and her husband moving independently through Athens, then by train across Italy, meeting everyone in Venice at the end. The previous fall, they flew to Arizona: Phoenix, Sedona, and a hike through Antelope Canyon in the north.

In both cases, the small Jackery Portable Power Station came along.

"When you're hiking, you take the smallest one you can fit in your bag," Michelle says, "because the weight isn't going to make you happy once you're doing a lot of hiking." At elevation in Sedona, where the trails demand more than the East Coast hikes tend to prepare you for, that weight calculation matters. A compact unit, a small fan she keeps charged for hot days, and the knowledge that her phone will last the full day.

Building the Power System, Layer by Layer

After Sandy, the accumulation continued. More Jackery products in more sizes. Eventually, a whole-home Generac generator on natural gas was installed to guarantee the sump pump would run, the refrigerators would stay cold, and the heat would stay on. 

"The whole house generator will not actually power everything in the house," she explains. "It's got a limit. You sort of have to prioritize. So I really appreciate having these other trustworthy power banks, of all different sizes, available for each person to be able to run what they need to."

At any given time, the house holds more Jackery products than Michelle can count off the top of her head. The smallest ones travel in her kids' bags. A larger Jackery product lives at her parents' house, specifically because they have no generator, and specifically because they probably cannot lift it to move it, which means it will stay charged and ready exactly where it sits.

During a recent heat wave when temperatures were 91°F (32.7°C) in New Jersey, which she describes with the mild outrage of someone who knows this is not quite right, she and her husband hauled one of the larger Jackery products onto the back deck and ran a fan off it. "That made it a little more tolerable," she says.

What It Means to Not Worry

Miriam, Michelle's younger child, keeps a Jackery product in her bag for long days that run from massage therapy class straight to evening plans. "She knows she's got one of these in her bag," Michelle says. "She doesn't have to worry about whether she charged it in the car or not."

"You worry when you suddenly can't reach someone that you expected to be able to reach," she says. "Our families didn't worry when we were 16 and driving to concerts in Cleveland without cell phones. Nobody thought twice about it. But now they do. So it becomes a necessity really quickly."

She has been writing honest Jackery reviews since nearly the beginning, the kind that say when something doesn't work. That habit eventually earned her a place in Amazon Vine, the platform's official reviewer program. But Jackery, she is careful to note, came first. The reviews came because the product worked. Not the other way around.

"I trust them," she says simply. "They have what we need. They've worked for us for a long time."

Asked what comes to mind first when she thinks of Jackery, she does not hesitate.

"Reliability," she says. "You know they're going to be there when you need them."