Using the DJI Power 1,000 battery to camp like Spielberg

I finally got to take the DJI Power 1,000 on a real camping trip to really see how it performs out in the field. Last weekend I spent a few days in the woods with my friends, but unlike previous years, I brought an outdoor cinema setup this time. Here’s how it went and what I used.

Gear list

• Dji Power 1,000
• Dangbei DBOX02 projector
• iPad mini with Movies from Plex
• UGreen portable battery (to charge iPad and speaker)
• UE Wonderboom 2
• A 150-inch projector screen
• Rope/bungee cables
• Zignes solar panel
• DJI Power car charger
• Camera tripod

And that was just what I brought to watch movies… I still had to bring all my regular stuff, too. I could have slimmed this down a little with a smaller projector, but for now, this is what I’m working with.

Testing

I’m not going to lie. Throwing cans at the screen when villains arrived was way more fun than I anticipated. The small black bag on the left is the DJI battery.

While I had run a few cycles through the DJI Power when I first wrote about it, I had never used it with a projector, so I needed to figure out how long it would last when playing movies and video games. Originally, I also wanted to run a Wii Sports tournament in the woods, but when it came down to it, I was outvoted, and we only ended up watching movies instead.

My first test was to run the projector and the Wii. Together, they average out to around 113 watts of power draw, and in my first test, the battery ran for a little over five hours. However, it died at 19 percent randomly. The next day, I ran the test again, and it pushed past the 19 percent wall running for just over six hours. The next day, I did just the projector, and it ran for a little over seven hours, which was easily enough to use the projector for more than one night of our trip. I also have a single Zignes 100-watt solar panel to go with the battery, but I was unable to really test it over the course of a full day since my backyard is shady. However, DJI says you need three panels to fully charge the battery in a day, and since I only had one I was expecting to be able to get around 30 percent of a charge with it.

While I wish I had three of these panels, this little one packs up really smartly.

The car charger works twice as fast as a single solar panel at peak efficiency, but since I was camping, I’d only be taking my car into town very briefly, so while I could get a few percent of energy, it wasn’t going to be the full charge we needed.

I’ll also mention that while it takes a long time to drain the DJI Power 1,000, it charges up fast from a regular outlet. From a wall, you can go from zero to 100 percent in around 70 minutes.

How it worked in the field

The first thing I’ll say is that this is a pretty reasonably sized battery that looks like a small cooler, but it’s almost 30 pounds, making it really heavy to lug around on a camping trip. Usually, I just camp out of a canoe, so this would be too large for most of those trips, but this time, I was going with a friend who had a real boat, so we were able to squeeze it in. The solar panel, on the other hand, actually folds up quite small, considering how much ground it covers when it’s unfolded. It also wraps up to be like a small briefcase, which is a pretty smart design. It also has an integrated kickstand, which I learned about only halfway through my day of solar charging.

The battery also comes with a soft-sided carrying case that you can unzip on the sides and the front, allowing it to still manage airflow and power your devices while its in the bag.

Once my friends and I unloaded all my stuff and relaxed for a little bit, the first thing we did was hand the screen. I bought a cheap 160-inch option from Amazon because I wanted it to be thin so I could try rear projection, and also because a lot of the cheap screens have built-in tie points, making it easy to string up in the bush. Ours went up fairly easily after we threaded a rope through the top holes and hoisted it up. We did need to get our tallest friend to stand on a cooler to adjust the corners, but overall it went up pretty quickly. For the bottom, we used long bungee cables in the corners that we pulled down to tent pegs in the ground. We could have done the same thing in the middle, but I was out of pegs unless I wanted to sacrifice some from my test, so I just hung the remaining cords from the holes along the bottom edge of the screen, and the weight of them held it pretty square.

The projector is meant for home use, so in theory, I should be able to find one that’s both smaller and more power efficient by next year, but for a first test, it got the job done. I mounted the projector on my regular Peak design travel tripod that I’ve written about before and the first night we used it in rear projection mode with the projector behind the screen. This worked well if you were sitting off-centre, but since the projector was so bright and the screen fabric was so thin, you could easily see the hotspot of the projector’s bulb through the fabric. I originally set it up like this because I wanted to play Wii Tennis, and this way, our bodies wouldn’t break the light beam when we were playing. In a brief test it worked. but for movies, I would need a better screen to do this again. The following night, we used the projector in front projection mode (what you’d expect from a cinema) and the movie experience was a lot better.

For sound, I thought the built-in speakers on the projector were going to be enough, but in the open air, they didn’t throw sound far enough. To remedy this, I used my UE Wonderboom 2 over Bluetooth connected to the iPad, and it was pretty good. There was a slight audio lag, but it was incredibly slight and honestly, once you put it into an outdoor mode, that little speaker can become really loud. Out of all the gear I used for this project, the speaker is easily what surprised me the most. It’s not perfect, but for a small and light speaker, the performance it gave us really punched above its weight class.

For the first night, we watched the movie trailers for the films I brought (30 minutes), the movie Snack Shack (1 hour 52 minutes) and Twister (1 hour 53 minutes). Altogether, it was around four and a half hours of content, plus add on a few minutes for setting up the projector. After this, the DJI Power 1000 was down to 37 percent. This meant we’d used 63 percent over the course of the first night, and based on my calculations, that meant we used a little less than 30 percent per movie. This means that with our one solar panel, we should be able to get another 30 percent so we can watch another two films the following night.

I ended up not going to bed until pretty late, so I didn’t wake up at the crack of dawn to place down the solar panel. Instead, I got up at 9:30am, missing out on a few hours of sun. In retrospect I should have just set up the panel and battery at night so it would start charging as soon as the sun hit it in the morning. That being said, in peak sunlight, the single panel was inputting 45 watts of energy, which was moving me up a single percent every 30 minutes or so, and by 1pm, I was at 47 percent. At this point, I decided to go into town to get some groceries and test out the car charger. To get to town and back, plus the driving between shops, was probably 45 minutes and it boosted us a few more percent to around 52. Then, when we got back, I left it in the sun for the rest of the afternoon, and by 7:30, it finally hit 60 percent. It wasn’t the ideal 63 I was hoping for, but since we weren’t going to watch the movie trailers again, I figured it would be ok.

The first movie we watched was True Lies ( 2 hours 21 minutes), and by the time it finished, the battery was at an even 30 percent. We followed that up with Cop Land (1 hour 45 minutes), and when it ended, the battery was down to its final 2 percent.

A five-star experience

Overall, I loved watching movies like this in the woods. It was really cool to see the light reflecting off the screen and lighting up the trees around us. Just being rowdy with a group of friends in what felt like a private movie theatre was an awesome experience, too.

In the future, I’d love to find a more energy-efficient projector, and I’m definitely contemplating getting more solar panels to get the most out of the battery on long trips. That being said, the UE Wonderboom 2 really surprised me with how effective it was outdoors and while it would have been really funny to play Wii Sports in the bush, relaxing in my hammock and watching some good movies was really hard to beat.

If you’ve been contemplating a projector for outdoor movie nights this summer, I can’t recommend getting one enough. The key thing you’ll want to look for if you plan to try and use it when it’s not pitch black out is brightness. My projector will run up to 2,450 lumens with HDR content, but for power-saving reasons, I had it set to the eco mode, which dimmed things down to about half the brightness, so I’d say you want to find something with at least 1,000 lumens for watching in the dark, but you might want something higher if you wanted to start in dusk hours instead.