I Love My Suspiciously Fast Charging Power Bank

If you plan on staying out for longer than five hours with a cell phone, you have a power bank. For the most part, these things are boring bricks. Though they keep trying to add new features (many of I will concede are useless), the most exciting features are “will it charge my phone?” followed by “how much?” and maybe “how fast?” But, being me, I asked myself “how far can these things be pushed?”, which is how I ended up purchasing the humorously named Cuktech 15 Ultra, an attractive and modestly priced little brick that unfortunately has one incredibly sick feature that has now ruined me forever. 

Cuktech, which I believe is named after the Ćuk converter and is pronounced “chook tech,” makes well-made gear. The Cuktech 15 Ultra boasts a capacity of 20,000 mAh, has a bright and beautiful screen that displays the charging speed of each port, and claims to have 140w output which is generally overkill but nice if you have a MacBook Pro (The highest end iPhone currently caps out at 40w tops, which is fairly fast for most people.). USB-C charging standards are annoying to keep straight and are only interesting if you have a bizarre obsession. What makes the 15 Ultra interesting is not that it has a high output, but that it has a mode dubbed “Beast Mode” that it claims allows for two simultaneous inputs of up to 165 watts (the internal meter capped at around 160w for me) for the majority of the time plugged in before it starts ramping down.

What this means is that, given adequate cables and bricks, the Cuktech 15 Ultra charges fast. Like, concerningly fast.

It should be noted that other power banks do actually do this, albeit at a way higher price point. Anker has a power bank that will take two inputs at a claimed maximum input of 240 watts, but that bank costs $200. I don’t know about you, but I don’t make $200 power bank money, but I do make $60 power bank money on a good day, which is what the 15 Ultra costs as of this writing. You will also need a few sufficiently fast chargers and cables if you wanna make the most of it. That’s an additional cost, but one that’s easier for me to swallow because I need those anyway for my various gadgets and gizmos. Having a spare GaN charger or two that can handle a total output of 100w or 140w is always useful.

What makes the Beast Mode or any disarmingly fast charging mode so refreshing is that it completely saves your ass if you are a deeply lazy or neurologically distractible person. Repeatedly I find myself in the following situation: my phone is hovering at like 36 percent, my power bank is empty, and I have to leave in 15-20 minutes. Once I get the correct number of chargers going, 15-20 minutes is precisely as much time as I need to dump a huge amount of juice into the power bank along with my phone. It is not that the charging feature saves a lot of time, but the time it saves is in the exact right place.

I should stress that this is not a rigorous testing of the parameters of the required charging cables, power adapters, safety and advertised battery duration of the Cuktech 15 Ultra. Lithium Ion batteries are complicated and that is long, tedious work that I respect. I do know the exact power testers to buy on Aliexpress if I ever decide to make that a thing for Aftermath, and maybe I will down the line. 

I do, however, regularly visit the blogs of guys who consistently do this kind of testing. Chargerlab and its more consistently updated Chinese language site Chongdiantou do teardowns and regular updates about new charging gear coming out of China, and it’s a fun way to see what’s on the horizon. There’s a German person named Chargingsheet who has their own subreddit devoted to USB chargers and cables who was impressed by the 15 Ultra (although found it to be a little large). TinkerVault’s testing of chargers and cables is useful when trying to find good gear, and it was very useful when trying to find enough juice to max out the Cuktech 15 Ultra.

This blog is not simply me endorsing the Cuktech 15 Ultra specifically – it’s well made enough, a very good deal for the features and comes with a nice cable. But there’s like five million charger brands out there right now. What I am marveling at is a feature that I expect will become standardized more and more in the future: the ability to crank as much juice as you can into a battery pack in the shortest time possible. Is charging a personal battery pack that fast a good idea? Is that hubris? Who can say. All I know is I have a learning disability that this helps with and the battery pack makes a really cool warp speed animation when you really get that sucker goin’.