Bluetti Elite 10 Review

Design and features

• Very portable
• Not rugged
• Great functionality

This is comfortably the smallest power station I’ve tested to have a mains socket onboard. Bluetti’s done a great job of shrinking its typical design, providing a front panel with multiple DC outputs and a compact version of its standard, helpful display. The AC input and output are tucked over on the right side, while there’s a DC input secreted on the left panel. Usually, that would be it, but this is also the first Bluetti station I’ve tested with a light strip – it’s hidden away at the back.

I often moan about outdoorsy promotional shots for impractically heavy power supplies, but there’s every chance you could build this one into a camping weekend, or even a day’s walk or bike ride. It’s small enough to slip into a day sack, and not so heavy you’d be regretting it within minutes.

That said, it’s not ruggedised or water proof, so you might want to ensure you can protect it from the elements.

The Bluetti Elite 10 has two USB A ports, each rated at 15W. Between them there’s a single 15W USB-C port. There’s also another USB-C capable of 100W, along with a DC5521 port good for 60W. It’s worth noting that this power supply’s 200W limit applies across all of its ports, and is only just enough to support those maximums all at the same time. The limit also encompasses the AC port, so you’ll only get its 200W maximum if you’re not using any DC ports.

I like the short light strip on the Elite 10’s rear panel – I’ve used it as a backlight in many of these photos. You can’t change its brightness, but the switch cycles through cool and warm lighting, or a repeated SOS. Unlike the Anker SOLIX supplies I’ve tested, this actually spells ‘SOS’, rather than a nonchalant ‘SO’.

You can control most of this power station’s features through various button presses, but it also supports Bluetti’s app. Here, connection is only available via Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi, but that’s acceptable on a device that’s hoping to spend some quality time away from access points.

Charging

• Charge from mains, car, or the sun
• Maximum 150W AC charging power
• Full recharge in less than 70 minutes

This power supply will let you charge from the mains at up to 150W, although it will slow down as the battery nears fully charged, meaning that a complete recharge will take just over an hour. You can also top up from a cigarette style car power adaptor, which at around 120W would mean driving for less than two hours. Unfortunately, Bluetti doesn’t provide the required adaptor as standard.

The Bluetti Elite 10 also supports up to 100W of solar panels which, impressively, you can use alongside an AC input. In this mode there’s still a maximum 150W combined input, so it’s no faster than AC charging alone. However, given the small battery capacity, a 100W panel could potentially help you stay off-grid for days. For another £100, Bluetti will sell you the Elite 10 with a suitable 60W panel – there are also photos of this supply in green, incidentally, but this doesn’t appear to be available yet.

Like other Bluetti power stations, the Elite 10 supports three charging modes: Turbo, Standard and Silent. Like everything else here they’re dinky, with standard and silent charge both staying below 100W, and only Turbo reaching the 150W maximum. I connected the empty Elite 10 to a power meter, and measured consumption of 151Wh for a full recharge in Standard mode, or 138Wh in Turbo. Again, typically for Bluetti, Silent mode isn’t totally silent, and it’s slower. In this case it was also less efficient, with a full recharge consuming 171Wh.

While some small power stations, such as the Anker SOLIX C300, also support charging via a bi-directional USB-C port, that’s not available here. That’s not a huge omission, but it would have added a little extra flexibility and convenience.

Performance

• Stable very close to maximum power
• Very little headroom

With a maximum output of just 200W, I realised this power supply wouldn’t be capable of most of my standard output tests. Even so, like other entry-level power stations it was a little challenging to push it to the limit. I started by connecting it to a constant 60W load via a USB-C cable. Over a couple of hours it provided just 97Wh before shutting down – that’s only 76% of the batteries’ rated capacity. Fortunately this was a blip. Connected to a constant 100W AC load, the Elite 10 supplied an impressive 114Wh (89%).

I connected the Bluetti Elite 10 to the input of another power supply. Although I’d configured this to charge at 200W, the Elite 10, the device it was charging and my power meter all disagreed about how much power was actually changing hands. I won’t bore you with the technical reasons, but the upshot was an overload that shut the Elite 10 down. I managed to gather several other devices together that presented a load of around 190W. With these connected, this power station provided 99Wh before shutting down.

Bluetti says this supply can switch to battery power in just 10 milliseconds, potentially making it suitable as a very lightweight uninterruptible power supply (UPS). I connected it to my PC and a network-attached storage (NAS) device, both of which were untroubled when I switched the input power on and off a few times. That said, this setup did cause the Elite 10’s cooling fan to become more noticeable. While it’s not especially loud, the variable load caused a variable fan speed that became quite intrusive.

It’s worth mentioning that the Bluetti Elite 10 offers a power lifting mode, theoretically supporting some mains power devices rated at up to 400W. It does this by limiting the actual voltage and current provided via the AC port so that the connected device doesn’t in fact consume more than the maximum 200W – it’s a trick that only works on purely-resistive devices like heaters. This is a useful feature on bigger supplies, but here I didn’t have a suitable device to test it with – the only candidate I can think of is an ultra-compact travel iron.

We calculate power stations’ efficiency by comparing how much energy they consume when charging against how much they can subsequently provide. Using my best figures for the Bluetti Elite 10 gave a disappointing DC round-trip efficiency of 70.3%, but a strong AC figure of 82.6%.

We also work out an indicative value by dividing the cost of a power station by the energy it could store over its rated lifetime. Here, Bluetti says the batteries will still offer at least 80% of their rated capacity after 3,000 full recharge cycles, which gives a figure of 32p per kWh energy stored – a little higher than you’d typically get with a more high capacity device.

Should you buy it?