Me wearing the hat with the cable running to a power bank.
Like many middle-aged men, I have a big solar-powered area on the top of my head: It’s called a bald spot. If I work in the yard for too long, it turns very red and glows at night. So, I wear a hat but all of that lovely solar energy reflecting off my dome goes to waste — or it did until I tried the $129 EcoFlow Power Hat (currently $99 on sale), a new combination sun hat/solar power source.
There are eight tiny solar panels in the brim, but unless the sun is hitting them just right, you’re not going to get much power out of them.
If I wasn’t already clear: This is a truly ugly hat. Sun hats are not generally stylish but this thing looks like a melted flower pot or like a giant version of one of those awful flower pot holders made from vinyl records. I’m no fashionista but the Oasis reunion made bucket hats cool again and wider-brimmed hats like the Tilley TS1 keep the sun off without looking like you’ve been whacked, Wile E. Coyote style, by a falling satellite dish. I’m a big fan of practicality over style, but there are limits, especially as it’s not very practical.
All of the electronics in the hat mean that you can’t wash it. When my baseball cap gets grubby, sweaty and covered in the soil of hard labor, I can throw it in the wash. Try that with the EcoFlow Power Hat and you’ll destroy it. You also need to have a cable connecting the hat to the phone, which isn’t very practical when you are trying to dig out weeds. I ended up running a cable down the back of my shirt, which just made the whole thing look even more foolish.
The Power Hat needs 100 hours to charge an iPhone 17 Pro, if the phone is off.
Many of the products I test end up being a case of a great idea but poor execution. The practicalities of manufacturing products and the compromises of real-world engineering often undermine the intended purpose of the product. However, at $129 full price or $99 on sale if you buy direct from EcoFlow, EcoFlow Power Hat is one of the rare exceptions that is a bad idea with bad execution.
It’s ugly and has solar panels that are too small to be effective for, well, anything. It might be better if they went with a flat cap design, or a sahara or hiking hat design with the solar panels on the top or neck flap instead. It’s also an inferior solution to simply getting a fast and compact portable charger, like the InfinityLab InstaGo 5000 or Anker 523 PowerCore Slim 10K PD. Another alternative is using a larger portable solar panel, which you can pair with a power station or attach to your backpack as you hike to charge your devices, as with the Bluetti Handsfree 2.
All of these options will provide you with more power than the EcoFlow Solar Hat, and they’ll do it better and faster. So keep the solar panels off your head and stick ‘em on your roof instead.
