Better Than Jackery? Reviewing the Bluetti EB70 Portable Power Station

hi everyone in this video i'm going to be going over the blue eddie eb70 portable power station this was sent to me by blue eddie for free they reached out to me i am not getting paid for this review but they did send this to me for free i've been testing it out for the last few weeks both on the road and at home and so in this video i'm going to go over the features but mostly i'm going to tell you what i like and what i don't like about it and i'm also going to compare it to a few different jackery products which i have several of i have the jackery explorer 240 the 500 the 1000 and the 1500 which were also given to me for free by jackery for the purpose of reviewing i don't have any brand loyalty to either of these brands i'm not an affiliate for either one it doesn't really matter to me what i use or what you use or what you buy i just want to use the thing that works best for me and i want to recommend the thing that i think will work best for you everyone is going to have different purposes in mind for these units my channel is all about camping in your car in your suv or other small vehicle and so that's the angle that i'm coming at this from i spend anywhere between 1 and 15 or 20 nights at a time in my car and i use portable power stations like this to run a fridge all day every day and also to charge up various drone and camera batteries and to recharge my laptop and run little led light and that kind of thing and so that's the angle that i'm coming at this from but things in this review will also apply to you if you're getting this for emergency preparedness reasons or you know various other various other uses and i realize that the top of my head is being cut off here but i think it's more important that you see this thing when you see my hair that's going crazy in the wind right now my quick review up front is that i like the unit and they get everything they get like the big things mostly right overall but there are some small things that leave you scratching your head wondering why did they do it this way i do like it but again there are some oddities that we'll get into here overall it's a relatively small unit it weighs 21.8 pounds and i will put the the dimensions on the screen for you guys has a handle on it that folds down which i really like being around 22 pounds it's it's pretty easy to to handle this is this is in the size class that really anyone can carry it and move it around it's not so heavy that you want to leave it in one place for an extended period of time it is small enough to be movable it has a 716 watt hour capacity that's basically how how big the batteries are inside of it and it has a 700 watt inverter so on the front here on the front here are the four four ac outlets and those are backed by a 700 watt inverter that peaks at 1 400 watts so a lot of times when you first start up an electronic appliance for example when you first turn it on it'll it'll surge it'll have a peak amount of watts that it draws let's say you know it draws 500 watts normally when it's normally running but when you first start it up it could draw a thousand watts and so this has a 1400 watt peak inverter and 700 watts normal usage for normal usage so basically it's a 700 watt inverter but it can protect above and beyond that and so again going back to that capacity the 716 watt hours it ran my 12 volt alpacool c20 fridge in my office when i tested it for about 70 to 72 hours straight so three days that's about what you can expect to get from this unit if you're not charging it up from your car or from solar or from the wall in the meantime just with this fully charged and the fridge plugged into it it'll run for about three days until it dies it'll charge a phone about 50 times in a laptop about 10 times to give you an idea of the capacity of this thing so relatively powerful power station it currently retails for about 500 499 dollars from the blue eddy website and then i think it was 5.99 on amazon when i recently checked this is a recently launched product so my guess is that it's priced at 500 at the beginning but i think usually it'll be 600 but right now it is available for 500 which is a very good deal for this amount of capacity usually the amount of capacity is tied to the dollar amount so like this were a 500 watt hour capacity unit the price would be about 500 and so from this 716 watt hour unit you'd expect the price to be around 700 but again it is cheaper than that at 500 it's a pretty darn good bargain and then giving you an idea of the inverters there and what you can run uh with regards to that from the walla sockets you can run any kind of small appliance you can run any tv or a small fridge any kind of fan a computer what you can't run is things that get really hot or things that draw a lot of power so you can't run a microwave from this you can't run a hairdryer a blow dryer you can't run an electric hot plate and so you can run smaller items smaller household electronic items bigger more powerful things this isn't the one for you on the top here is a wireless charging pad for your phone and as far as the other ports along the front of here go let me go through those starting from the left there are two usbc ports which are high wattage usb c ports they're 100 watts which is great it'll charge any kind of high-powered laptop or or anything like that there are two more traditional usb type a ports there are two five and a half by 2.1 millimeter 12 volt barrel ports i'll get to those a little bit later there's one 12 volt cigarette lighter type socket there are four ac wall outlets two of which are grounded two of which just have the regular two prong they don't have that third prong hole in them there's a dumb little light in the top right corner that i don't like but again i'll talk more about that a little bit later and it comes with a wall charger so it can be charged from the wall and it comes with a 12 volt car charger so you plug one end into the cigarette lighter socket in your car and plug the other end into the unit here to charge it up while you're driving and then it comes with an mc4 to eight millimeter connector cable so mc4 is the standard connector that comes on most solar panels so it's nice to have that that come with this unit so you can buy basically any solar panel uh connect the mc4 connectors on the included cable to that solar panel and then plug the other end the eight millimeter end into the charging port that's right there if you want to learn more about the the technical specs of this unit i will include a link to the blue eddie website in the video description and i'll also include a link to a pdf version of the user manual that comes with this unit if you want to read through that a little bit let's now move into things that i like about this unit i like the large capacity i like the large capacity especially for the price i think it's a good deal i like the battery type that's in here so in here are let me get this right lifepo4 batteries which means lithium iron phosphate batteries the jackeries have lithium ion batteries the battery in this is better the lithium iron phosphate the lifepo4 that is better that's a better newer battery technology than the lithium ion that's in the jackeries comparing the jackery explorer 500 to this it says on the jackery website that charging it up to 80 you can get about 500 cycles of charging so you can charge it up from zero to about 80 percent 500 times and then after that i'm not sure exactly what happens i don't think it drops off like completely but i'm sure once you get to that point and the the battery degrades significantly according to blue eddy you can recharge this one 2500 times so five times more than the jackery and that's a big deal now i can't really verify those numbers but i'll put some links in the video description about lifepo4 versus lithium-ion if you want to read more about that i like the shape and size of this unit it's a nice size it's not too big and i like the shape i like that it's just a regular rectangle so like you can put something on top of this and it's not a big deal with the jackeries it has the they have the fixed handle on top which makes it kind of hard to to stack things on top of it not that that's something you do like all that much but you know it's nice to have a flat surface on here just to put things on in fact let me go get one of the jackeries to show you this is the jackery explorer 500. it's a little bit smaller in footprint like it's a little bit narrower a little bit thinner but let's see if it's taller it's about it's about the same height actually i think the jackery is a little bit taller but even though this is a little bit bigger in most dimensions it's just a nicer shape this has that handle on top i mean which is nice it's it's a good handle for a handle but it i don't know i prefer this kind of handle with the folding down action i think it's just a better design i like that it comes in multiple colors this is the kind of light minty green color i didn't have any say in the color that they sent me they just sent me a color i think it's cool i really like it it comes in red and gray also i believe it's just a nice little unit it looks it looks good it looks pretty it's attractively designed more so i think than the jackeries which have a little bit more of an industrial look they're not ugly i mean they look fine you don't really need one of these to look pretty it's not that big of a deal but i do like the the options to have multiple colors with the blue eddy instead of just the standard kind of black and orange that you get with the jackeries i really like the wireless charging the qi charging pad on top if you do have a phone that's compatible with that that's potentially one less cord one less usb cable that you need to lug around now of course you might want to be using your phone as it's charging in which case yeah you're gonna want to bring that that usb cable with you for me i need to take my phone out of the case for it to charge because i do have a pop socket on the back of my phone so it won't charge with the case on but it charges just like this it works really well and then i like these kind of weird five and a half by 2.1 millimeter barrel ports these two right here those are on some jackeries like on this one [Music] this is the jackfruit explorer 500. they are on here too except i think these might be six millimeters they might be a little bit bigger but same kind of thing you can buy adapters i actually like the five and a half millimeter on here better than the six on the jackery it seems like the five and a half millimeter is more more prevalent there are more things for the five and a half millimeter anyway i like those because basically for one reason like i don't know what most people use those for i don't really have any other items that need those ports but there is one thing i use one of those ports for and that is for this i don't know if you can really see this try to put a better picture of it on the screen this is a a thing that basically allows you to have another cigarette lighter 12-volt outlet on your power station so another one of these on the one end there is a male five and a half to by 2.1 millimeter plug plugs in right there and then on this end you have another cigarette lighter socket i really like that now it's not like super solid um if you're driving a super bumpy road it can come out a little bit but i really like this because i use this one for my fridge and then i can use this one to charge my drone batteries i have a 12 volt charger for my drone batteries so it comes in really handy for this kind of thing it's also nice to have two of these if you're running a fridge and say an electric blanket uh an electric heater uh it's just nice to have more of these in fact i would rather have more of these than the the wall outlets but that's just my personal preference you might be different and speaking of the wall outlets there are four of them on here over here the jackeries either have one or three depending on which jackery you get let me look at the 500 here i keep pulling this out but like the checkered 500 here has just the one if you go up to the 1000 the jackery explorer 1000 that has i believe three this just has one now for me one is just fine in fact i rarely use that i rarely use the the wall outlets on these units i'm more in the the 12 volt section over here than the 110 volt section i use the dc more than the ac but i understand that you know everyone needs are different and so if you need those wall outlets this is a way better buy than the jackery explorer 500. i like that it comes with that mc four to eight millimeter cable this cable right here usually you have to buy these like for the jackeries i've had to buy these to connect the solar panel that's on the roof of my car to the jackery it works fine once you buy it but you know these are 15 or 20 dollars separately and so it's nice that they actually included this in the package saves you you know 15 or 20 bucks i like that it charges quickly it charges faster than the jackeries it charges in about four and a half hours from zero that was my testing i tested it out twice to see if that was the case and yes from zero to 100 it charges in about four and a half hours blue eddy says it'll charge from a car in seven to eight hours which i believe is a little bit faster than the jackeries but not by much so it's kind of a wash there and then when it comes to charging via solar i mean solar is so variable it's really hard to say but in a good day of full sunlight it'll it'll charge fully up same thing with the jackeries now one thing that i like about this that other people whose reviews i read online didn't really like about it is that so for the the button right here so this is the button that activates the the 12 volt section of sockets and then for this button right here which is the general on off button and then for this button right here which is the button that activates the 110 volt wall outlets for all of those it's just a very small little green led light that comes on i like that because it's not blaring me in the face when it's in my car at night i don't need to cover it up with tape it's just a pretty small little green led light now some of the reviews that i mentioned didn't like that because it was hard to tell whether it was on or off which i understand but overall i like that it's a small kind of nondescript light that's kind of hard to see but again your mileage may vary on that one now let's get into the things that i don't like about this unit the first one and it's a big one for me is that i hate i hate hate hate the stupid little battery percent indicator the jackeries say that it has you know 95 battery life left 40 battery life left whatever the the number is it'll say that on the jackery units on this it just has a little battery picture and that battery is broken up into five little sections and so whichever you know sections are lit up that's how much battery life is left and so you get an idea within about 20 percent what kind of battery life you're looking at i hate it i i really want the exact number even if it's not exactly right like i'm sure the jackery one is variable to a few percentage points you know whatever i like seeing that number rather than seeing the stupid little battery bar graph thing i really don't like that and i don't find that it's especially accurate either for example i ran it a couple times and like when it gets to to be pretty low in in capacity none of the little battery sections will be lit up and there will be a little red battery warning light that pops up but that went on for like half a day or maybe even a full day when i was running my fridge in those tests so like if you're seeing that battery warning sign you can't really tell if you have zero percent battery left and if your fridge is like imminently about to turn off or if it'll run for another half day and to me that's just ridiculous it's not necessarily a deal breaker but it's almost a deal breaker for me i hate it that much i really dislike it i don't know why companies who make these things have that system instead of just the the raw percentage number and a lot of them do have that battery indicator i just really don't like it the second thing about this that i don't like involves the screen involves the display so when you turn on this the screen you can turn on the display by just pressing this button here it'll be hard to see in the sunlight but i'll include some footage of it turning on so you press that button the the screen turns on it shows you things like the wattage going out the wattage coming in if it's being charged the battery percentage all those kinds of things if you're plugging something into it let's say into the usb ports here if you're plugging something in the draw is less than three watts it won't even register it'll say zero watts so for example i have a small little usb powered fan when i plug that fan into this and turn it on the fan turns on just fine it works great but the display the screen says that it's drawing zero watts that's not great again that's not really a deal breaker but i mean it's annoying right like you want to see exactly how many watts are being drawn and the jackeries do do that it'll say 1 watt it'll say 2 watts it'll say 3 watts for the 12 volt ports over here it won't show anything under 3 watts similarly for the ac outlets over here it won't show anything under 30 watts just to illustrate the point here really quick this usb powered fan that runs off of dc is on and this little lamp that runs off of ac is also on and yet it says we have zero watts for the output why did they design it that way i don't know obviously it's some kind of limitation that they ran into i don't know why it's like that i don't know why they couldn't do it when the jackeries can do it who knows but that's problematic i think now let's get into charging it via solar a little bit and this isn't really to me much of a downside but let me read to you the the top review for this product on amazon right now it's a three-star review by a guy named paul b and it says should have waited so this is the top review of this unit on amazon he says i was unaware of the 8 amp charge limit when i ordered this info wasn't available this makes my two 100 watt solar panels in parallel which equals 200 watts only slightly better than one 100 watt panel unfortunately there are not many panels available that meet the optimum charging criteria of this unit other than blue eddies so i saw that and i thought okay that's interesting let me try that out i have a ton of solar panels i have the one on my car i have like six portable jackery solar panels i have another rock pals folding solar panel i have like eight solar panels eight 100 watt solar panels so let me try this so i plugged one 100 watt solar panel into this the one on the roof of my car and the screen on this said that it was bringing in about 80 watts which is normal it's 100 watt solar panel but with you know how dirty the panel is and the angle of the sun and maybe there's some haze in the atmosphere today or whatever 80 watts is about standard from 100 watt panel so then i pulled out these mc4 y-connector cable things that i have and i plugged in another solar panel a rock piles 100 watt folding solar panel i wired them together in parallel connected them both into here and is the light on for this i think the light is on i'll get to that light in a second sorry that light has been on for i think the last little while that's really annoying anyway i connected the two solar panels together in parallel plugged them in and it brought in let me see let me make sure i get this right here 146 watts so normally maybe you'd expect about 160 watts coming in from two 100 watt solar panels the fact that i got 146 it varied between like 135 and 146 140 ish in that range that's pretty good i mean that's more than just a little bit better that's quite a bit better sure it looks like we're losing maybe 20 watts in there somewhere but i still think it would be worth having two solar panels if if you needed that or if you wanted that i never in practice use more than one solar panel i only use one solar panel the solar panel that's on my roof and so for me even if it didn't really make a big difference that's not that big of a deal but the fact that it did make a significant difference maybe not the full potential of the solar panels but it got pretty darn close that's not much of a downside to me i just wanted to bring that up as a potential downside because apparently it is for some people but for me it actually worked pretty well and wasn't wasn't much of a downside now another big downside that i saw people mention in several reviews and one that i actually agree with is that this power station not power station this power supply here on the the wall charging cord this has a fan that is always on and so whenever you're charging the blue eddie power station from the wall with this there's a fan on and it's it's kind of annoying it's obviously not super loud but it is loud in a in a room like in my office i could definitely hear it it wasn't nothing like it's definitely audible not a huge deal necessarily depending on where you charge this and how you charge it that is something to be aware of it's not great and then also speaking of fan noise oh and by the way the jackeries don't have a fan in their power supplies i don't i don't believe speaking of fans this has a fan in it now with the jackeries when i use them they also have a fan but in my experience it only turns on to cool the unit down to cool it off when i'm running the 110 volt wall outlets when i'm just running the 12 volt outlets over here the fan never turns on on the jackeries on this one i heard this come on quite a bit in my car now this could either be a good thing or a bad thing it could be good because maybe that means it's cooling the unit down that means the batteries will last longer maybe i don't know i'm not an electrical engineer but in practice it's a little bit annoying it's i think roughly as loud as as this maybe a little bit quieter than the power supply but i mean it's definitely noticeable and the first time it happened i thought that i had left the ac section on but i didn't it was just cooling down and so i emailed the blue eddie support person that i'm in in contact with about it they said that yeah that's normal it'll come on to cool the unit down maybe that's good maybe it's bad i don't know but if you need a silent unit this is not the one to get go for a jackery instead now let's go back to this stupid little light in the corner here um i say it's stupid because i accidentally turned it on several times so the button to turn it on is the same button to turn on the screen here so if you press it for too long the light will come on um but if you just tap it the screen will turn on the display screen will turn on some people don't like the screen here i saw in other reviews they don't like that it doesn't last for very long when you do turn it on it turns on after a few seconds or something i found that to be pretty variable sometimes i would turn the screen on and it would stay on for just a few seconds sometimes i would turn it on it would last for like 10 or 20 seconds i think it might have something to do with with whether it's being charged or whether stuff is being drawn whether things are plugged in whether power is being drawn from it i'm not entirely sure that was a little bit finicky for me but i hate that i accidentally turned on this stupid light like i did in this video i hate that that happened when i was actually using it and so i don't know why they have the same button do those two things with the jackeries they do have a light on the side it has its own little button here i think these lights in general are kind of dumb i understand why they have them i've never once needed to use those but for i suppose emergency preparedness purposes it's it's a good thing to have on there and then speaking of the lights on this there's no light that comes on to show that the unit is being charged on the jackeries there's a little a little blue light so this is the input for the jackeries and on the right to the right of it here is a little blue light a little blue led that turns on when the unit is being charged whether from the wall or solar or from the car there is no such light there's no charging light on the blue eddy which i think is a shame i like that light i like i like knowing that my thing is being charged the only way to find that out on here is to turn the screen on which again kind of has its own issues one weird thing i noticed is that the the user manual that came with this was like printed over itself one side was printed normally and then i turned it around to the other side and on that side it had the same thing from the reverse side printed on it so it was like double printed it was the exact same thing plus the thing that should have been on that other side and so there are like two printings on the same side kind of weird i don't know if all of them are like that or just the one that i got but again i think that shows that like in general this is a good unit but like there are lots of little details that are kind of weird and kind of annoying or maybe even majorly annoying the manual was just a minor annoyance but i think it goes to show how there are some quirks with this power station the car charging cable on this is too short it's 34 inches long uh the jackery ones there are a couple of different lengths depending on which jackery you get i think if you buy the lower end jackery units it comes with one that's about eight or ten inches longer than this one so better and then with the bigger units like with the 1000 and i think the 1500 it's a much longer much longer car charging cable so i think it's dumb that it's so short i i can't use it in my car with this cable i've had to use an extension cable i got this off of amazon 15 or 20 maybe 25 i don't remember whichever power station you buy if you find that the car charger is too short there are extensions available and so it'll get anywhere in your vehicle that you needed to to get to and again i'll put a link to this in the video description so there you have it that's my review of this unit the question is do i recommend it actually there are a couple of questions the first one is do i recommend it and the answer to that is yes i think it's a good unit i like it there are things that bother me about it but it's a good unit overall and more than that i think it's a good value i think it's a a good value compared to jackery's or other units in this price range for the battery technology that you get in here for the life for the lithium iron phosphate that is better than a jackery no question and the value for money like the capacity that you're getting for your money that is better no question the tricky part is when you get to the second question which is which one do i prefer or what would i recommend i prefer the jackeries just because i like the way that i can use them i like the user interface better i like that there's no fan and i like that there's the the percentage battery indicator and so when i'm going on a trip i personally am going to be reaching for the jackeries in my collection versus the blue eddie in my collection but i have a lot to choose from and i got these all for free so you have to keep that in mind if i had only five hundred dollars i would probably get the blue eddie instead of the the jackery explorer 500 because of the the battery technology and because of the capacity i've had a little bit more money if i had 800 or a thousand dollars i'd probably get a jackery and then expect maybe in a handful of years to buy another one if you don't use it that often then a jackery is great or if you use it often like me obviously the jackery is still great but you might have to replace it sooner than this i've i personally haven't seen any degradation in my jackery's so far i've used them a lot over the past year uh they work great i think that for most of us the 500 charge cycles versus the 2500 charge cycles is more academic than actually practical but i mean you can't deny that this is better in that regard so keep that in mind i personally prefer the jackeries but if you have 500 bucks this is a good unit to get if you have more expendable income try a jackery i think you'll be happy with it because it is just nicer to use overall but again the blue eddy does have things that the jackers don't have like the wireless phone charger like the multiple and it's got more of the ac outlets um not all of the jackeries have the the barrel outlets the barrel connectors there so again there may be a deal breaker for you on either side maybe there's a deal breaker for you on the side of the blue eddy maybe there's a deal breaker for you on the side of the jackery you're just gonna have to see which one ticks most of your boxes i guess and you're gonna have to figure out what you value most in your portable power stations so hopefully that was helpful let me know what you guys think let me know if you have any questions i'm not a super technical guy so if you have like super technical chemistry or electricity questions i might not be able to answer them but if i don't know the answer to your question i'll just say i don't know thanks again to blue eddie for sending this out to me i will put links to their website and to amazon in the video description and in the top comment spot in the comments if you want to check one of these out for yourself and then also you guys let me know if there are other battery portable power station companies that you want me to to reach out to i actually have probably two or three or four companies reach out to me every week wanting me to review their power stations most of them i say no to i said yes to jackery because they're a well-known brand in the space i said yes to blue eddie because they're becoming a more well-known brand in the space they're not one of these companies that like is launching one on kickstarter and you may or may not get it and they may or may not be around in a couple years if there are other power stations from other companies that you want me to look at to review i can reach out to those companies and see if they'll if they're willing to send me one so again thanks for watching i'll see you guys in the next video be sure to check out adventure know-how my new site where you can gain access to a map of all of my free campsites plus monthly bonus videos that you won't find anywhere else learn more at adventureknowhow.com and for links to everything else suv rving related visit suvrving.com links to these sites and more will be in the video description

Channel: SUV RVing

Views: 41,851

Rating: 4.9309354 out of 5

Keywords: suv rving, car camping, suv camping, road trip, camping, camper, rv, vanlife, vandwelling, adventure, travel, suv dwelling, rav4, toyota, sleeping, solar, jackery, bluetti, power station, solar generator

Id: t2_lybsZ6n4

Length: 30min 47sec (1847 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021