BLUETTI| EB3A Portable Power Station | 600W 268Wh

I bought the EB3a to test out its functionality and to hopefully use it as backup power for my CPAP in our frequent power outages. It has a 600W sustained load rating and a peak output wattage of 1200W. It will only allow you to hit that peak rating for a split second or two before it reads overload and will shut off so you need to be sure to look at the input needs of each device before you plug them in to ensure compatibility. I have had this unit for about a month and have used it off and on almost daily, testing things that would work and may not work. This has yielded some interesting results. But before I get into that I wanted to give you a brief list of my credentials so that you have some idea as to my background. I was an electronics technician in the navy for 20 years before retiring and have hundreds of hours of experience working on small electronics as well as large equipment with very high voltage requirements. I have been involved in testing and certification of new equipment for the US military and have spent time as a shift test engineer. That said there are several video’s out there that discuss the efficiency and the capacity of the EB3A so I wont bore you with those types of details. Honestly what do you need to know?? What can it do… What can I use it for….. Is it worth the asking price… Am I going to get value out of it

Most UPSs for home use have one or two 12V SLA batteries of 7 - 9Ah capacity each which once they go through the necessary power conversion end up only providing about 60% of that or basically 5Ah each of actual usable capacity in theory when new. Those UPS batteries lose capacity relatively rapidly and ultimately go bad every couple of years and must be replaced. I have replaced many batteries over the years for my APC and CyberPower UPSs.

On paper, this little EB3A has somewhere around 2 to 4 times the capacity (approximately 22Ah in total) compared to the (5 - 10Ah total) you get from these typical personal UPSs, and the life of the EB3A batteries should last 10 times or more longer. I performed a simple capacity comparison test between my new EB3A and one of my smaller UPSs – a CyberPower 1000va/600Watt UPS. My albeit limited testing demonstrated the EB3A completely outperforming my CyberPower 1000va/600Watt UPS.

For a practical example, I took one of my computers and ran it solely off my fully charged CyberPower UPS until fully depleted and then tried the same thing with the EB3A. Both tests were conducted starting with the units plugged into wall power while the windows computer and monitor was running on them and then unplugged the units to simulate a power outage. The computer and its monitor combined pulled an average of 104W throughout the tests as measured by a Kill-o-watt meter. Both the CyberPower UPS and the EB3A transitioned to battery power cleanly leaving the computer system running stable. The CyberPower UPS ran to 0% and shutoff after just 4 minutes; it was painful to watch as it started off reporting 44 minutes of backup time remaining at first… looking good. A minute later, the UPS reported 28 minutes remaining. A minute later, 10 minutes remaining. After four minutes total it turned off! That was unexpectedly disappointing results from my CyberPower UPS. The EB3A was a completely different experience. After running the same computer and monitor combination for an hour it reported about 55% remaining capacity. At 2 hours it was reporting 3% capacity at which time I stopped the test. So, in this test the EB3A ran my computer and monitor for 2 hours while the CyberPower UPS could only carry it for 4 minutes – that’s 30x longer run time for the EB3A. Not bad.