It depends on what you need powered. There is a clean dividing line.
When cords are fine
If everything you care about has a plug, run cords. A fridge, a router, a few lamps, phone chargers and a CPAP all plug in, and a station sitting in the hallway will run them without any installation at all. This covers most people in most outages and costs nothing extra.
When you need a switch
The moment the list includes something hard-wired, cords stop working. A gas furnace, a well pump, ceiling lighting and most heating controls have no plug. To power those you have to feed the circuit, which means connecting to the panel, which means a transfer switch.
A transfer switch also removes the real danger in improvised setups. Back-feeding a house through a socket can energise the utility line outside, and that is the scenario linemen get hurt in. A transfer switch makes it physically impossible to be connected to both sources at once.
Which Jackery switch
Three options, and they are not interchangeable.
- Manual Transfer Switch 120V 30A. Pre-wired with an L5-30 inlet, colour-coded wattmeters and a metal indoor cabinet. Jackery lists it for the 2000 Plus and 3600 Plus. You flip the circuits over by hand when the power goes out.
- Manual Transfer Switch 240V 50A. A CS6375 inlet, aimed at the Explorer 5000 Plus, and listed for the 2000 Plus or two 3600 Plus units when a parallel combiner is used.
- Smart Transfer Switch. The automatic option, Explorer 5000 Plus only. Jackery states a handover within 20ms, app monitoring and rooftop solar integration. Nothing in the house restarts when the grid drops.
Manual or automatic
Manual is cheaper and perfectly adequate if you are home when the power goes and do not mind walking to the panel. Automatic earns its money when something must not blink, or when outages happen while you are away.
Have it installed
All three connect to your electrical panel. That is electrician work in most jurisdictions, and it is worth doing properly for something that has to be safe on the worst night of the year. Jackery also asks owners of the Smart Transfer Switch to complete its installation request form after purchase so it can arrange the process.
Tell us which station you have and which circuits matter, and we will tell you which switch fits and whether a manual one will do.