If you can actually believe this, there are still places that you can go in your life where there won’t be available electricity. It’s 2023, people! There is good news, though. Electricity is portable now, and I am not talking about those little power banks that charge your phone. I am talking about a hub to power or charge anything you can carry with you on your journey. The Bluetti EB70S Portable Power Station is built for whatever adventures you can think of.
The Bluetti EB70S is an 800W power station with a 716Wh LiFePO4 battery and should last more than 2500 life cycles. It has four 120V AC Outlets, two 100W USB-C ports, two 5V USB-A ports, a 12V DC car charger outlet, two 12V DC5521 ports and a 15W wireless charging pad on the top of the power station.
The 21.4lb Bluetti EB70S Portable Power Station has a handle that folds in flush to the casing to make carrying this chonky accessory a whole heck of a lot easier. On the sides are some small ventilation points to keep the power station from overheating, and on the front, you’ll find a whole lot more than the aforementioned outputs.
The sets of AC and DC outputs can be individually powered on and off to slow the draining of the battery by cutting off power to unused outlets. There is also a light with three stages of brightness and an emergency flashing mode. The display is a brilliant LED screen that is easily visible in the brightest conditions and will give you status on battery life as well as current output and input wattage.
When I say input, there are a lot of ways to get power back into the Bluetti EB70S. It comes with an AC adapter to charge the power station at home, a car charging cable to power up on the go and a DC7909 Male to MC4 solar charging cable for when you are off the grid (solar panels sold separately, but I happen to have one, so I can take you through how it performs).
“The Bluetti EB70S Portable Power Station is built for whatever adventures you can think of.”
Given the size of the battery, charge times are a little lengthy but not unreasonable. Plugged into an outlet, you will be fully charged in roughly 4-4.5 hours. Plugging into a 12V car charging outlet will take you about 7.5 hours to charge from empty, and solar charging is where things can be choppy. Different panel wattage and variables like exposure to the sun, orientation of the panel and temperature (charging is negatively impacted if it is too hot out) can greatly affect the charge time.
Given ideal conditions: a 200W solar panel (the highest wattage the EB70S can take) on a clear day when the panel is constantly adjusted to face the sun, you are looking at 4-4.5 hours to charge, but in my testing, with an 80W panel where we were away from the campsite for portions of the day (thus not re-orienting the panel), we got it charged about 50% before it got dark out.
We put the Bluetti EB70S through a barrage of tests in real-life situations to test the maximum potential of the power station. We started with a trip to the beach, where we used it to power the pump that inflated our two stand-up paddleboards (and deflated them at the end of the day), all the while charging three phones (1 on the wireless pad and two plugged into the USB-C ports) and a Bluetooth speaker (plugged into a USB-A port). A 4-hour trip barely moved the needle in our battery life. We estimate it used up approximately 14% of the battery over the course of the four-hour trip.
“The Bluetti EB70S is a heavy-duty power station, so it stands to reason that it comes at a heavy-duty price.”
Another test I performed was to set up my small projector and, powered by only the Bluetti EB70S, watched more than 4 hours of content and used just shy of 40% of the power station’s capacity. But the biggest test was when we took the Bluetti camping for a week, this time with the solar panel to help replenish the EB70S’ battery over the course of the day to see if we could get the entire week out of it.
For day-to-day use, it was incredibly easy for Bluey (yes, we named it) to handle our power needs, but I introduced a wrinkle in the test when I plugged in my CPAP machine. As someone with sleep apnea, I have a hard time camping because any sites that are not powered are not an option for me. I have to be able to run my machine, or I won’t be able to breathe through the night. I only stayed overnight for the last night in the event that it didn’t work as expected.
The advertisements claim that you can run a CPAP for 16 hours on the Bluetti EB70S, but to be able to sustain a week of camping, it needs to perform at that level while also taking on whatever you throw at it through the day AND have the good conditions required to charge it back up. I can happily report no issues with the overnight usage.
The CPAP worked great, and the Bluetti never failed me. It used over 50% of the battery (more than advertised), but CPAPs are not created equal. So, I wouldn’t recommend the Bluetti EB70S for this scenario, but only this scenario. Use it for your CPAP if you are expecting power outages or virtually any other scenario, just not a week of off-the-grid sleep apnea treatment.
The Bluetti EB70S is a heavy-duty power station, so it stands to reason that it comes at a heavy-duty price. At $499.99 USD, it is actually reasonable, given its size and versatility. It has a lot more outputs than cheaper options, so you can use it to power a lot more gear at once. It can power small appliances with ease and can make any place you take it feel like home.
