Crap. It’s mid-February, you’ve just returned from a day beach vacation, landed, cleared customs, and returned to the Park ’n’ Fly with a suitcase full of Dominican Rum. Its 1:15 am, you try to start your F-150, and there’s nothing. Flip the key around and try again. Nothing. Give it a moment, try once more, and still, the sound of silence fills the freezing air.

You goof! It turns out you left the dome-light on in your rush to leave the country for Coronaville last week. Ten days later in the freezing cold, your battery is more barren than Whoville on Christmas morning. There are no electrons, no amps, no watts, and no chance that you’ll be going anywhere, or getting warm, anytime soon.

This is the sort of situation that devices like the Cyntur JumperPack Mini are fantastic for. One of a plethora of options available in the portable power market to boost dead car or truck batteries and more, this just-launched product works on a simple premise: charge it up at home, keep it in your car or truck, and use it for those just-in-case scenarios when your battery is toast.
The Cyntur JumperPack Mini is far from the only option in this type of device, though few features help this unit to stand apart in the crowd. Key among them include the Jumper Pack Mini’s ability to hold onto a charge for a full year, or some twice as long as competing products, says Cyntur. With the long-lasting storage of enough juice to jump-start up to 25 engines, the idea is simple: juice the Jumper Pack Mini by plugging it into an electrical outlet for a few hours, toss it in your glovebox, and forget about it.

And unlike those big clunky booster packs, this one will, in fact, fit in your glovebox. For all of the battery power available, the entire device is relatively small – about the size of an external computer hard-drive. That’s remarkable, given Cyntur’s claim that their latest in portable power can start even larger six and eight cylinder engines, unlike competing products that’ll only fire up four-cylinders.

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I tried the Jumper Pack to boost something a little bigger. After intentionally draining the (original and due-for-replacement) battery in my 2000 Dodge Viper with a 10-cylinder engine, I hooked up the JumperPack to the terminals, and fired the car up, virtually as if the battery was new.

Then, without recharging the unit, I lent it to a mechanic pal, Paul Kennaley, who brought it to work and boosted at least three more engines in the course of a few days. No recharging in between. I joined him for the final test: starting one derelict Jeep Liberty that had been sitting behind the shop since last august, had been buried in the snow all winter, and was deader than dead in the battery department.

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