How long can my Onefinity CNC run from an Anker SOLIX F3800?

Powering a Onefinity CNC and Makita router using an Anker SOLIX F3800 portable power generator.

Hi, I’m Mike Schienle and thanks for joining me. I’m making a set of cribbage boards using my CNC, which is powered from an Anker SOLIX F3800 Portable Power Station. The prototype cribbage board was shown as this video started. I’ll carve 3 cribbage boards out of hard maple in this video, but we’ll just focus on the center one to keep the video short.

This video is not sponsored in any way.

This takes about 2.5 hours to run in real time. The F3800 performed perfectly and still had 73% battery life left. I had some cold weather issues with the tape and glue used to hold the boards down. You may notice some screws appear in the video to take care of the problem. This required some steps to be partially rerun, moving our total time to over 3 hours. This implies I could run a similar workload for about 12 hours before draining the battery. Since this isn’t an in depth woodworking video, I won’t get into details about the project, other than I designed a set of 3 football-themed cribbage boards with four bits, two depths and about 1,200 peg holes.

Since this F3800 is brand new, I wanted to ease into it. And by that I mean I did this in an unheated garage on January 14th, 2024 when the outside temperature was -8 degrees in northwest Indiana. I don’t know the inside shop temperature, but my cup of coffee partially froze, so let’s call it mid teens.

Our F3800 was purchased to provide additional power for my woodworking shop. This rural home was built in 1969 and a home-based woodworking hobby was clearly not part of the plan. The garage has a single 120 volt, 20 amp outlet, with 100 amp service to the home, so there is not much room for electrical growth before things get expensive.

A CNC uses a controller, or tiny computer, several motors that drive the axes, a palm router in my case, and dust collection. All of that is more than the single garage circuit can reliably manage. I will run the CNC controller, motors and router from the F3800 and the dust collection from the wall outlet.

We have been looking at various solar and battery generators over the last couple years and never really felt the price to performance was right for our needs until the Anker F3800 came along. Between the 3800 watt-hour capacity, 6000 watt output, 120 and 240 volt outlets and solar inputs, it’s very well matched to the woodworking I do.

I hope this has been useful and please let me know if you have any questions or comments about this Anker SOLIX F3800.

Thanks for watching.

Contacts:
Email - mike@windridgewoodcrafts.com
Website - https://windridgewoodcrafts.com
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/WindRidgeWoodCrafts/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/windridgewoodcrafts/

Non-Affiliate Links (software, tools and components I use and recommend for no commission):
Anker SOLIX F3800: https://www.anker.com/products/a1790
CNC Slab Flattener Utility - https://windridgewoodcrafts.com/utilities/cnc_flat/
Vectric VCarve Pro - https://www.vectric.com/products/vcarve-pro
Onefinity Journeyman CNC - https://www.onefinitycnc.com
Cadence Manufacturing and Design (router bits) - https://www.cadencemfgdesign.com