BLUETTI Portable Power Station AC200P

Share on

There are few places that do not have the occasional power outage and some places get them more often than others. It may be snow taking down power lines, fire in a transformer or as here in California the power company shutting down power when there are high winds and the brush is dry to prevent wildfires.

We were not financially compensated for this post and the samples were provided to us for review purposes. The opinions are completely our own based on our experience with the products.

BLUETTI Power Station AC200P

When the power goes out, there are different levels of redundancy you can prepare for depending on what your needs are.

► Level 1 - Get out your flashlights, burn some candles, charge your phone with a power bank and cook your food on the outdoor BBQ, all while your food starts going bad in the fridge and defrosting in the freezer. This may work for a few hours before you have to start dumping bad food in the trash.

► Level 2 - You have prepared a little and invested in a smaller lithium battery power station that can power a fridge or freezer for a few hours, keep your internet router up and turn on a LED lightbulb for a few hours.

► Level 3 - You invest in a larger portable power station that is at least 2000 Wh, that will let you run a fridge/freezer for a couple of days along with your internet and a few select lights.

► Level 4 - You invest in a small freestanding gas generator that can power a few appliances, your internet and some lights indefinitely as long as you have enough gas and it will start.

For those of us in California, having a large lithium battery power station has been a great compromise. This summer we had a few smaller outages that lasted up to a couple of hours and a longer outage that lasted 36 hours. During the shorter outages we used a lithium power station to keep our internet running and charging our laptops while working from home, while for the longer outage we also powered a fridge stopping all our food from spoiling in the heat.

The Lithium power station we have used for the last year is the BLUETTI Portable Power Station AC200P and it has worked flawlessly and saved us a lot of food that would have spoiled and provided countless productive hours on our computers while working from home. During the longer outage, we put the power station in our kitchen and plugged in the fridge and ran extension cords to our internet router plus computers to be able to continue working.

You might ask why we did not opt for a gas generator as described above. They are less expensive and can run indefinitely as long as you have gas. Well, there any several reasons:
► We live in a dense neighborhood and running a generator even during an outage is NOT popular.
► Our power outages are typically relatively short. 1-24 hours are the most common.
► The essential items we need to power is a fridge and some electronics plus some lights in the evening, so a gas generator is somewhat overkill.

We actually had a gas generator (we purchased a few years) ago and had stored in the garage (after testing it) for the potential long outage. But herein lies is the problem, we did not use it for 2 years and when we tried to get it to start, we could not make that happen no matter what we tried. It got sold cheaply to someone that wanted to try to fix it up.

The power station is also amazing for limited off grid car camping. We got the power station just in time for a weekend camping trip to the California desert to photograph the night sky. At an isolated campsite inside a national park with no electrical hookup, we parked our car, put up the tent, rolled out the sleeping bags.

We had pulled in later than anticipated, but were able to fire up the microwave to heat dinner and boil water for coffee in our electric kettle. A few years ago, propane gas stoves were the only practical solution for preparing warm food outside of a camp fire. With the BLUETTI AC200P, it took us about the same time as in our own kitchen to prepare dinner at our campsite, with significantly fewer moving parts and no dirty cookware to wash.

Shooting the night sky with multiple cameras while using motorized star trackers and laptops to control the setup presents its own challenge if you are an avid photographer, especially if you need to bring fully charged batteries for each individual unit. With the BLUETTI AC200P, we plugged in everything to the 120v outlets, as we would at home and never worried about any equipment running out of juice in the middle of a 5-hour Milky Way timelapse. Needless to say, a power station will be a standard part of our equipment going forward no matter where we go off grid.

We are extremely happy with our BLUETTI Portable Power Station AC200P and it delivers all the power we need. We put it to a controlled test to determine how much power it could deliver. After first charging the unit to 100% overnight, we hooked it up to a 1200W heating fan to test exactly how much electricity it can store. We used a "Kill A Watt" meter to independently measure the electric output and found the total delivered electricity to be 1780 Wh over a 1 hour 30-minute timeframe at 1205Watts continuous load. This is in line with what we would expect given an expected approx. 20% efficiency loss when converting to AC power. The AC200P power station have 6x 110v outlets, 12v DC (in 3 different outlets) and both USB-C power delivery as well as regular USB charging options plus dual wireless charging pads.

You can charge it either using the included external AC power brick or though an DC inlet that may be connected to solar panels. We wish that we did not have to drag around and keep track of an external power brick when traveling with it. We also wish that it would charge faster. It takes almost 6 hours to charge from AC alone, but this is totally fine for most situations. We have not been able to test it charging from solar panels, but you can do that at the same time as using AC to shorten the charge time.

We also like the touch screen that lets you change various settings and keep track of charging state, charging rate from different sources as well as discharge rate and some log information.

We recently found a new use for it during the holiday season that will save us a few dollars. We have a lot of outdoor holiday light that come on during the peak electric rate hours in the eveing and we power them from the power station with electricity we charged it with after midnight at a much lower rate. It's plugged into a smart switch that come on at midnight to charge it. Buying such a power station for this purpose alone will not come close to pay for itself, but with it's many rates power cycles (3500+) we might as well put it to work on a daily basis.