Best portable jump starter for 2022
If you’ve ever tried to start your vehicle on a cold morning only to hear the dreaded clicking noise, you know the importance of getting a quick jump. This once meant relying on the kindness of strangers or calling a tow truck, but fortunately now there’s also another option available: the portable jump starter.
Car battery chargers and jump starters are dense little storage bins for electrical energy, and many come with useful built-in accessories. They’ll recharge with standard extension cords, wall-plug adapters, cigarette lighter-style 12-volt male adapters or USB ports in running vehicles. Most portable battery jump starter options offer some combination of the four recharge options. These three chargers are some of the most dependable we’ve come across at CNET.
THE BEST PORTABLE JUMP STARTER IF MONEY IS NO OBJECT Schumacher Ultracapacitor Hybrid Jump Starter
This one violates the spirit of this list because it’s only a jump starter — no LED flashlight, USB charge port or anything else. It made it because it’s really cool, as it applies the next wave in electrical storage technology: ultracapacitors.
Once referred to as condensers, capacitors store energy electrostatically in an electric field. Compared to chemical-based batteries, they store relatively little energy, but the advantages are significant. Modern ultracapacitors can absorb energy quickly and dump it in big jolts, as opposed to something more like a trickle with a battery. And they can operate effectively in a broader temperature range than most batteries. That makes them perfect for jumping a weak car battery.
The Schumacher Ultracapacitor Hybrid Jump Starter delivers 900 amps of cranking power, which should fire just about anything up to a semi-truck. It has a small, replaceable lithium ion battery to prime the ultracapacitors, but if the onboard battery is drained it will still prep the ultracapacitors in roughly two minutes on a 12-volt charge from a vehicle (maybe even the weakened battery in the vehicle that needs a jump).
In other words, it’s never really dead. It’s intended primarily for commercial purposes, and it’s not cheap.
But if you want the coolest, most failproof portable jump starter out there, this might be it.
Antigravity Batteries XP-10 HD Micro-Start
This is the latest iteration of Antigravity’s top-rated XP-10 car jump starter. It has all the same features as its smaller brethren, including the multimode LED flashlight with a strobe and multiple charging options for electronic devices, but the heavy duty car battery jump starter can deliver an extra 50 amps of peak starting jolt. It also comes with all-copper, heavyduty commercial grade battery jumper cable clamps.
THE BEST BIG PORTABLE JUMP STARTER WITH A COMPRESSOR DeWalt Digital Portable Power Station DXEJ14
The DeWalt DXEJ14 makes our best portable jump starter list with a 4.4 stars
Antigravity Batteries XP-10 HD MicroStart has multiple charging options for electronic devices. ANTIGRAVITY
LEFT: DeWalt Digital Portable Power Station DXEJ14 has an expansive 21 amp hour battery.
rating across 450 buyer reviews at Home Depot’s shopping site. This car jump starter has an expansive 21 amp hour battery, an onboard compressor and a patented feature that can tell you if your vehicle’s alternator is up to snuff. There’s a light and USB ports, but the DeWalt’s biggest draw is the power in its initial jump-start jolt. At 700 cranking amps, it’s rated among the most powerful portables on the market.