I’ve found a decent portable battery and charging system that I have just begun to use for my outdoor adventures. Two products landed on my desk: the Bluetti AC70 portable lithium power station and a Bluetti DC-DC charger known as the Charger 1. Okay, I’ll give them a try, I thought. It looked easy enough to hook up the Charger 1, and these portable power stations are self-explanatory. So why not?
So far, I’ve used the AC70 to power my outdoor hot water service, which I use for showers when working on my under-construction beach house, to recharge my laptop when working on the road whether inside a caravan or, yes, a tent, and to make toast. A lot of toast.
BLUETTI AC70 FEATURES
Let’s take a quick look at some of the AC70’s features. It contains a 768Wh (24Ah) internal LiFePO4 battery and a 1000W inverter. However, the AC70 contains a ‘Power Lifting’ mode, accessible via the Bluetti app, which boosts the inverter’s capability to up to 2000W for powering high-current-draw heating devices such as kettles and hair dryers.
I have a cheap Kmart kettle at home that draws 1850 to 2200W. In Power Lifting mode, the AC70 wanted to boil the water but Kmart’s cheapest kettle simply drew too much power, with the inverter cutting out well before the water was hot enough for a cuppa. That said, the ability to boost the inverter’s output via Power Lifting mode up to 2000W is a fantastic feature. Sadly, my old kettle was simply too power-hungry, even for this surge power function.
My toaster, on the other hand, posed no such problem for the Bluetti AC70. In fact, my toaster draws from 780 to 920W, well within spec of the AC70 without resorting to Power Lifting mode. In order to give myself an idea of the kind of performance I could expect from this unit, I charged the battery to 100 per cent, which takes about 1.5 hours on AC power from dead flat when using the Turbo-Charging mode, or about 45 minutes to 80 per cent SOC. Turbo-Charging mode is also accessed in the app. There are, in fact, three charging modes: Turbo, Standard and Silent. In Silent mode, it’ll produce 45db of noise, but it’ll take longer to charge the unit.
With the AC70 fully charged, I cycled my toaster 10 times on a medium setting, depleting the battery to 47 per cent capacity. Running the toaster another five times brought it down to 21 per cent. The toaster pulled just over 800W each time.
The AC70 has a built-in digital screen that provides at-a-glance information concerning the state of charge, any AC or DC input and of course, electrical output, whether AC or DC.
It contains two AC outlets, a couple of USB-A and USB-C outlets, as well as a cigarette-style 12V port.
Naturally, it can be charged off solar panels, too, with a 500W solar input maximum. But what if there was another way? I’m being facetious: when it comes to charging batteries, there’s always another way…
BLUETTI CHARGER 1
In this case, I’m talking about the Bluetti Charger 1. The AC70 will set you back about $800, while the Charger 1 will lighten your wallet by about $400, though on the Bluetti website it appears you can buy them as a bundle and save a little money. In any case, it could be money well spent.
The Charger 1 is compatible with all vehicles that have either a 12V or 24V battery and it comes with everything you’ll need to get charging: the unit itself, the cabling to connect it to your vehicle’s alternator, and some mounting brackets and screws. It really is just a case of locating your preferred mounting point, running the cables through the firewall (not always easy, particularly on newer cars), and connecting them.
The fan-cooled Charger 1 is capable of making up to 560W (50A input, 10A output), but the electrical wizardry of the unit monitors the car’s battery voltage and adjusts its output accordingly. It will also automatically stop drawing power from the car’s battery a few seconds after the engine is turned off, but while the engine is running, the Charger 1 will remain active, though it can be controlled through the app, so you could ask your passenger to check on the state of the battery as you drive or turn it off.
I’ve used the Charger 1 a few times now. The first time, I didn’t realise the Charger 1 needed to be ‘told’ via the app which device it was charging and drove a couple of hours to the Hilltop Caravans National Gathering in Nagambie, Vic, achieving just 218W of input. But I knew something wasn’t right – the device was supposed to charge at rates up to 560W and the AC70 can accept up to 500W.
Back home, reading the manual (which is what I should have done in the first place), I realised my mistake. For the purposes of testing, I depleted the battery once again, this time to 22 per cent, hooked it up to the charger and it began immediately putting in a maximum of 490W – much better! In less than an hour, the Charger 1 had charged the AC70 up to 66 per cent, and half an hour later, it was at 100 per cent SOC. As it approached 100 per cent, the input reduced to under 300W and then shut itself off once the battery hit 100 per cent.
Think about that. Within 1.5 hours, I’d recovered about 80 per cent charge into the battery. It has, in a sense, turned my car into a kind of generator, overcoming the issue of charging the battery when the sun isn’t shining. I can just idle the engine for a while!
I can’t help but compare these charge rates with what I have achieved in the past off a couple of 80W solar panels past when charging a different battery (140W in good sun), or when charging yet another lithium battery station from my vehicle’s cigarette-style port (just over 100W). In that respect, the Charger 1 is a revelation.
Overall, this is a good, quiet unit. I am still working out where and how to mount it permanently, so I have it simply sitting in the back of the car for now, which is not ideal, but I’ll get around to it.
I’m still playing with both the AC70 and the Charger 1, and haven’t used them enough to provide a longer-term assessment, but from what I can tell so far, and having spoken to a number of others who have used and abused Bluetti gear, I think these products will be good and faithful companions for my outdoor travels.
In particular, I like the Power Lifting mode of the AC70, giving me that little extra juice should I need it, while the simplicity of the Charger 1 can’t be ignored. Literally, just plug it in, turn on your engine, and away you go. The app is intuitive and easy, too. I can’t see any reason – so far – why I won’t continue to use this gear for the foreseeable future. You just can’t go wrong by adding a decent portable lithium power station and a DC-DC charger to your kit.
More information: www.bluettipower.com.au
