Some time ago, I reviewed the SunJack Portable Solar Charger. It is an awesome piece of kit so when SunJack offered to send me their new LightStick for review, I couldn’t pass it up!

The SunJack LightStick is both flashlight and portable battery bank rolled into one. It has four illumination settings – high, medium, low, and flash/strobe. On high, it is about 350 lumens, which is roughly equivalent to a 40 watt bulb. Even at the low setting, there is plenty of light to see what you’re doing, that’s for sure.

Because of the stick shape to the light, it isn’t really directional. Instead, the light serves to illuminate a large area all at once, which is what you want in an emergency.

The different light modes are selected by pressing the power button on one end of the LightStick. Each press cycles to the next setting. Very simple and easy to use, even in pitch blackness.

I found that the battery lasts roughly five hours if the light is left sitting on the high setting. This meshed with the manufacturer claims. According to SunJack, at the lowest setting the light would last about 46 hours on a full battery charge.

When totally discharged, it took about 4 hours to charge the battery fully. Again, my experience was similar to what SunJack stated. There are four small blue LED lights at one end of the LightStick. These are the power indicators, each representing about 25% battery power.

At the opposite end of the stick from the power button is a removable, waterproof cap. Unscrewing it reveals two USB ports, one standard and one micro USB. These ports, coupled with the included mini USB cable, can be used to charge your cell phones or other devices. A full battery charge is supposed to be enough to charge up to three cell phones. I don’t own that many cell phones so cannot verify for certain if that’s true. However, I had no issues getting my own phone charged with plenty of power to spare.

These ports are also how you charge the LightStick. I used both my SunJack solar panel as well as a USB outlet converter.

The SunJack LightStick is waterproof to a depth of about six feet. This makes is rather useful around the house if you’re dealing with flooded basements. If you’re hiking or camping, you won’t have to worry about it being damaged by rains and such.

I haven’t had my LightStick long enough to verify this for certain but I’m told the battery will self-discharge at the low rate of 2% per month or so. This means that if you charge it fully and then just toss it into a closet, it should still retain about 75% of the battery power after a year. Pretty cool!

The SunJack LightStick measures a little over 10″ in length and is just under 1.5″ thick. It weighs about 10.4 ounces, so it isn’t the lightest addition to your pack but it is worth the extra weight, in my opinion.

You can find the SunJack LightStick on Amazon for around $40 right now. That’s a pretty good deal as this is high quality stuff. Highly recommended!