With black friday advertisements, it’s hard to miss what Bluetti is selling. The brand advertises green energy, energy savings. When paying about 30 or 40 cents per kWh, I wonder how many hours of sunlight a generator needs to operate to be profitable. The product catalog makes me understand the typical purchase is in the range of 1K, 2k eur if not more. Panels are capable of making half a kW under best conditions. My questions:
can one really make saving using one of these products? Every slice of 1000 eur spent on hardware is likely to need 3kWh to 4kWh of solar energy to offset the investment.
with 400 or even 800 watts of panels, I doubt the real production can yield more than 2-3kWh per day, except for summer perhaps.
is it realistic to hope these machines operate 24/7 for 5 years to “pay” themselves with money that wasn’t spent on grid energy?
I’m puzzled, because of the two arguments: make savings, and enjoy green energy. I find it quite suspicious to call anything powered by lithium “green energy”. Solar panels are already unlikely to offset their own environmental production cost, so I doubt these solar station do much better… so I address the community and ask you to help me see what I missed…
I think batteries have an important role in green energy, even when the resource extraction, and production of batteries and home energy storage devices are everything but green. Batteries are important to accompany wind and solar energy because you still need energy when the wind does not blow and the sun is under.
The LiFePO4 battery chemistry that Bluetti uses is ready for a lifetime of 10+ years or 2500/3500+ cycles. However, it has to be seen how long the accompanying electronics last. So far, the more expensive and more powerful lines of Bluetti power stations seem to work reliable for most users. If that was not the case, these forums would be flooded with reports of broken devices.
It may be a hard case to pay them back with solar energy not bought from your utility company. Depending on regional pricing and possible subsidies it likely is cheaper to have a on-grid solar setup. Here excess solar energy is sold back to the utility company and when your solar system has no production you just take power from the net. But take in consideration that battery systems have a big advantage: You still have power when the grid has a blackout. And when you can save the contents of your fridge/freezer and enjoy the comforts of having electricity when all others are in the dark, then you have more advantages than a simple financial sum.
Thank you for initiating a constructing dialogue about this important matter.
I think that many things are to be taken into consideration here, and the final answer it will be always, and always: it depends.
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Lithium batteries in general are highly recyclable, and the recycling industry is becoming a practice on these days running aside the green movement, what is probably not keeping up the same speed is people education on the matter and sometimes the local recycling policies.
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For most people and in most situations the entire feeling of being off-grid and playing with batteries and green energy is just healthy fanaticism. The feeling of being independent from “something” is what drives most people to play with the entire green energy matter, even if most of the time that’s really not about savings.
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Being “off-grid” is a word that have a serious meaning and not properly used.
What most people are instead referring to while using that term is about the feeling they are having by actually producing something by themselves while in fact that will only cover a small % of what they will really need. At the same time they are anyway constantly bound to a system which is on-grid by default.
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And that’s perfectly okay. I believe that is very important since it educate people on the matter and it helps the industry and technology going forward.
Because if there’s no demand, there is no supply.
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I think that Bluetti products are much more intended to be used during traveling or for offline storage in case of emergencies rather than for the purpose of savings.
That’s because with a PV system savings are always long term, with every kind of PV system, and they demand people to think since savings start first and foremost with thought and sacrifices towards our natural desire to waste.
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If you’re able to store an average of 2 kWh every day by using an AC300+B300, by using this energy during the night, and you estimate a minimum lifetime of 8 years for the system, that’s about 6 mWh of energy that for sure it will be saved from the grid over that period. That’s a rough estimate on the minimum you can save from buying and using the system.
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If 6 mWh of green energy are worth the manufacturing of the unit, included its recycling, the short answer is probably yes.
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Also, while thinking long term you could estimate if the product will last as advertised by:
evaluating the product itself
maintaining, storing, and using the product in the right way over the years
Since in recent years the entire PV market has allowed almost everyone to use products that were previously reserved only for experts, the downside is that, even if Bluetti products in general could not be easier to use, people try to get more with them and they end up in mistakes.
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Honestly, Bluetti products from an hardware standpoint are very high quality products. The companies and people behind Bluetti designed some multi functional systems by starting from scratches, from the enclosure until designing their own inverter, charger, battery management, including the DSP microcode which is highly upgradeable.
Also, Bluetti products use LiFePo4 cells from EVPS which is a fairly new but reputable producer.
That’s why I think that Bluetti is probably entitled to advertise their products as much as they need.
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On the other side it’s always up to the users to understand what they are buying and for which reasons, because at the end a company exists to be profitable but a customer has the power to educate himself and to make a choice.
Yes, we agree on that. There comes the right to repair into play. How many everyday items do we buy on batteries nowadays? It’s like a corded device is too much to handle in the digital age. Don’t get me wrong, I have smartphone addiction.
Is @BLUETTI repairable or user serviceable? Or once a single part of the electronic dies, the whole machine is no good anymore?
Can you do that with those transportable portable generators? I see “two-way AC” on the latest AC200L but it doesn’t say whether it can inject in a house, like balcony-based microinverter panels can.
Ok. But is the grid really so bad in Europe for instance? It seems the main markets are USA and EU for these products.
thanks, I appreciate my message isn’t taken as “trolling”. Still, got a moderator MP suggesting I go troll somewhere else. I’m not a Greta Thundberg zealot who comes for war. I just want to hear how solar enthusiasts who seem very into their brand defend the counter-arguments against solar in general.
ok for the lithium part. But what about nickel, cobalt and manganese used in batteries?
yes in the capital city of my homeland, solar panels are installed for free on the rooftops. It’s an attempt at curbing an energy crisis, but so far, it isn’t working due to low power output versus the energy footprint of a city. Just traffic lights. And sheesh, those 50" advertisement TV sets continuously eating 400W - but “it’s ok, we’re producing green energy” is the answer apparently.
Ok, the metric makes sense. Thanks for the detailed thought process.
Ok, so no nickel / manganese / cobalt here.
Well I’ll keep reading on the topic. Thanks again for sharing.
100% agreed. It’s also about accountability. We live in nice countries providing everything for us. My Granpa used to grow half of the veggies eaten by the household. It was culturally normal back then, and was also a kind of hobby, and healthy conversation material. Our society is so dependent on energy that, like food back a few decades ago, it’s also good to take responsibility. Every solar watt you produce, or at least peak shave, is in my opinion your contribution to reducing the pressure on the grid. GenZ is so entitled they think the grid has always been there, and that no one ever sweat to make it what it is. If we can’t upgrade it, maybe we can make its work a bit easier.
One reason I bought the Bluetti AC300 + B300 instead of something like the AC200Max is that with the AC300 the battery and power station are separate devices. When my AC300 breaks down, I don’t have to repair/replace the battery, and if my B300 battery is end-of-life I can replace the battery without having to replace the power station itself.
The Grid in my country, The Netherlands is very reliable. I have been using UPS systems for my PC and audio hardware for years. Maybe I can say that I have had more downtime because of UPS system defects than grid power failures. Still, I like the idea to not being 100% dependent on the grid and have some preparation for outages and disasters.
Especially talking about the AC300, since I had the chance to analyse it inside. As a professionally built device every electronic part of the system is well tagged and provided with connectors for easy replacement or repair, every component is labeled and not sanded out to avoid identification, every moving or potentially moving part is glued or zipped (including PCB components) and the whole system is telling you that someone wanted to realised something different that stood out by itself.
So, my opinion about repairability is that Bluetti devices are highly repairable. Of course if we look over their integrated circuits that naturally runs on custom firmwares or the lack of blueprints since this is indeed not an opensource platform we could point out there could be issues in the future that we don’t have the power to manage ourselves, but that falls within the realms of things that makes a percent of what we can’t do and that’s normal. There’s no reason to believe Bluetti will not be here in 8 years to give us technical support or payment-driven repairs after the first people will start having issues with expired warranties.
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As for the longevity I believe what will fail first after the cells they would be the electrolytic capacitors, but still they are easily replaceable with basic electronic skills. Any other long term failures are to be considered to be caused by improper usage or natural exceptions.
At some point in the future you should expect people making Youtube videos about DIY replacing the inside 26700-type cells to get the full capacity back in their Bluetti devices. Or, replacing the 26700-type cells with rectangular prismatic cells. But that is to be seen.
By thinking about longevity you should also consider it depends not only on the built quality but also on the device performance since that will determine the running stress of the single electronic components.
This makes me remember the usual Youtube videos with random devices advertised as a “bang for the buck” because they are capable of providing astonishing Wattages while in fact they will come with tremendous performance. An AC inverter provides current and voltage that can be represented in a waveform. On zero load the waveform is most of the time perfect on pure-sine wave inverters, but as the load level increase and based on the load type (resistive, capacitive, inductive) the performance of the inverter itself is what is capable to keep that waveform as much sinusoidal as possible.
The AC-series Bluetti devices I had the chance to test with various kind of loads are able to keep a pretty decent sinusoidal waveform under load and so they are to be considered of good performance. The same can be verified on many YouTube videos.
That aside of the build quality helps to believe Bluetti devices are made to be reliable and to last.
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Injecting AC into the grid requires numerous certifications and limitations that Bluetti portable devices do not have since they are designed, first of all, to be portable and flexible.
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By advertising the two-way inverting capabilities of the AC200L Bluetti is specifically referring on the single AC/DC inverter to be capable of working in both directions, by providing AC from DC (to feed loads) and DC from AC (to charge the battery), that is from an electronic stand-point a milestone that very much increases efficiency.
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Nickel, manganese and cobalt are valuable minerals that keeps their properties inside a lithium battery beyond its service life. That is one of the main reason why used lithium batteries can be profitable and so highly recyclable.
Yes we could state that energy makes the difference between dark and light. That, apart of the banal reference, means that today absolutely nothing runs without electricity. At the same time, as well as being the most important thing, it is also the most obvious thing that is considered totally for granted.
For sure a battery is something that can educate and make us think more about what energy is and what we can do to avoid wasting it.
After-sales maintenance issues need to be analyzed specifically.
Some cases can be resolved through firmware updates.
In some cases, the power station/battery pack needs to be returned for repair. As long as there is no human-induced damage, BLUETTI is responsible for the round-trip shipping costs under warranty period.
Good approach. Can I be devil’s advocate here: if your AC300 dies, you B300 can only be used with a few other devices from the same brand, right? But yes, I agree with splitting the risk factor across devices.
One aspect I don’t see mentioned when people question the usefulness and cost effectiveness is the desire to have more solar generated electricity at our disposal.
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Sure, I may only be saving $30/mo at the moment, but the real data is harder to calculate because we are using solar powered AC or heater more than we would if it were coming from the grid.
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I don’t have a lot of time with my system, but in the short amount of time that I have had 2.4kwh of daily production and 6kw of storage, I have already benefited very nicely from the AC300 system. And although it may take many years to recoup the expense based on what we were spending, there is no way to calculate that we are keeping the house cooler on hot days, and warmer on cool days.
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I am just glad I was able to set up a system DIY of sorts with Bluetti, because the commercial installers would have negated any real benefit I was able to come up with on my own.
It’s part of an energy transition for a lot of us. Ask your neighbors about the consumption of everyday devices. People usually have no clue and don’t understand their energy bills: “what’s a watt?” and even worse: “what’s a watt hour?”. Portable solar power generators bring a hands-on experience that is highly instructive in that regard. It also gives average people like me an understanding like I never had before of what energy really represents. Without even thinking “savings” ensured by the solar power generation, handling the devices, monitoring the battery & co allowed me to cut my energy usage by 25% the first year. Add the solar power that was generated on top of that, yes, savings here. Real savings.
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Energy transition not only means shifting to other sources than grid/fuel, but also means getting a better, natural understanding of our energy use, and thus, footprint.
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Progress is always an arguable notion. People who drive 40.000km will critisize the guy riding his electric scooter due to batteries. See my point? We’re stuck in a petrolum based economy. It’s not a great prospect. Some people don’t mind centralization. Others are preppers, they only trust their own means of production.
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Solar power generators evolve in this soup. And honestly, it’s tasty, and it’s green.