Toyman01 (Moderately Supportive Dude) said:
My wife has a different gooloo jumper pack. It works. It holds its charge for a long time. For a jump start or two, I don't think you need anything special. It's much smaller than the traditional lead acid jump starters. For consumer purposes, I think something like this is the way to go.
I have a regular battery charger, 110v outlet and it has a 60a jump function. Works well too.
L5wolvesf said:californiamilleghia said:I got a small battery from a garden tractor and just put cable on it , also bought a leather purse to carry it at a yard sale :)
Did the purse match the battery?
ummm now the you ask , the shade of black was a little off , I think it had to much tan in it.....
Does anyone have experience with the Halo Bolt jump starter?
For the compact lithium battery jump packs, make sure you get one that has a high enough amperage rating. The smaller 400A packs struggle with even smaller engines, while a larger 1500A will start basically anything other than a gigantic marine diesel.
FWIW, the Audew is on sale right now for Amazon Prime Day.
My issue with lead acid batteries is maintaining them. Leave it in your car or on the shelf in the shop without charging it for three or four months and when you need it it will be dead. BTDT.
A lithium battery, 3 months later, will still have enough charge to start a car. My son used his to jump his Suburban the other day. Not just once, but 6 times over a span of 2 hours. The lithium pack still had 75% charge left in it.
Makes sense to me. I have a ton of experience with jump packs but it's generally been in a repair setting where they get used often enough to get recharged. This is the same environment that makes me pretty 'meh' on most of the compact lithium units as they generally cant start a car completely on their own unless it's a fairly easy case (same reason my Echo has a $22 lawnmower battery and most of my other cars dont). On the other hand there have been times that two full size jump packs was not enough to start some PITA diesels i've dealt with.
I think the sheer amount of online info about all the little jump packs is nice, but unfortunately cranking 'an engine' without knowing a whole bunch of other things is pretty anecdotal. Some cars are a LOT harder to crank than others, and unfortunately you can pretty much size up the limitations of a lot of these jump packs from 10+ ft away just by looking at the size of the leads. Since i actually have access to an old VAT-40 that is thankfully too dumb to stop me from pulling 500 actual amps out of something, if anyone wants to send me an array of lithium booster packs i'd be happy to compare all of them to a $49 Walmart Value battery that i will provide myself. 
In reply to Vigo (Forum Supporter) :
Here is some actual real world experience with the GooLoo I posted above.
Ford F53 chassis (RV) with a 460. According to Google, normal starting draw is 150-200 amps. Stone dead battery. It will start it from cold after sitting for weeks with no problems. I forget to turn off the isolator switch regularly and kill the start battery.
2002 Suburban. Normal start amp draw is 125. Battery at the click stage. No problem. Multiple cranks (6) without starting over the span of 2 hours while troubleshooting a crank no start problem.
Chevy Silverado. Stone cold dead battery. The battery was failing and would be dead after sitting 2 days. No problem.
Ford F450 with 6.0 diesel. Normal starter draw, 400-500 amps. Stone cold dead and had been sitting for months. Not happening. The glow plugs (120-160 amps per Google) would draw the jump pack down to 90% before you ever turned the key. The starter would just click.
Any other car I have hooked it up to it started with no issues.
It would be interesting to see how many amps you could actually get out of it before the magic smoke was released. It wouldn't be worth $70 though.
JNC660 gets my vote. Couple of our customers use those with no issues.
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