Key Features
Review Price:
£1299- A slim power station for fridgesThis power station is designed to keep your fridge running through a power outage. It stores enough power to last a modern fridge/freezer around a day, and it can even handle some other more power-hungry kitchen devices.
- Quite specialisedThe FridgePower has only two mains output sockets, with no USB or DC outputs for charging phones, so it’s not really built as a general-purpose power supply.
Introduction
If you live out in the sticks, or you’re often on the road in a camper van, you might be familiar with the problem of keeping a fridge running when you’re away from a reliable it’s a slimline battery power station for fridges, designed to slip in alongside them or sit unobtrusively on top. Its narrow section is deceptive, as Bluetti has squeezed in enough batteries to store just over two kilowatt hours (kWh) of power
In theory that’s enough to last a modern fridge freezer for over a day of running; perfect for riding out even a significant power cut. And if you live in an area that frequently sees multi-day outages, you can even add up to three expansion batteries, potentially keeping the milk fresh and your peas frozen for a week or more.
While most of today’s fridges top out at only 200-300W of consumption – and typically use quite a bit less – the FridgePower can deliver up to 1,800W. That means you could use it to backup a couple of coolers and perhaps even a microwave or two-slot toaster, but it doesn’t have the grunt for very powerful appliances such as a kettle or oven. We wanted to put this specialised power station through our usual tests, and more.
Design and features
- Slim, but heavy
- Handle and wall-mounting bracket
- Basic but practical display
As you might expect, this power station’s 2kWh of batteries make it rather heavy – almost 20kg in fact – but it comes with a screw-on handle if you do need to cart it around. There’s also a sturdy wall mount if you want to keep it off the floor or counter top.
The other recommended orientation is to place the Bluetti FridgePower on top of the fridge – that’s how I positioned it, but I’d advise taking great care when lifting it into place or back down again.
This isn’t built as a general-purpose battery power station, so its ports and inputs are comparatively limited. Around the back you’ll find a standard mains power input and an XC60 connector for DC sources including solar panels. There are also just two mains output sockets. The most significant omission is that you won’t find any USB connectors, a shame if the FridgePower is within reach and you wanted a convenient place to charge a phone.
While Bluetti’s power stations usually get a display showing battery, input and output status, here you get a simplified version that uses five green LEDs to show the state of charge, plus a couple of other indicators for things like grid power availability. This is better than the norm in one important way; it’s always on, giving you an at-a-glance battery check in the middle of a power cut.
Alternatively you can buy the FridgePower with a magnetic screen designed to stick onto the side of the fridge. I didn’t have one to test, but it appears to work along the same lines as Bluetti’s standard on-device displays, showing the charge state, input and output power at a glance.
This display’s a neat idea, but I’m not convinced it’s necessary given you can get the same information from Bluetti’s app. Here you get the usual range of information and settings, including a choice of function modes. The default Standard UPS mode is fine for straightforward power security: when the grid is up the FridgePower will recharge and provide power, and when it’s down it’ll switch to battery power within 10 milliseconds. There’s also a PV priority mode, which lets you set a battery threshold above which the unit stops recharging on mains power: useful for favouring solar panels if you have them. In this mode, you can configure the use of some mains power to quickly recover a baseline amount of stored energy after a long power cut.
There are two time-control UPS modes, where the FridgePower recharges and provides standard UPS support during your off-peak hours, then powers your fridge from stored battery power during peak rate. That could be a good way to lower your fridge running costs, but if a power cut occurs late in the day when the battery’s depleted, you’ll get less backup time before your ice cream goes runny.
It isn’t just food that goes off; even the heavy-duty lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries in the fridge power will lose some of their capacity over time. Bluetti says that they’ll retain at least 80% of their rated capacity after 4000 full charge cycles, which equates to more than eight years of daily use. You can extend this life by using the app to limit both the maximum state of charge and the maximum depth of discharge. The flipside is that this will leave you with a smaller working battery range, and less time off the grid when you need it.
Bluetti has designed the FridgePower to be expandable. Additional battery units are priced at about £900 each, and could give you a total storage capacity of up to 8,064Wh (8kWh) – enough to power a single fridge freezer for four to eight days. The port for connecting each pack is behind a rubber bung on one of the long edges, seen at the right of this photo.
The Bluetti FridgePower is the latest example of how battery storage prices are falling. We calculate a power station’s value by dividing its price by the amount of energy you could expect it to store over its batteries’ working lifetime – in this case that’s the 80% over 4,000 cycles figure I mention above. Low values are good, with most of the supplies we’ve tested recently working out somewhere between 10-25p per kWh. Assuming steady degradation over time, and calculated for the discounted £999 launch price, you’d pay about 14p for every kWh stored in the FridgePower, which is among the best we’ve seen.
Charging
- Charge from the mains. Solar or vehicle charging are optional
- Maximum 1800W AC charging power
- Full recharge in a little over an hour and a quarter
If you’re installing the Bluetti FridgePower to backup your fridge or freezer at home, you’ll almost certainly be recharging it from the mains. Typically for a Bluetti power station you can choose from Silent, Standard or Turbo modes, with the latter drawing a maximum of around 1800W. Starting with fully empty batteries, I timed a Turbo recharge to 100% full at 83 minutes. This consumed 2089Wh – only a little more than this power station’s stated capacity.
In truth, there’s unlikely to be much need for recharging this power station in a hurry. At the default Standard mode it demanded around 1200W and finished charging in a couple of hours, consuming 2041Wh in the process. Silent mode demanded 600W, took nearer four hours, and consumed only 2011Wh – actually slightly less than the battery pack’s 2016Wh rated capacity. Based on these tests, Silent recharging would be the ideal choice if you’re using the FridgePower in time-control mode, provided you get at least four hours of off-peak power each night.
The presence of a DC input port does open up some options, particularly if you have a few solar panels near your kitchen or on the roof of your RV. The Bluetti FridgePower can accept up to 1000W of solar input. If you have an RV and don’t mind shelling out the extra £500 or so for Bluetti’s Charger 2, you could recharge at up to 800W from your van’s alternator alone – provided you also won’t mind losing about 1 horsepower of engine output. This power station supports simultaneous AC and DC charging up to a 2200W maximum.
It’s worth noting a couple of quirks depending on your market. US models will only charge at up to 1440W from the mains, while Japanese models top out at 1200W. UK and EU customers also get the best surge performance (a momentary 3600W) and bypass power output (a sustained 2300W), although even the lowest capabilities as found in the Japanese model should be plenty high enough for a couple of domestic fridges.
Performance
- Stable at maximum power
- A bit noisy even at light duty
- Very strong efficiency
While I usually head straight for our standard load tests, I first wanted to understand how this power station performed in its intended role. With it connected to my fridge and fully recharged, switching the mains power on and off didn’t cause any noticeable effects at all: the fridge continued working steadily.
I was interested to see whether the FridgePower’s Time Control mode might be a useful way to combine backup power with cheaper off-peak electricity, so I configured it to charge during my overnight off-peak tariff and discharge during the day. My Bosch fridge/freezer typically uses only around 60W, but even so I was amazed at how long the FridgePower’s battery lasted, with a slow discharge that suggested it could go for almost four days between charges. The maths suggested this shouldn’t be possible.
Switching back to Standard UPS mode helped clear things up. Here I put a separate smart socket on the FridgePower’s input cable, scheduled to turn the AC input on only during off-peak hours. The battery power state dropped far quicker when working from battery power in this configuration, suggesting that in Time Control mode the FridgePower had been consuming some grid power during peak hours.
With a couple of mains power meters added to the setup, I could see that the FridgePower did indeed consume around 60W of mains electricity in Time Control mode. This was constant, and occurred even during peak hours: the time period during which I was trying to avoid any power use. However, because of this the battery was less depleted by the end of peak hours, so there was less off-peak consumption to replenish it.
I let the fridge run for 48 hours in each configuration. The FridgePower (3kWh) and fridge (2kWh) consumed exactly the same amount of power during each test, but in Time Control mode some of the FridgePower’s mains use was during more expensive peak hours – if you were aiming to save money, you’d want to avoid that.
Things were much more straightforward on our standard tests, where we fully recharge a power supply and subject it to a constant load until its batteries are empty. At the maximum 1800W this device supplied only 1558Wh – some way short of its rated storage – while at a steady 1000W load it delivered 1696Wh. Using these figures I calculated a best round-trip efficiency of 84.3% – that’s excellent, meaning that of every 8kWh you store in the FridgePower, you might get nearly 7kWh back out again.
One small annoyance to mention is that the Bluetti FridgePower isn’t fully silent, even when it’s hardly under load. During the day it cycled its cooling fan on and off quite regularly and, while not loud, this was audible enough that it bothered me when watching TV on the other side of our living room. To be fair, I bother easily when it comes to noise – my partner barely noticed it.
Should you buy it?
You need dependable backup for your fridge
The Bluetti FridgePower really is suited to backing up one or two fridges for at least several hours during a power cut, and you can extend this with extra batteries. It’s a good choice if that’s your focus.
You want a general-purpose battery power station
This power station performs well, but it isn’t optimised for more general use in the home. If you want backup power for all your appliances, buy a generalist supply with more ports.
Final Thoughts
If you live somewhere that regularly gets power cuts, the Bluetti FridgePower could be ideal. It stores a sensible amount of power, can easily be upgraded with more, and has a high enough output to cope with the surges of fridge compressors switching on and off. It’s even got a bit of headroom spare to deal with other kitchen gadgets. For the owners of smaller camper vans, this might actually make the FridgePower an option for powering a modest kitchen where a more conventionally shaped power supply simply wouldn’t fit. Whatever you need it for, its 14p per kWh of lifetime energy storage makes it great value.
Personally however, I’d go for a more general-purpose power station where space allows. Alternatives like the Anker SOLIX C2000 Gen 2 offer similar storage and charge modes, combined with more ports and a higher maximum output. That makes them more flexible in a power cut and for everyday device powering and charging – even if they won’t fit neatly down the side of your fridge.
Trusted Score
How We Test
We test every power station we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
- We test with a variety of devices to see how long the battery will last.
- We test different charging methods to see how quickly the battery can be topped up.
Where can I buy the Bluetti FridgePower?
Bluetti announced the FridgePower several months before it launched, leading to some confusion among people who wanted to buy it. It’s now availablerritories including the UK, US and Canada
Can the Bluetti power a refrigerator?
Battery power stations with an output of at least five hundred watts can usually power a refrigerator. In fact, some supplies with just a couple of hundred watts’ output can do it, provided they’re able to cope with the momentary power surge each time the fridge’s compressor starts up. Bluetti’s been sensible with the FridgePower: its 1.8kW output is enough to cope with several coolers cycling on and off, and it gives headroom to spare for other mid-to-high power devices.
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