In the Quiet Hours: How One Man’s Portable Power Dream Keeps the Lights On

< Jackery Stories/In the Quiet Hours: How One Man’s Portable Power Dream Keeps the Lights On

Keith Jepsen

In the Quiet Hours: How One Man’s Portable Power Dream Keeps the Lights On

A Trailer, a Coffee Maker, and a Silent Need

When the summer nights stretch long and the desert cools under a wide Western sky, Keith settles into the kind of silence that most people spend years chasing. His travel trailer, hitched and hauled to his favorite patch of dry camp near Big Bear, is his escape hatch — a tiny moving cabin far from his daily routine of keeping the vast corridors of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory clean and running smoothly. Out here, he is not Keith the janitor. He is just Dad. Camper. Problem-solver. A man who wants to make coffee at dawn without waking a soul.

Blackouts and New Beginnings

The story of Keith’s portable power quest begins not in the wilderness, but in a suburb struck by a blackout that lasted two days. The lights blinked out, the refrigerator hummed its last cold sigh, and Keith watched his neighbors run extension cords into the yard, hoping the storm wouldn’t last long. His son brought home a Jackery HomePower 3000, a unit hefty enough to keep the essentials running: lights, the fridge, even a microwave if they needed it. It was a revelation. “That outage showed me how fragile it all is,” Keith says. “That’s when I knew this wasn’t just about camping anymore.” He realized that while the big HomePower 3000 would always stay ready at home for the next emergency, what he really needed was something smaller and portable, power he could take out into the wild.

The Lessons of a Single Cup

Most days, Keith’s work is far from the romance of open skies. At JPL (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), he helps keep the everyday spaces running — the offices, the hallways, the workstations of people whose discoveries might one day land on Mars. The irony is not lost on him. “I clean these places where they dream up robots and solar arrays for other planets,” he says, chuckling. “And here I am, trying to figure out how to run my coffee maker in a trailer.” Coffee, it turns out, is the linchpin of Keith’s domestic energy puzzle. His first portable Jackery, a small Explorer 300, lacked the wattage to brew a single cup in the trailer’s tiny machine. So he upgraded to the Explorer 1000. “That was the game changer,” he says. “Suddenly, I could make coffee, run a fan, or even watch TV if I wanted.” He laughs at how simple it sounds: coffee in the wilderness, but for Keith, it’s the mark of self-reliance — a power station humming away silently, no gas fumes, no stuttering engine noise in the quiet hours when campgrounds forbid generators. Later, as his setup grew more ambitious running AC for his pug, powering a microwave, experimenting with solar charging, he added a Jackery HomePower 3000 to his lineup. “The Explorer 1000 is still perfect for quick getaways,” he says. “But with the HomePower 3000, I don’t have to think twice about what I plug in. It just handles it.” He plans to take it out on his next trip, aiming to power everything: lights, air conditioner, even his inflatable kayak pump using only the HomePower 3000 and solar panels.

A Working Man’s Solar Experiment

The quiet is what he cherishes. He and his wife share a pug, a breed that struggles in the desert heat. With a Jackery rigged to the air conditioner in his trailer, Keith can keep the little dog cool through the hottest July afternoons. “I always worry about the pug,” he says, glancing at the animal curled loyally on the bed beside him. “They just can’t take the heat. If I can keep the AC going without starting up the gas generator, that’s worth it.” He is, by his own admission, no electrician. The language of kilowatt-hours and inverters doesn’t come naturally. He tests by trial and error. Once, he tried to keep a freezer running off a solar panel perched on the shed roof, only to realize the system wouldn’t register a charge until the battery dipped below 90 percent. “I learned a lot that day,” he says, smiling ruefully. “Now I know! don’t expect the sun to kick in when you’re topped up.

Rolling Freedom into the Wild

For Keith, the technology is inseparable from the sense of freedom it brings. There’s an old blow-up kayak he keeps for the lake, a ritual he hopes to continue on the next dry camp at month’s end. It takes forever to inflate by hand. Now, he’s got a plan to plug in a portable air pump, run off the same station that keeps his trailer humming. “It’s the little things,” he says. “You don’t want to be huffing into a kayak for an hour when you could be fishing.” Sometimes, in the evenings after a long day making sure every corner stays spotless and ready, Keith will open the Jackery app on his phone — a quiet little dashboard that shows him what’s drawing power, what’s left to give. He likes the reassurance. He doesn’t think of himself as someone who needs much. A lake, a trailer, his wife and his three dogs, the pug, the one who never leaves his side, is always the first to climb into the trailer. At night, when the desert winds come down from the mountains and the campground falls silent, you can hear the hum of his power station if you stand close enough. Inside, Keith is already asleep, a cup of coffee ready for the morning, secure in the knowledge that when the sun rises, there will be power enough, quietly, reliably to start his day.

A Simple Sentence for Peace of Mind

“It’s a great product,” Keith says simply, when asked to sum it all up. But that is just the surface. For a man who’s seen how fragile the grid can be, who has swept the corridors of science’s grandest dreams, there is something deeply human in the simple hum of a silent generator, powering a life that stays bright — even in the darkest hours.