Bluetti EB3A budget portable power station review
The baby Bluetti is a highly-portable battery pack with multiple charging and re-charging options for personal or professional use. Suck electricity on a budget, in almost any flavour, out in the bush…
What you're looking at essentially is a lithium-ion phosphate battery pack which, in practice, out in the bush, gives you a multitude of electricity sucking potential.
It's ridiculously portable, amazingly good value and if you need to sustain your digital nomad office in a ute or a van, or maybe you need to take it with you for the weekend in your four-wheel drive for camping or possibly onto your boat - this baby Bluetti will do all of that - without breaking the bank.
You get pure sine wave 240 volts AC, you get USB-A, high powered USB-C, 12 volts DC, and if that's not enough, there's even an integrated inductive charge pad on top for your phone.
Bluetti has sponsored this report, but that does not mean they get any input into what I say - they don’t - and nor did they get to see this report in advance before it was published. They didn’t. This review is my honest personal opinion, supported by facts.
Doing some rough calculations, you’re going to get three and a half laptop recharges; you can use the high-powered USB-C port with 100 watts coming out which is a lot, the other USB-As are substantially less powerful at 15 watts standard.
Your 268 watt hours is also going to offer about 25 recharges of your smartphone, or you could run 25 watts of led lighting which is pretty bright around a campsite and in the domain of LEDs for about 10 hours. Or you could probably get away with 5 to 10 watts of led lighting for most camping, to be more conservative. You could do that for days on end with a unit like the EB3A, especially if you plug in the solar or trickle charge it from your car’s 12-volt DC setup.
You’ll get about three recharges for a 5 amp-hour 18-volt power tool, and that’s just using the charger that came with the tool batteries and you plug it straight into the 240-volts like you would in the garage at home.
Another nice little feature is the general purpose worklight which, if you're packing up after dark, that's pretty handy. You can increase or decrease the brightness, and then if you’re stranded or lost in a remote location trying to help a rescue helicopter locate you in the bush or something, there is built-in SOS flashing function. But hopefully, it won't come to that.
You can pump 200 watts of solar into the EB3A, while you are also using it to run something else, because there's also a smaller solar array, PV120, which you can plug in with one simple cord and two plugs. It'll deliver 120 watts of solar on a bright day.
What this means is you can have your battery charger plugged in recharging a couple of batteries, and at the same time you can be recharging your laptop, and the solar can be charging the Bluetti, so you don't have to separate those two modes of operation.
This aspect extends the durability of the unit beyond the 268 watt hours because if you're pulling 200 out of it and putting 200 into it, the state of charge will not diminish over time.
It also extends the lifetime of the Bluetti because you’re not completely draining the unit’s battery before recharging it, so you’re reducing the full discharge cycles.
Happily, you can use all of the EB3A’s outlets at once, subject to not overloading the device. So, you could have your phone on top using the inductive (wireless) charging pad, you could have a couple of USB devices plugged in at the front, plug in your regular laptop cord into the 240-volt plug like in the office, and if all of a sudden you go over the 600 watts of maximum discharge, the unit will trip.
Or, if the thing last device you just turned on causes it to surge by going over 1200 watts briefly, it's surge protected at 1200 in addition to the steady state trip it’ll do at 600. If you do trip the unit, that's no big deal; you can just unplug some stuff and hit reset and go again.
But do unplug some additional components before resetting and going again, otherwise you'll just be in the same predicament.
For more in-depth info on the Bluetti EB3a watch the full report above for pricing, an informative discussion on value, and some thoughts on how, when and why you might consider one of these budget Bluetti babies for your usage case.
Check out more Bluetti reviews and applications here:
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