Hi,
Since a few days I am the proud owner of a Bluetti Elite 100 V2 powerstation.
I bought this unit mainly to handle possible grid outages. I have to sleep with a CPAP device, so the Bluetti is important for me as a backup system. For a CPAP device the 100 V2 may be overpowered, but it can also be handy for other things during grid problems.
I chose this Bluetti Elie 100 V2 because of the specs, its compact size and the many good reviews.
I already tried it a night with my CPAP device and it did the job. Once in a while I heard the fan switching on at a very low speed but it is very quiet and not annoying at all. Great !
But I noticed a power consumption on the display of 65 Watt and that made me thinking, because I knew for sure that it wasn’t that high. ( I use it also on my boat )
So I took my Watt meter to find out for the CPAP load and this meter showed an active power value of only 12 Watt. (no heating used) This was a more familiar value to me.
Why is this value displayed so high on the Bluetti ?
As an electronic engineer I understand the different types of power, so I first assumed the display was showing the apparent power in VA and not the real active power in Watt, because the CPAP internal switched-type power supply is a load that also has a reactive power part.
But the display on the Bluetti 100 V2 clearly shows a “W” symbol meaning real active power, so it should not be apparent power which should be noted as “VA”. The manual shows nothing about this.
Being afraid of having received a faulty unit, I decided to do some measurements.
As a start I used pure resistive loads, that give a power factor of 1, meaning that the active power will be equal to the apparent power. The loads were a solder iron, incandescent light bulbs and a home heater with selectable heating elements.
I found the results below:
Load: Watt meter: Bluetti Elite 100 V2 output display:
- Bulb 15W 17W 0 ?
- Bulb 60W 58W 82 ?
- Solder iron 86W 100 ?
- Solder iron + bulb 143W 156 ?
- Heater 650W 691W 690
- Heater 1300W 1306W 1301
- Heater 2000W 1896W 1878
This table shows at results 2 – 4 the Bluetti has a large deviation of the actual active power value. (too high)
Result 1: is an active power of 17W too low to measure?
Result 5 is almost exact and results 6 and 7 are acceptable ( because the Watt meter will have some misreading too)
It looks like there is no problem with higher (resistive) loads, the problem has to do with lower loads.
If measurements of low power loads are so inaccurate, then how can this Bluetti calculate the SOC at low power loads such as my CPAP with some acceptable accuracy ?
Well, that is maybe the next problem because I also checked the remaining time for my working CPAP:
After a calibration cycle, at a SOC of 100%, the display shows that I still have 99,9 hours for my working 12W CPAP device.
That is too optimistic : 99,9 hours x 12W = 1200Wh. This cannot be done with a 1024Wh battery, also because there is some system power (10W?) needed too…
Being a little disappointed about the faulty low power readings, I browsed the internet for finding things about this issue and that is how I discovered this interesting post on the Bluetti community platform.
I learned that:
- Bluetti says: “For the Elite 100 V2, the screen will display the apparent power when the apparent power of the load exceeds 50W, When the apparent power of the load is less than 50W, the screen will show the active power” Very confusing…
And it doesn’t explain my misreading in case of my pure resistive loads of 58W and 86W.
- It seems certainly possible to have more accurate active power readings with other firmware!
Also at lower power levels which I can see in the post of lavash_bluetti
(9 and 19 Watt pictures, nov ‘25)
- Other (older) Bluetti powerstations have no problems with their power display.
(pictures of AC180 reading 65W of lavash_bluetti , nov ‘25)
- It seems that there is new firmware to solve this, but it is only given to some (complaining) people.
The most strange thing here is that new firmware is not distributed to ALL Bluetti 100 V2 units !
I think that this is a weird choice of Bluetti and I also think that more people will come to complain in future. That will not be good for Bluetti’s reputation…
I understand the technical explanation of Bluetti that the amount of apparent power is taken into account to determine overload conditions. But I agree with lavash_bluetti and VSM that users are not interested in this apparent power values on their display!
Software is flexible and apparent power values can be needed for various calculations but of course a display can show other variables, in this case the ACTIVE power.
So like many others I would like to have a output display with real active power W values together with a proper SOC value, both calculated with a reasonable accuracy, also at low power loads !
BLUETTI please help me with some new firmware, it is all very confusing and frustrating…
I hope that I have given enough information, but of course I am willing to add more info.
Thanks !
My SN and firmware:
