Quickly Charge Your Phone On the Go with the Energear 27W PD Car Charger

With people demanding more and more of their mobile phones, most people don't see their phones last past the late afternoon after a day of heavy use.  If you have an active lifestyle and spend a lot of time in the car for work, the Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger can quickly get your phone or tablet the charge that it needs.

The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger works with your 12V car's cigarette/DC charge port and has a single USB Type-C connector that can provide 27 watts of charging to your phone or tablet. 

The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger is also special in that it is one of the few car chargers in the market that have been certified by the USB Implementers Forum and bears that USB certification logo on its packaging. This logo shows that this charger meets the USB compliance specs and the USB Type-C port can provide up to 27 watts, and enjoys a high degree of compatibility with other USB certified devices. Note that however this charger actually stopped working which we found out after a while.

The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger supports two power profiles for charging- 15 watts (5 volts @ 3 amps) and 27 watts (9 volts @ 3 amps).

The packaging contains not only the charger but a 3 ft. USB Type-C to Type-C cable and user manual.

The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger comes in a small compact form factor that should fit well no matter where your car's DC charge port is located.

The Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger only comes with a single USB Type-C port but has enough power to support all phone and tablet models. If you don't need to charge a tablet but need two USB ports to charge two phones at the same time, Energear also offers the Energear 18W USB-C PD and 12W USB-A Charger.

To have a look at the Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger's power capabilities, we used the USB Power Test App from Granite River Labs with the Granite River Labs USB Power Delivery Compliance C2 Tester to produce the following test results.

The USB Power Test App first negotiates a power contract for every PDO supported by the Energear charger, and increases the load gradually to find the threshold where over current protection (OCP) kicks in and voltage and current start to drop for safety reasons.

The USB Power Test App reports out all the PDO's supported by the Energear charger and their OCP thresholds.

PDO	VAC	OCP (A)	%OCP	OCP Timeout (sec)	Voltage Drop(V)
PDO#1 Fixed: 5V 3A		3.34	111.3%	0.4	0.11
PDO#2 Fixed: 9V 3A		3.33	111.2%	0.4	5.07

The USB Power Test App from Granite River Labs takes this data to produce an I-V curve which graphically shows the relationship between voltage and current for each PDO. Interestingly unlike most non-PPS chargers, we can observe dramatic current fold-back behavior for the 9V 3A PDO where as the current increases beyond the OCP threshold, the voltage starts to bend down rather than immediately shutting off. In contrast the 5V 3A PDO just shows the voltage immediately shuts off when crossing the OCP threshold.

Using the USB Power Delivery Compliance C2 Tester from Granite River Labs to run just a subset of the full USB Power Delivery compliance test suite, a compliance failure was observed for the Energear 27W USB-C Car Charger even though the charger has been declared as USB-IF certified.

USB-IF High Level Mapping Summary

Sl No	Test Category	Test Group Description	Test Result
1	PHY_PRIMARY_TX	BMC Physical Layer Transmitter	PASS
2	PHY_PRIMARY_RX	BMC Physical Layer Receiver	PASS
3	PHY_PRIMARY_MISC	BMC Physical Layer Miscellaneous	PASS
4	PROT_PRIMARY	Protocol Specific Primary	FAIL
5	POWER_PRIMARY	Power Source/Sink Primary	PASS

Result Summary

Sl No	Test ID	Test Name	Test Result
1	TDA.2.1.1.1	TDA.2.1.1.1 BMC PHY TX EYE	PASS
2	TDA.2.1.1.2	TDA.2.1.1.2 BMC PHY TX BIT	PASS
3	TDA.2.1.2.2	TDA.2.1.2.2 BMC PHY RX INT REJ	PASS
4	TDA.2.1.2.1	TDA.2.1.2.1 BMC PHY RX BUSIDL	PASS
5	TDA.2.1.3.1	TDA.2.1.3.1 BMC PHY TERM	PASS
7	TDA.2.2.1	TDA.2.2.1 BMC PROT SEQ GETCAPS	PASS
8	TDA.2.2.2.1	TDA.2.2.2.1 BMC PROT SEQ CHKCAP P PC	FAIL
9	TDA.2.2.2.2	TDA.2.2.2.2 BMC PROT SEQ CHKCAP NOMARK P PC	PASS
13	TDA.2.2.7	TDA.2.2.7 BMC PROT BIST NOT 5V SRC	PASS
15	TDA.2.2.9	TDA.2.2.9 BMC PROT GSC REC	PASS
16	TDA.2.3.1.1	TDA.2.3.1.1 POW SRC LOAD P PC	PASS
17	TDA.2.3.2.1	TDA.2.3.2.1 POW SRC TRANS P PC	PASS

BMC Eye Diagram

Two of these chargers stopped working after a year and a half.