Randall from Wisconsin, a longtime good friend of this blog and probably Off Grid Ham’s most loyal reader, has a blog of his own. It’s not exclusively a radio-related blog, but he does have a lot of solid content that any ham radio nut would enjoy.
He recently posted a review of the Bluetti AC200MAX Portable Power Station. His insights were so well presented that I thought it was worthwhile to pass it along to my own readers. I prefer to produce my own content and this is the first time in the history of this blog I have recycled someone else’s material.
We’ll see you soon for our regular monthly feature, but until then, check out Randall’s excellent product review.
Click here to go to the Bluetti AC200MAX Portable Power Station on the Grouchy Farmer blog.
Quick update on the Bluetti – I now have it running my entire radio shack/office/lab and it handles all of that easily. Only thing it isn’t running is the heater. It’s running a Kenwood TS-990 transceiver, a Yaesu 400DR, a Palstar HF Autotuner, a gaming laptop with 2 monitors, occasionally a Lenovo laptop, a variable power supply and a Weller soldering station and occasionally some other stuff. Works well for that but with some RFI problems.
RFI is an issue with this thing on the HF bands. 20 meters and higher it isn’t bad enough to degrade operations but things get worse the lower in frequency I go. 30M was still relatively OK but there were serious problems on 40M. No problems on 15, 12, 10 meters and higher.
It causes my overhead LED shop lights to rapidly flicker when they’re plugged into it. Have no idea why. I’m not seeing any fluctuations on my meters that would indicate voltage fluctuations or anything else that would cause it. And it’s only with those lights. Other LED lights like my desk lamps have no problems at all.
I sent an e-mail to customer support about the RFI and light flickering issues. We’ll see what kind of response I get. I’ve been hearing some concerning things about Bluetti’s customer support. Their customer support seems a bit iffy. Some people think it’s great with fast and effective responses. Others have waited weeks to get any kind of response at all and have had the company basically just blow them off.
There are other issues I discovered, but haven’t, thankfully, experienced myself. Apparently early this year they put out a software update that bricked some AC200MAX units requiring them to be returned to the company to be reprogrammed or replaced. There have been some problems with some of the expansion batteries. Some models of the AC200MAX had the high amperage RV plug screwed up with the polarity reversed.
I have some cheap 100 watt solar panels on order that should be here this week so I’ll be able to test charging this thing off solar. Well I will if we ever actually get sun. We’ve had one day of sun here in the last 3 weeks.
I’ll keep you posted if anything else goes on. Overall it does work, the RFI is disappointing but to be honest I rather expected that I was going to have to deal with it.