Phone Charging Station Sizes: How to Choose a J8, J24 or J48 for the Room

Phone charging station sizes come down to one question: how many people at one spot want a power bank in the room's busiest hour? JB Charging sells three sizes. The 8-bank J8 Pro fits a front desk, a host stand or a one-room bar of up to about 300 people. The 24-bank J24 Pro tower fits rooms of roughly 300 to 1,500 and mall concourses. The 48-bank J48 Pro is for the rare spot where an even bigger crowd passes one point.

Get the size right and the math moves fast. Say a J24 in a busy concourse rents twice a day at $5. After a venue share and upkeep, you'd net about $195 a month and cover its roughly $3,550 delivered cost in about 18 months. Put the same tower in a one-room bar that rents 20 times a month and it takes over 5 years. The full math, and a way to test a room before you buy, are below.

Phone charging station sizes at a glance

What doesn't change with size: every model has a tap-to-pay reader (Apple Pay, Google Pay, contactless cards), built-in 4G with Wi-Fi backup, a standard-outlet plug, no monthly fees and a 3-year limited warranty. So the choice comes down to banks, screen and floor space. Prices are list prices at the time of writing.

Look at the last row and the order flips. The J48 is the cheapest station per bank, and that's the trap: a bank only earns when someone rents it.

Which size fits which room

For the exact spot inside a venue, see our 10 placement rules.

Size for the busiest hour, not the busiest day

A station can only rent the banks it's holding: about 6 ready at the rush in a J8, 20 in a J24 and 40 in a J48. The question is whether more people than that want one at the same spot in the same hour, before the first renters bring theirs back.

The headcounts in the table are rules of thumb. For a specific room, ask the bartender, host or front-desk lead: "On your busiest night, how many guests ask you to charge a phone, and when?" That's your starting number, not a forecast, and most hours are much quieter. A handful spread across the night is a J8 room. A dozen in the hour after the game or the show lets out is a tower spot.

Picture a 400-person sports bar at 10:45 on a playoff night. The game ends, everyone checks scores and calls rides at once, and eight people want a bank in the next half hour. A J8 with 6 ready is empty by 11:00, and the next two guests walk up to an empty station and decide it doesn't work.

A small box in a big room fails twice. It runs out at the rush, and on a busy floor a 16-inch box disappears behind the crowd, while a 71-inch tower works as its own sign.

A big box in a small room fails quietly. Extra slots don't create renters. A tower in a 60-seat bar costs about 3.7 times a bundled J8 and takes floor the owner would rather give to a table.

Same spot, two sizes: the hypothetical math

Here are both mistakes in dollars. Every input is an assumption for illustration. Say each rental brings in $5 (the default is $3 per 30 minutes with a $20 daily max, set per station, so some rentals are one period and some run longer). Say the venue takes 10% of gross out of your 80%, so you keep 70%; many venues host for free as a guest amenity, and others take a share you negotiate. Say upkeep, meaning replacement banks and service visits, runs $15 a month. A J8 from the 5-pack costs about $950 with its share of shipping, and a J24 about $3,550 with freight, at list prices at the time of writing.

In the big room, the tower is the upside. In this example, the J8 covers its cost sooner, but the tower nets $105 more a month from the same spot. Over the 3-year warranty period, that's roughly $3,470 ahead for the tower (36 x $195, minus $3,550) against $2,290 for the J8 (36 x $90, minus $950). You can always buy another station; you can't always get another concourse.

In the small room, the tower is the trap. In this example, it gets the same 20 rentals at about 3.7 times the station cost and needs more than 5 years to cover itself, well past the warranty period. And the last row is a reminder that no size fixes a spot nobody passes.

All figures are before taxes and your time. JB's 20% already covers card processing and the 4G; slow months would stretch every number in the last column. The concourse row describes a strong spot, and many spots do far less. Malls often add a placement fee, and our mall playbook runs that math. Before you buy a tower on numbers like these, test the room (last section).

Counter, stand or wall: fitting a J8

The J8 needs a bit over half a square foot of counter and an outlet within reach of its 60-watt adapter. There are three ways to set it up:

• On a counter at a front desk, host stand or coat check, where staff will notice when something's off.
• On the $150 steel stand when there's no free counter, like in a restroom hallway. It puts the J8 at about table height.
• On a wall mount where a stand would crowd a narrow hallway. Ask about one when you order, and get the venue's OK in writing before anyone drills.

The 5-pack includes 2 stands, the 10-pack 6 and the 20-pack 10, so count the spots with no free counter before you order.

The lit "Charge Your Phone" header that comes with every J8 is what lets a 16-inch box hold its own in a dim bar. It can't do that on a bright mall concourse, which is why concourses get towers.

Towers: footprint, delivery and the J48

A J24 needs under 2 square feet of floor, a wall at its back and an outlet within reach, with no extension cord. It weighs 72.8 lb and ships by freight ($250, as shown at checkout at the time of writing), so plan on two people and a hand truck. Once you're set up in the portal, its 3D Viewer previews a J24 in the venue before you pitch it. That answers "we don't have room" better than a spec sheet does.

Want something between a J8 and a J24? Two J8s from a 5-pack cost about $1,900, roughly half a J24, and cover two spots with 16 banks. But each is still a 16-inch box. Pick the tower when the crowd passes one point and has to see the station from a distance.

The J48 is built to order for the largest rooms, places where one spot sees the whole crowd. It takes about 2.5 square feet. Plan around three facts:

• It weighs 130.1 lb and arrives on a pallet ($300 freight at the time of writing), so someone has to be there on a weekday to receive it.
• It stands 80.7 inches tall, taller than many doorways. Before you order, measure every doorway, tight turn and elevator between the loading dock and the spot.
• It's rated at 290 watts and plugs into a standard outlet, so it needs no construction.

Before you order one, ask whether a single spot really gets the whole crowd. Two J24s give you the same 48 banks for $6,598 list, against $4,299 for one J48, so the J48 wins only when the crowd truly comes to one place. If it splits across three areas, put a station in each: people rarely cross an arena to find a charger.

What screen size does for ads

Every screen shows the price and a "Rent a power bank" button. The rest is ad space you own and update remotely from the portal. You keep 100% of the ad revenue you sell, but you find the advertisers yourself, and no sale is promised.

Size for rentals first: a bigger screen doesn't find advertisers any more than extra slots find renters. Where the room already calls for a tower, its 23.8-inch portrait screen reads down an aisle like a poster, which is an easier sell to a local business than a 10.1-inch screen people only see up close. The J8's screen suits the venue's own specials or the shop next door. Read how to sell local ads on your screens.

Not sure a room can fill a tower? Prove it with a J8

If you own J8s, you don't have to guess. A J8 is easier to miss in a big room than a tower, so give it every advantage: put it on a stand, header lit, at the most visible point in the room for 30 days. Then watch two things in the portal:

• Active Rentals lists every bank that's out and for how long. Check it at the busiest hour.
• Venue Insights flags stations that are low on or out of charged banks. If the station is down to zero at the same hour on several nights, the room wants more banks.

If the J8 keeps running out, you have your case for a tower: upgrade the spot to a J24 and move the J8 to your next venue. If it never runs low, you've saved the price of a tower. If it barely rents even there, a bigger box won't fix it; the spot or the venue is the problem, so read when to move a station.

Next step

List the venues you're working on, with the number of people in each room at its busiest hour and what staff tell you about charge requests. Bring it to a call with our team, and we'll go through which station fits each spot, including where a J8 is enough. Specs and current list prices are on the stations page.

Examples are illustrative only, not a forecast or a typical result. What a station earns depends on the venue, placement, pricing, local demand, and how actively you run it.