Olight Ostation X AA Review – Automatic AA Charging & Storage

Pricing & Availability

Olight sent me this charger and 32 batteries in exchange for an honest review. It will be available for purchase starting on February 28th, 2025 and MSRP is $120 USD. Here’s the official product page and the Amazon US page. It will be on sale for $100 USD until March 2nd. There are also bundles with batteries or other products available here, but those may only be available during the sale.

What comes in the box?

Ostation X comes in a nice box with a carry handle. Inside is:

The charger itself
USB-C to USB-C cable
Weirdly enormous user manual
30W USB-C Power brick
Olight NiMH batteries (optional add-on)

Design & Construction

The design is pretty cool, with transparent orange compartments top and bottom for batteries. I like the rolling door on top. That top hopper is completely removable to clear jams, and you can operate the charger like that if you need to fit it in a smaller space. The inside of the bottom hopper slides out the front to clear jams.

Build quality is fine. It’s pretty much all plastic. There are some threaded inserts on the bottom for a wall mounting bracket that Olight sells as as an optional accessory on their website only.

Size & Measurements

Olight Olantern Stretch | XTAR PB2S | Olight Ostation X AA | Maglite 2C

Measurement	Measured (mm)
Height	179
Height (top hopper removed)	195
Width	97.3
Depth	167
Weight (g)	1410

Operation

Operation is super simple. Drop batteries into the top hatch and wait a few hours until they get dropped into the bottom hopper. Ideally, have enough spare batteries that you can keep charged ones in the bottom hopper at all times. It doesn’t matter which direction the batteries are facing, which is really cool. There’s a lever door on the bottom hopper that only lets one battery out at a time. It came with a card that says not to load batteries unless the light is solid white, but I loaded batteries whenever I wanted and it seemed to work fine.

Indicator: The indicator ring on the front of the charger will glow blue to indicate charging status, and more of the ring will light up as the batteries inside charge. It glows solid white when it’s awake and idle. The light turns off when it’s asleep.

Errors: If any batteries can’t be charged because they’re faulty or the wrong chemistry, they’ll be deposited into a separate error tray. The tray is held in by a push-to-release latch, and it has a light on the front that glows when its full. When I tried putting in a AAA, it wasn’t recognized and it ended up in the bottom charged hopper with all the charges AAs.

Here’s what the charging section looks like with the top hopper removed.

Reliability: Around 40% of the good batteries I put in got spit out into the error tray the first time I charged them. There’s a sticker in the tray suggesting to clean the battery’s contacts, and that worked every time to get the error batteries to charge. That’s still a lot more errors than I would expect, but none of the batteries gave me repeat errors so it might just be some kind of factory coating on the ends of the batteries that I had to wipe off. I also had one instance of the charger not recognizing a battery was inserted. I just power cycled it and then it recognized and charged the battery.

Charge Time

This charger is pretty slow. The user manual says 3.8hrs to charge 1-4 batteries at default speed, but I found it took a bit longer. You can increase charging speed using the app if you like, but I don’t think the slow speed is an issue. Best practice is to keep fully charged extras in the bottom hopper so you don’t have to worry about charging speed.

Compatibility

Ostation X will charge NiMH batteries, and that’s it. No Li-ion and no LifePO4. There are two versions, one for AAs and one for AAAs. That’s pretty limited compatibility.

I wish it charged both AA and AAA sizes and also supported Li-ion chemistry for 14500 and 10440 cells. Perhaps there’s some technical incompatibility that makes that impossible, like risk of mistaken battery chemistry. It makes me wonder if an “Ostation X Pro” is around the corner that will do all of the above. Like how they made Arkfeld and Arkfeld UV largely obsolete when they released Arkfeld Pro.

Power comes in through USB-C ports on the back of the device. There are two of them so they can be daisy chained to power Ostation X plus another device (like the AAA Ostation X) off a single power source. The power source must be 18W USB-PD rated minimum, but Olight includes a 30W USB-C power brick so you can daisy chain without losing charging speed.

Noise

Most chargers are totally silent because they have no moving parts. This one makes a variety of mechanical noises. When you turn it on and occasionally when it’s sitting still, it will make quiet whirring noises while it probes for batteries inside. When a battery is finished charging, it drops down into the bottom hopper and that’s jarring if you’re not expecting it. It has a cooling fan but I never noticed it making any noise. These aren’t issues, but it’s something to be aware of. I found it distracting to keep in my home office so it would be better suited to live in a closet, garage, or laundry room where random noises won’t be disturbing.

The App

The app lets you increase charging speed and access some telemetry features like charge time and temperature. You don’t have to create an account to use the app, which is excellent. As a matter of fact you don’t have to use the app at all. All the functionality you need is in the charger itself. Ultimately I think the app is a gimmick and Ostation X would be a better product if it were cheaper and had no app connectivity.

Conclusion

Ostation X is the best solution for charging a lot of NiMH AAs or AAAs (depending on the version you choose). It’s well designed, dead simple to use, and there’s nothing else like it on the market. If you go through AA/AAA batteries fast and need a reliable, easy charging solution, Ostation X is for you.

One thing I know about Olight is they are excellent at iteration. I hope they release an updated version soon that does BOTH sizes (AA and AAA) and/or TWO chemistries (NiMH and Li-ion). That would be a lot more compelling for the price.

Thanks to Olight for sending me this light for review!