Product reviews, comparisons, runtime tests
Two numbers often dominate the conversation when new homeowners start looking at portable power stations: price and capacity. But what those numbers don’t tell you is how a unit actually performs when the lights go out. I’ve tested 11 different power stations over four hurricane seasons, and I’ve learned that the real story is always … Read more
182 pounds. That’s the shipping weight of the Bluetti EP500 Pro. Ray found this out the same way most contractors do — not by reading the spec sheet first, but by watching two delivery men struggle it off a freight pallet and wheel it into a garage while the homeowner stood there looking mildly horrified. “I … Read more
Donna asked me the question that I realized I’d never actually measured properly. We were standing in my driveway after the second day of a 2024 outage — the power station inside was at 31% — and she looked at the 220W panel propped against the fence and said: “So how many hours until that … Read more
Donna called me on a Wednesday afternoon in August while I was in my garage with a thermometer, a Kill A Watt meter, a 5,000 BTU window AC unit, and an EcoFlow DELTA Pro. She wanted to know if she could keep her bedroom cool during the next outage without running a generator. “Just tell … Read more
3:14 a.m. That’s the time the power went out during Hurricane Ian’s outer bands moving through Jacksonville in 2022. I know the exact time because my ResMed AirSense 10 beeped once, went dark, and the absence of white noise woke me up instantly. I’d been using a power station for my fridge for months. I had … Read more
23. That’s how many standby generators Ray has installed in the past 18 months in the Jacksonville area alone. Generac units, Kohler units, a handful of Briggs & Stratton machines he doesn’t recommend anymore. He’s pulled permits on all of them, run gas lines to most of them, and gotten service calls back on some of … Read more
Chris texted me on a Sunday with an unusual question. Not about generators — his usual territory — but about his younger sister in Raleigh, North Carolina, who’d just moved into her first house and was asking him what to buy for storm season. “She has a $600 budget,” he wrote. “Maybe $700. What do … Read more
6,000 watts of continuous AC output. That number is the reason this unit exists. Every other flagship portable power station in this price range — the EcoFlow DELTA Pro at 3,600W, the Bluetti AC300 at 3,000W — caps somewhere below it. The Anker SOLIX F3800 runs at 6,000W continuous with a 12,000W surge rating, which means … Read more
Donna called me on a Wednesday in July, which was unusual because she typically texts. “Someone at my office told me to look at the Bluetti AC300,” she said. “They said it’s what serious homeowners buy.” She’d already looked up the price. There was a long pause. “Marcus, why does the base unit not have … Read more
$299. That’s the price difference between these two units at their most common sale prices — the Bluetti AC200MAX at around $1,199–$1,499 and the EcoFlow DELTA 2 Max at $1,499–$1,699. A gap that narrow makes this comparison genuinely difficult, because both units land in the same tier and go after the same homeowner: someone who’s serious … Read more
