Bluetti Elite 400
pros and cons
- The wheels make moving this a breeze on flat ground
- An all-purpose unit that’s great for home backup, camping, RV use, and more.
- Competitively priced.
- Can be heavy if you need to lift or carry it
- Charging can take longer, depending on the output mode.
on Google.
It took humans some 300,000 years to figure out that rolling something was easier than carrying it. Just as it’s hard to believe that the iPhone hasn’t been around for 20 years yet, it’s just as hard to believe that we’ve only been using wheels for some 6,000 years.
And it’s odd how few power station manufacturers put wheels on their units (and when they do, they feel like a compromise). They still expect you to lug around 80-pound lumps like a prehistoric cave dweller.
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Bluetti solves this with the Elite 400
The Elite 400 is big, but not as big as my Tower of Power, the Apex 300 with three B300K expension batteries! (Banana for scale!)
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
Take all that, and then add an inverter that can push out 2,600W of AC power (3,900W surge), and you’re looking at a unit that measures 17 x 11 x 41 inches and weighs a whopping 86 pounds. That’s well beyond the 51 pounds that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) recommends.
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There are four 20A AC outlets (the unit photographed is the UK version, so the output options differ) for mains-powered items, four USB ports (two 15W USB-A and two 100W USB-C), and a 12V/10A DC output port.
Lugging the station around
The wheels are a joy to use on all surfaces, from loose gravel to carpeted floors. Any wheels are better than having to carry a lump weighing close to a hundredweight, but these wheels cope with pretty much any surface you throw at them (except mud… I don’t recommend dragging your power station over mud!).
And wheels need some sort of handle, and the telescopic handle on the Elite 400 is perfect for the job.
It’s an all-purpose unit.
You do need to be aware of the weight because 90 pounds is a heck of a weight to do anything with other than roll it around.
The wheels are a winner!
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
But you also get close to 4kW of power at your disposal and the ability to handle 20 Amps of load. Anything that you can plug into a standard outlet will work with the Elite 400, making it a no-compromise system.
The price is also good.
At a regular price of $1,899, it’s very competitively priced for a unit that delivers that much power. Right now, over on Amazon, you get 32% off the list price, bringing the price down to an extremely competitive $1,299. At that price, this is a steal because you’re hard-pressed to find a good 3kW portable power station for that price.