A good quality 18650 gives about 12W from a 3400mah cell so an 8 cell 26800mah portable charger has a theoretical 100W safe upper limit. A recharge of about 5W is an upper limit, such as if you held the Mini+ it gets pretty hot recharging, but its all on its own shedding its heat in all directions, if you tried to work each 18650 recharging at that 5W/cel in a 8 cell 100Wh 26800mah package, you’d have 2/3rds of that heat going into the other cells and a real overheating problem. This is why the recharge speed per mah drops with a bigger mah. So say I wanted to carry 30Ah, I’d actually recharge faster with 3 10Ah all taking a 2A input for 6A aggregate ingest.
The issue is the heat from the cells and the heat from an imperfect DC-DC conversion is all magnified if you put a 100W output in a small package. There is less surface area the bigger the volume per cell. So the ability to scale wattage with size is a thermal challenge. This is just physical, maths and anyone’s opinion to contradictory is putting lives at risk.
I’d rather be safe than sorry. I thiink the current 30W limit can be improved with IQ2 which will waste less heat for a higher wattage so a slightly less thermal problem. If you also shape to be more slab like to increase the surface area per volume it will also shed heat a little better, so the Lithium Poly which can be shaped to be thinner than 18650 will improve. You see this for example in the slab shape difference of the Powercore II 10000 relative to the Powercore 10000.
I’d have thought a 60W output is viable by end of the year. I think 100W output (i.e. exhaust all of its energy in an hour) is going to be at risk of fire, and I’d hate to buy a $99 100W battery to find its banned on flights due to a few exploding.
Far more viable is to use own common sense, if you’re about to be sat on a long flight working, don’t sit there til near the end of the flight til its a flat laptop and then complain of a slow recharge, rather better use that time sat down and plug in your 30W or 60W charger and slow the drain (worse case) or slowly charge (more common) and just do not expect the recharge speed of a 100W wall charger. I think that is both highly practical and safer. You then get into the taxi with a charged laptop and not plug when moving a lot.
