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June 24, 2021 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
27:18
Lithium gear reviews
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Let me mention a couple of other products out there that I've got some thumbs up information about that I've been using myself.
And these are not sponsorships.
These are not paid reviews at all.
But just things that I've been using that I promised you I would give you some feedback on them.
One of them, it's a company called Anti-Gravity Batteries.
And I think the website is, yeah, antigravitybatteries.com.
Now, there's an interesting story about this.
Let me just tell you right away.
Antigravity batteries started out doing car batteries for race cars that were ultralight lithium-ion batteries for motorsports, basically.
And then they got into...
Replacement batteries for cars and trucks that are the same size and shape of your normal batteries, but they're made out of lithium ion, and they have other special features, and they're deep cycle.
So you may recall during the February deep freeze that I almost lost my dog because he fell through the ice in my pond.
And I had to rescue him with a mini excavator that I have on the ranch.
And in order to start the mini excavator...
I couldn't...
I didn't think I could start it because the regular lead-acid battery is really crappy.
All lead-acid batteries are crappy.
So I had this booster product, and now I forget the name of it.
Genius.
What is it?
Noco Genius, I think.
Booster.
And so I attached that sucker to the lead-acid battery.
And remember, it was like 5 degrees outside.
Which is, it's hard to start diesel engines at that temperature no matter what.
And thank God I was able to crank it and start it because of that lithium-ion booster.
So at the time, I credited this lithium-ion booster product, which I still carry in my truck, and I have another spare as well.
They're really useful products.
I credited that lithium-ion booster for helping me save my dog's life, literally.
If I hadn't been able to start that excavator, I don't know how I would have rescued my dog.
So I got to thinking after that, actually I made a list of things that I failed to do well in this freezing grid down collapse, which is what Texas experienced for the week.
I made a list.
It's like, oh, this sucked.
I didn't have backup electricity because I couldn't start my tractor that had the PTO generator.
And I was barely able to save my dog by starting my excavator.
I didn't have a kerosene powered portable heater.
For example, even though I had a wood stove going, I didn't have a good, powerful electric chainsaw.
And I didn't have a solar generator that I could just charge off-grid using solar panels.
So since then, I made a point to try to solve these problems by buying these products and reviewing them.
That's what this review is about, just kind of telling you what has worked, what I've learned since then.
And this anti-gravity battery company, which, again, I've never spoken with them.
I bought their product.
It is expensive.
It's the most expensive vehicle battery you'll ever buy, but my goodness, this thing works!
This thing works!
I'm able to start my excavator just right up, right away, with no effort.
It just, boom!
It starts right up, because I have this...
I'm an anti-gravity battery product.
I think I paid $900 for it.
I know, it sounds like a lot, right?
Until you think, well, what's it worth to be able to start a vehicle in an emergency?
What's it worth to be able to save your dog?
Or what's it worth To be able to pull a car off of somebody if, like, somebody was working under a car and the jack failed and the car fell on their leg or something, what's it worth to be able to pull that car off somebody using an excavator, which you can do, by the way?
I'm just thinking of examples of the kinds of things excavators can do.
Well, what's the value of that?
Well, you can't put a value on it.
It's priceless, right?
Right.
And where I live, way out in the country, to be able to start a vehicle, to me, it's priceless.
And so I've decided I'm replacing all of my vehicle batteries with anti-gravity batteries that are lithium-ion.
And the other cool thing about this is I think I paid like $35 or $40 for this little device that attaches to the battery.
You just kind of screw it right on to the battery terminals.
And this device is a Bluetooth transmitter of the battery status.
It uses a very tiny amount of current, almost nothing, and it's transmitting at short range, battery status, voltage down to two decimal points.
Like, I was looking at it today, the voltage of this battery is 13.65 volts, which is just right for lithium.
And you can tell when the battery's low.
You can tell when the battery's charging.
You can tell when it's discharging.
You can do crank tests, all kinds of things.
And you just download this app and put it on your phone, and it talks to the battery transmitter and just tells you your voltage all the time.
So you never have to guess, like, you know, is my battery dead or what's going on?
And finally, the other thing about this that's really cool is it has a button on it And a button, like a physical button on the battery top, I think it's on the top, I haven't used it, but they claim that when you press this button, it kicks in this alternate battery pack, like an emergency battery pack that's built into the whole thing, that gives you an emergency jumpstart.
So if you've left your lights on, or whatever, and you've run down the main battery...
You can pop the hood, press this button, and it kicks in like emergency power, like the Terminator in the original Terminator movie, remember?
Routing, rerouting, backup power located, and the Terminator comes back on, except this isn't a Terminator, it's a battery, and now you can start your car with this emergency thing, and then your car, at that point, your alternator kicks in, and you're recharging the whole battery, and you're back in business.
It's got its own emergency jumpstart in it.
What's the value of that if you're stranded in the winter?
We're on a road somewhere on the highway.
Or I don't know, you left your lights on at work and you're trying to get home and you need to start your car.
What's the value of that?
That's pretty valuable stuff.
So as a prepper, myself, I'm always into having backup plans for emergencies.
I found this is a great battery.
I'm converting everything over to these batteries.
Even though they cost a lot.
I mean, you can get $1,000 battery or $1,100 battery that's got more cranking amps.
And the cold cranking amps are really, really strong.
Now, I'm sorry if I'm boring those of you who aren't into batteries and equipment and such, but you might think about this for your own car or your own truck.
Because in addition to this, if you think about an emergency situation, You can run 12-volt appliances off this battery for a very long time because the capacity is so high.
So you can use this as an emergency battery pack for things other than your car.
And if you have, you can easily go online, you can buy a 12-volt inverter that will convert 12 volts into like 110 volts of AC. And you can plug in your laptop to that, or you can plug in a cell phone charger, or a flashlight charger, or your satellite phone charger, or whatever.
You could use this expensive car battery, you could use this as an emergency lithium battery bank to charge other devices in an emergency.
And believe it or not, you could even buy solar panels and a solar charge controller and you could charge this thing with some small panels.
Now, charging lithium is a little bit different than charging lead acid, so you need to make sure you have a charger that works with lithium because the voltages are slightly different, so be sure to check that out.
I'm just saying that there are a lot of uses for this kind of technology, even for people who aren't into heavier equipment or living on a ranch.
You just put it in your car, and you're also driving around with an emergency battery bank.
And the other thing is, all lithium systems, or at least most of them, are really deep-cycled.
You can discharge them a lot, and they will cycle far more times than lead-acid batteries, and they're much lighter than lead-acid.
It seems like they're about one-third the weight, maybe 40% of the weight, something in that range.
And lead-acid batteries are super heavy.
I know, because I've swapped those on my truck before, and it's like, geez.
These batteries must be 65 pounds or something.
I don't know.
But a typical lead-acid battery, if you discharge it below 50%, you've basically ruined it.
With lithium, that's not the case.
You can discharge it almost all the way, and it comes back, and it's fully functional.
So with that in mind...
I've been on this crusade to try to get more lithium products into my preparedness, and I was looking for a lithium-ion chainsaw.
And I've owned other lithium chainsaws in the past, like the Makita chainsaw.
In fact, I think I have two Makita chainsaws, and they use the Makita 18-volt batteries.
Both of those chainsaws really suck, by the way.
They're just not good.
One of them is really short, like 12 inches.
And the other one's just not very strong.
And it uses, I think, two lithium batteries.
Yeah, one on each side.
So it's a, you know, combined voltage of 36 volts.
But then this new company launched these products last year, I think in the fall of 2020, and it's called literally Ego, like E-go, E-G-O, but the word is ego, like a big ego.
And they have put out a 56-volt, 18-inch chainsaw.
Now, that's the kind of length that I need on a ranch.
And by the way, this is a survival item.
This is a preparedness item because a chainsaw can help you do many amazing things, such as clear a road if a tree fell and it's blocking the road for you.
Or maybe you need to block a road to protect yourself from like zombies on wheels or something.
And so you need to cut a tree and make it fall across the road.
Chainsaws can do that as well.
Chainsaws, you know, of course, can be very useful for building things.
For example, I've got a lot of mesquite trees on my property, and mesquite makes very long-lasting posts for construction.
And a lot of mesquite branches, really thick branches, like 8-inch diameter branches, froze during the winter, the crazy winter that we had in Texas, and they died.
So I'm using this chainsaw to cut these branches off, and I'm stacking the branches.
I'm harvesting them for later use as construction materials.
You can even buy a machine and make your own lumber, although I haven't done that because a lot of those machines are really expensive.
But you can make your own lumber.
Or you could just use them as posts.
You can make a pole structure shelter of some kind or a pole barn out of mesquite posts.
And you don't have to treat them with anything because they already contain mesquite oil, which is already long-lasting by itself.
So anyway, you need a chainsaw as a survival tool.
But in a collapse, where are you going to get gasoline for your chainsaw?
And by the way, gas sucks for chainsaws because gas contains ethanol made from corn, and ethanol screws up all the gaskets in your chainsaw.
And so you have to buy actually special gas, which is non-ethanol gas, for your chainsaw, and it's just a nightmare.
Where are you going to get your super special gas in the middle of a collapse?
You're not.
But guess what you can get?
You can get sunlight.
And with sunlight, you can charge an electric chainsaw.
How?
Well, you have a solar generator, which I'm going to talk about here too.
But anyway, this Ego 56-volt chainsaw, 18 inches, claimed that it was just as strong as a 35cc gasoline engine.
I was very skeptical of that.
And so I took it out and I started cutting mesquite.
Now, mesquite is a very, very hard wood.
It's really hard.
It's among the hardest.
You'll tear up chainsaws going through mesquite.
This chainsaw did amazing.
It was really strong.
And it was quiet, which is great.
And it's not blowing gas exhaust in your face.
And this giant battery that it has, this lithium battery...
They must have engineered this thing really well because to push out that much juice, it would normally generate a lot of heat, but they have, I don't know, a special geometry on this or something that's able to dissipate the heat more easily.
And I was working in 100-degree heat with the chainsaw going full force sawing mesquite, and it was still doing great.
And the cool thing is there's a button on the side of the battery.
You press the button, it tells you how much battery you have left.
So you know how much juice you've got left.
Now, why does all this matter for preparedness?
And again, no, this is not a sponsorship for the Ego company that they make a bunch of other battery powered stuff that I wasn't interested in.
But why does this matter for preparedness?
Because you can buy a solar generator and there are several of them out there and we don't sell them and we don't have any solar generator sponsors.
But there are solar generators out there that basically combine solar panels with lithium batteries and a built-in inverter.
That's the combo.
And these solar generators, as they're called, you know, they collect sunlight and turn it into power.
And then you can turn on the inverter and you can plug in other things to power those things, including you can plug in a charger for an electric chainsaw.
So whereas you can't get gasoline in a Mad Max collapse to recharge your chainsaw, but you can get sunlight, and if you have this equipment that I'm talking about, you can recharge your chainsaw.
Now, by the way, it might be really slow if you only have, you know, 110-watt solar panel or something.
Might take a couple of days to recharge that chainsaw, but you have a way to do it.
You're not just out of luck.
You've got a method to do it.
And you can always get more solar panels.
One more thing is, in a collapsed scenario, you don't want to make a lot of noise.
And so an electric chainsaw, you can do work quietly, whereas a gas chainsaw, you can hear that for miles, it seems, you know, depending on the weather conditions.
But if you're using a gasoline chainsaw, you're just announcing to all your neighbors that you've got gas.
Now, that may not be a good message to send out in the middle of a collapse.
So think about that.
Electric vehicles and electric appliances are stealthy.
They're quiet.
And that's why, as a prepper myself, I have become a strong advocate of these lithium-powered devices, because they just work better.
Now, in terms of a solar generator, I've mentioned one brand before, and I suspect this brand is made in China, although I'm not sure.
But I haven't done a full consumer reports style review of all these products, but I have found a lot of garbage products.
So I've wasted many hundreds of dollars on...
I like to purchase a wide variety of items in a particular category and then try them out and kind of share with you what's working.
So I guess it is kind of a consumer review of sorts.
But most of the stuff made in China in this category is just total crap.
It's horrible.
Some of it didn't even take a charge at all.
But there's one company I found so far, and that is EF River.
And they have a product called EcoFlow.
E-C-O-Flow.
And once again, they are not a sponsor.
So this is not a paid promotion.
I bought their smallest unit and their largest unit.
And I'm using these currently as in-line lithium-ion uninterruptible power supplies to power computers.
And what got me into this was, again, during the Texas blackouts, I had UPSs.
And, like, one of them was maybe a $1,500 UPS with lead-acid batteries in it and other UPSs, and they all failed.
And UPSs, it turns out, don't last very long because they have lead-acid batteries, and those batteries are only good for about five years max, even if you never use them.
They just lose their ability to hold a charge.
And so the UPSs were worthless, and I started looking into lithium-ion UPSs.
And I ended up buying this rather expensive UPS from, I think it's APC, and they make a lithium-ion UPS. I think it was also around $1,500.
I bought that, and I installed that on one of my smaller server farms, and that's working fine, but I thought, my goodness, this is like $1,500.
Maybe it was even more than $1,500.
It was maybe...
It was between $1,500 and $2,000, but that's a lot of money for a person to spend on a UPS. I thought there's got to be a better solution here.
And I wonder if some of these smaller lithium-ion solar generators, so to speak, or you might call them power boxes, I wonder if you can plug them into the wall and plug your computer into them at the same time, And if you pull the wall plug, will they continue to power your computer?
That would make it a dual-use device, which is a device that's kind of a solar generator, a battery pack, and it's got a built-in inverter, and I can use it as an inline lithium-ion uninterruptible power supply to handle power outages and blackouts and brownouts, which seem to be getting worse everywhere.
Especially with the droughts and everything, hydroelectric power is failing in California.
The Texas power grid is strained, seems to be ready to fail at any moment.
So I decided to buy a couple of these devices and put them in line and see if they would work as UPSs that are lithium-ion.
And sure enough, they do.
And the smallest unit from this company, again, EF River EcoFlow, I saw it on Amazon with a discount coupon, I think, and it was like $280.
And I am powering a large Dell workstation.
Off of that $280 unit, and it's working just fine.
It's working great.
And I mean a Dell workstation with graphics cards and dual CPUs, and I've got like a tape drive on it, a bunch of hard drives, and it's working great.
And that's been going that way for weeks.
And then I've got a larger unit that's powering another small server farm, and that's working great.
So it made me realize that none of these are sold as UPSs, but they can completely function that way.
And that's the way I'm using them.
So these are the three products that I wanted to mention to you today.
Sorry I've taken so much time to cover this, but they're all based on lithium batteries.
You know, it's the anti-gravity lithium batteries for your vehicles.
This Ego Company 56-volt chainsaw, which seems to work great, although some users have said they had a problem with the oiler on it.
And I saw one review, somebody said that it was assembled incorrectly and there was a kink in the oil tube that provides oil to the chain.
You know, you have to put bar oil in it.
So you do need some oil for that, but mine seems to be working fine.
Other people had that problem, but I guess that's something that can be fixed.
And then also the third thing is this EcoFlow lithium-ion battery bank and uninterruptible power supply.
So these three products, I mean, they're synergistic.
So you add some solar panels to this EcoFlow unit and now you're charging it with sunlight and then again you can use that free sunlight energy to charge up all of your devices in an emergency.
A laptop computer or to power your cell phone or flashlights or whatever you've got that's electric.
And it can even run small blenders and things like that.
Not heavy duty large appliances but it's not going to run your Your king-size space heater blanket because that uses a lot of juice, but it's going to run smaller things just fine.
You could even run a satellite bandwidth device off of it, which I have one of those, you know, from the satellite phone store I mentioned another time.
But I could plug in that and have the power and be able to get satellite emergency bandwidth with a hotspot To actually just have a Wi-Fi connection and I'm running satellite bandwidth and I'm actually at that point getting, you know, downloads and uploads all based on sunlight power.
So these are legit devices that can turn sunlight into life-saving solutions or solutions to help you communicate or to help you charge devices that you need.
Or to help you cut down a tree if you need to cut down a tree.
Or harvest limbs for building shelters.
Or whatever you need to do In your Mad Max scenario.
Because I'm thinking, the world's falling apart, folks.
It's getting bad out there.
And we need to be as much off-grid as possible.
And being off-grid means we've got to get away from oil and gasoline and diesel as much as I have diesel equipment, of course.
I mean, most of it is diesel.
But long-term, what's going to happen to the refineries?
When the economic collapse comes, right?
When the dollar is worth zero, which is coming.
Mark my words, that's coming.
How are the refineries going to function?
How much would it cost to even get a gallon of diesel or gasoline?
Especially when gas spoils within a couple of years, although diesel lasts much, much longer.
But if we can get into more electric products for ourselves on our own homesteads, That's off-grid power, folks.
Off-grid.
Because the government can't block the sun.
Well, I know Bill Gates is trying to.
He's trying to block the sun, you know, to save the planet from climate change or whatever BS he's come up with.
He wants to dim the sun.
But they're not going to be able to get that done.
It'll take them years.
To really dim it to any great extent.
And in the meantime, the whole system is going to collapse anyway.
So you're going to have sunlight.
And by the way, if you wake up and the sun is gone, we're all screwed anyway.
It doesn't matter what kind of batteries you have.
The world will become a frozen ice planet like Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back.
Or worse, Hoth had sunlight.
So the sun's going to be there.
We should harvest the sun to be better prepared.
That's all I'm saying.
So that's my review.
Oh, and look, I'm also going to review a kerosene lantern.
So there's a fossil fuel based item.
I'm going to test this to see if I can run on isopropyl alcohol.
I just bought a 55-gallon drum of isopropyl alcohol as part of my personal preparedness stash.
That's right.
That's when you know you're a real prepper is when you're buying things by the drum.
Like IPA by the drum.
Yeah, it's actually way cheaper to buy it by the drum.
A whole drum, 55 gallons, is only like 800 bucks.
Compared to people paying quadruple that, buying it in small quantities.
So anyway, that's just me buying stuff by the drum again.
But I'm just passing this information along to you so you know what's working and what's not working.
Yeah, I've run into a bunch of stuff that doesn't work, but I'm not here to complain about those things.
We're trying to bring you things that do work.
And finally, if you want to see more videos and podcasts with all of my preparedness advice and reviews and so on, just go to prepwithmike.com.
And I'll have some new videos coming there soon, but I review a lot of products there, and I give you some guidance on everything from red dot sites and how to organize your ammo magazines and all kinds of things.
So check that out at prepwithmike.com.
I think you'll learn a lot there.
A global reset is coming.
And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
You can download it for free by subscribing to the naturalnews.com email newsletter, which is also free.
I'll describe how the monetary system fails.
I also cover emergency medicine and first aid and what to buy to help you avoid infections.
So download this guide.
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