How long will your battery run a Starlink Mini?
Punch in your battery and how hard you're using the dish. This works it out for a Mini running straight off 12V through a step-up booster — the efficient way, no inverter.
Run the Mini straight off 12V and it lasts longest — no inverter, no wasted watts. The catch is voltage. At night your fridge and lights pull the battery down, and a sagging 12V makes the Mini reboot at 9pm even though it was fine at noon. A step-up booster holds the voltage so the dish stays online.
Shop 12V power for the Mini →How the numbers work
It's energy in, energy out. Your battery holds so many watt-hours (Wh). The Mini draws so many watts. Divide one by the other and you've got hours — but two things trip people up.
- You can't use the whole battery. A lithium (LiFePO4) battery you can safely run down to about 10% left, so roughly 90% is usable. An AGM you should only pull to about half before you start killing its life — so a 100Ah AGM gives about the same real runtime as a 55Ah lithium. The calculator already accounts for this.
- The booster takes a small cut. Stepping 12V up to feed the Mini costs a few percent in conversion. We've allowed for it. It's nothing next to the 15%-plus you'd lose running the dish through an inverter.
Why the Mini is the off-grid pick
The Standard dish pulls 75–100W and needs mains power, so off-grid you're forced through an inverter, burning battery to make AC. The Mini sips 15–35W and runs directly off 12–48V DC. On the same battery it lasts roughly three times longer. For touring, caravanning and off-grid, it's not close.
Make your battery last longer
- Turn it off when you're not using it. The biggest saving there is. Use the "hours per day" figure above — running the Mini 8 hours instead of 24 roughly triples your days between charges.
- Add solar. Even a modest panel topping up through the day means the battery only has to cover the evening, not the whole cycle.
- Feed it clean 12V. A booster that holds voltage under load stops the brown-out reboots — which waste power on constant restarts and drop your connection at the worst time.