I just received my Bluetti AC180P. It charged up great. It charges well from a solar panel. One use case I planned to use this for was to charge my phone, which has a 4700mAh battery.
Since the AC180P has 1440Ah capacity, which is 1,440,000mAh, I would expect charging my phone to use a tiny fraction of that capacity and to be able to charge my phone many times. Just by the math I would expect: 1,440,000/4700 = 306 charges. Put another way, I would expect charging my phone to use about 0.33% of the capacity of my powerbank. I know there will be some inefficiency, but I wasn’t expecting it to be as bad as this.
My first two tests were overnight with the wireless charging (DC), which drew the capacity down from 100% to 91%, which is 9% of the total capacity for a single charge. I know wireless is less efficient than wired, but I wasn’t expecting that much loss. Last night I charged with a cable (AC), which drew the unit down 7%. That is still a LOT more than I was expecting. Rather than hundreds of charge cycles for my phone, it looks like I will get a dozen or so.
I’ll try DC again tonight with a cable in the USB connection on the front, but I wanted to drop a note here to see if anyone can explain why I’m not able to get hundreds of charge cycles. Is the AC180 using up electricity for cooling (I don’t hear the fan) or looking for bluetooth (App) or ???
I have the AC180, it has a self consumption of 15W. If I charge my Samsung form it using the 18W wireless or USB A 18W port, I am actually using 33W to charge. Then there are efficiency losses in converting the AC180 32V battery to 5VDC USB, this can be another 10-15%. Here, you can end up with something like 50-60W load on the AC180 to provide 18W to your phone.
I have a small 20,000mAh power pack (about twice the size of a cigarette packet. It’s native battery voltage is much lower than the AC180 and it will charge my phone several times. I set my phone to stop charging at 80% and recharge when it reaches around 20%. This is then a 60% charge to my 3300mAh battery = 1,980mAh. I get around 8-9 charges from the power pack. I then use a higher output 240VAC charger from the Bluetti to recharge the power pack, nearer 30W. I find this a more efficient way to use the AC180s capacity. Plus, if sitting at desk, for instance, you can leave the phone connected to the to the power pack and still use it.
The reality is, that large power stations are not efficient when charging low load DC devices.
Hi @dwatrous, We appreciate you taking the time to test your AC180P’s performance. For the most accurate capacity measurements, we recommend using a load of around 1000W during testing.
As @Mandp correctly pointed out, with smaller loads (like charging phones), the unit’s base power consumption (self-discharge) becomes a significant factor, skewing your results
Larger loads minimize this effect, giving you a truer measure of actual capacity.
The AC180P has different running times depending on the device you’re using it with.
For high-power devices, the running time = Battery capacity × DoD × η ÷ load power.
For low-power devices, the running time = Battery capacity × DoD × η ÷ (load power + self-consumption of AC180P). DoD refers to Depth of Discharge and η is local inverter efficiency.
For AC180P, DoD is 90%, η is 85%, and self-consumption is about 15W. E.g. If you run a 100W blender with it, the running time will be: 1440Wh × 90% × 85% ÷ (100W+15W) ≈ 7.66 hrs
Note: 1) The formula is NOT suitable for inductive loads with compressors, like refrigerators, air conditioners, etc. 2) The above data is for reference ONLY.
