This looks like a decent portable 140W power bank, good match for the FW Laptop?

Most power banks are designed so you can fly with them. That means a maximum battery capacity of 100 Wh.

They are specified in mAh, not Wh, but the conversion isn’t TOO difficult. All the power banks I have seen have a single LiPo cell, or multiple cells that they rate in parallel to provide the mAh rating, so the voltage is 3.6 or 3.7V. (The power bank, especially the new USB-PD ones that can be called on to deliver much higher voltages than 5V, may use the cells in series rather than parallel, but the mAh rating is always calculated as if the cells are connected in parallel.) To do the conversion, first divide the mAh to Ah by dividing by 1000 (aka moving the decimal point over, easy), then multiply by the nominal voltage of the cell.

For example, consider a 25000 mAh power bank. Divide to get 25 Ah. Multiply by a typical 3.7V and you get 92.5 Wh. That’s under 100 Wh so it’s legal to carry on a plane.

That’s the raw capacity of the battery cells in the power bank. Since it has to use a converter to produce the output voltage (5V for traditional USB; 9, 15, 20 for USB-PD, those plus 28 and 48 for the latest PD spec), some of that capacity is lost in conversion. (The Framework normally charges at 20V; the Framework charger supplies 20V at 3.25A.) It will charge at 15V if you have a 45W brick handy, but more slowly.) The charging circuitry in the laptop is also not 100% efficient; combine both losses and perhaps 80% of the energy from the power bank goes into the laptop battery. That means that our hypothetical 92.5 Wh bank would likely only deliver 80 Wh to the laptop battery. Still, that bank would fully charge most laptops, including the Framework, with a bit of power to spare.

As for the original question, I’d say that either of those power banks will be just fine for the Framework. The current Framework can’t actually draw 140W; it charges at 20V maximum so its limit is 100W. (I don’t believe it can charge at that rate, but you might need 100W to charge at full speed while using the computer.) The upcoming 16" Framework might be able to use the full 140W rate from these; we don’t know yet.

I have personally used a ZMI power bank to charge my Framework. (It matches that 92.5 Wh that I used as an example.) It can deliver up to 100W – works great. A full charge of the Framework doesn’t use it up; there is at least enough left to fully charge a phone.

2 Likes