Big, powerful, and ridiculously upgradeable battery power.
Bluetti’s massive Apex 300 is a powerful, robust power supply suitable for the home or a camper van. With fast charging, oodles of output power, and frankly ridiculous upgradeability, it’s a serious bit of kit. While you could use it simply to backup various home devices in the case of a power cut, you could integrate it with your home, or use it as the basis for a powerful mains system in a boat or camper van. At this price, it’s hard to fault.
-
Massive output power -
Excellent upgradeability -
Superb durability and warranty
-
Standard battery storage could be a little more generous -
No household DC outputs as standard
Key Features
-
Review Price: £1649 -
A very heavy-duty, highly expandable power station
Bluetti’s Apex 300 is built for heavy-duty home backup, or as a mains-like power supply for recreational vehicles. It stores more than 2.7 kilowatt hours of electricity, and can deliver up to 3.8kW at once. If that’s not enough, you can expand it. -
Charge via the mains, solar, or a car
You can charge this power supply from a range of sources, but it’s likely to be slow except from mains power, or unless you have lots of solar panels.
Introduction
The Bluetti Apex 300 is a large, heavy-duty battery power station. While its onboard storage might not be massive, it’s otherwise very highly specified, with a whopping 3.8kW maximum AC output – more than enough to run any device fitted with a 13A plug. While you can technically cart it around, in truth, this power station is intended for backup and storage use in the home, or as the hub of a power system for a recreational vehicle.
The Apex 300 is described in its manual as a portable power station, but the word ‘portable’ is doing some pretty heavy lifting. As will you: it weighs in at 38kg, and is probably much too big and heavy for most people to carry alone. That’s because the power station filled with heavy lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO) cells, rated to retain at least 80% of their initial capacity after 6,000 full charge/recharge cycles. That’s equivalent to more than 16 years of daily use, and it’s backed up by Bluetti’s usual five-year warranty.
This power station is designed with upgradeability in mind, making it suitable for anything from appliance backups, to taking your whole house off grid. However it’s worth noting that you don’t get any USB outputs as standard: just four highly specified mains ports.
Design and features
- Decent storage capability
- Massive output
- Very upgradeable
Considering the size and weight of the Bluetti Apex 300 it’s perhaps surprising it doesn’t offer more than its 2,764.8 watt hours (roughly 2.7 kilowatt hours (kWh)) of storage, but that’s still a lot for this price. This really is a huge and heavy beast, and while it can be heaved around, you’ll want to find a good place and leave it there.
In its simplest form, the Apex 300 plugs into a standard mains socket, and offers four AC outputs. Each is protected by a rubber bung, which is good if you’ve got the Apex 300 below the sink in a utility room or RV. It can be annoying when it comes to inserting oversized plugs or adaptors, though.
Any one of these AC outputs can provide the 13A maximum supported by a UK plug, while there’s a mighty 3,800W available across all four. That’s enough to run anything: kettles, washing machines, tumble dryers – you name it, although perhaps not all at once. As such, that makes this a great option for home backup power, but it’s also ideal if you want to add a potent power supply to a camper van or motorhome.
Bluetti sells various upgrades that make the Apex 300 more suited to either role. For a start, you can connect extra batteries, with each B300K expansion unit offering a further 2.7kWh of storage. You can add up to six packs, for a total of more than 19kWh. To put that in perspective, it’s enough to power the typical family home for two days, or to move an electric car about 60 miles. However, with each battery pack weighing 30kg, you probably wouldn’t want too many onboard if you are buying for a recreational vehicle.
As if that wasn’t enough, you can link up to three Apex 300 units together using the Hub A1 parallel box. In this configuration they could provide up to 11.5kW of power, and with six extra batteries each store a massive 58kWh – enough to power your home for several days off-grid. As a reality check, the necessary batteries and power stations for this scenario would cost nearly £25,000, and you’d need an electrician to help connect everything to your home.
Additional upgrade options include a solar charging regulator supporting up to a massive 4kW input, and a DC hub offering USB-A and USB-C ports, two car outputs, and a 50A Anderson connector for RVs. Oddly, you do get a car charging cable in the pack, but it’s next to useless, as I’ll explain below.
As you’d expect, you can control all of the Apex 300’s features via a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection and Bluetti’s app. This also duplicates the status information that you see on the screen, summarising the DC and AC power input and outputs.
Charging
- Charge from mains, car, or the sun
- Maximum 2300W AC charging power as standard
- Full recharge in an hour and a half
There are multiple ways to recharge the Bluetti Apex 300, but you can probably discount standard in-car charging from a cigarette lighter style socket. This typically supports a maximum 120W, at which rate you’d need to drive for 24 hours to fully recharge the batteries. If you are considering the Apex 300 for an RV or camper van, it’s almost certainly worth shelling out £250 or so for Bluetti’s 560W alternator charger – though even that would need around six hours to finish the job.
This battery power station has two XT60 connectors suitable for plugging in portable solar panels, up to a total of 1,200W per connector. In ideal conditions they’d provide the power to recharge in a little over one hour, but the Apex 300 can accept up to 3,840W of combined AC and DC input. Connected to solar and the mains, that could see you recharge in less than an hour.
It’s possible to reach that speed from mains alone if you connect the Apex 300 to your home via the Hub A1 accessory, but standard mains charging is limited to 2,300W in Turbo mode. In the default Standard mode, this drops to about 1.4kW, at which rate a full recharge takes about two hours. It’s handy having a switch to easily select which mode you want.
As I’d expect from a Bluetti power station, there’s a third ‘Silent’ mode, which charges at a slower rate to minimise heat and noise. While this usually works well, it didn’t seem ideal here: The Apex 300 began charging at a stately 500W, but at around 20% full this dropped down to 200W. In theory this would mean another eight hours or so to finish the job, but the screen and app estimated more than a day remaining. With the battery only 33% full I measured power consumption of more than 1.7kWh, which would equate to 5.2kWh for a full recharge. That’s an efficiency of only around 50%, and not worth bothering with.
Happily, things were fine in the other two modes. Standard recharging consumed 3.39kWh which, assuming the batteries went from empty to fully charged, would equate to an efficiency of 81.7%. A full recharge in Turbo mode consumed 3.35kWh (82.4%), and completed in 95 minutes.
Like other heavy-duty Bluetti power stations, the Apex 300 is limited to a maximum 10A input current by default. At the UK’s 230V mains voltage, that equates to 2,300W. If your home wiring is up to it you can increase this to 13A via the password-protected Pro mode, but it won’t raise the maximum charging speed possible over a standard mains connection: that’s capped at 10A.
However, raising the maximum AC input does come into play if you’re powering heavy duty loads from the mains. Depending on its configuration, the Apex 300 will use battery power to make up the difference between the AC output and what it’s able to draw from the mains. Increasing the input limit will raise the threshold before it needs to start supplying additional power, and thus discharging the batteries.
Raising the maximum current could also improve charging performance if you were trying to charge flat out while powering a middling load, for example a heat-pump dryer drawing 800W. With a 13A input limit, the maximum input power would be just shy of 3kW: the Apex 300 would be able to charge at near its maximum speed, while still providing the necessary bypass power to its output sockets.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but you can also lower the maximum mains power the Apex 300 will draw, all the way down to 1A (around 230W). That could be ideal for an RV at a 6A hookup, as you could limit the Apex 300’s mains input to 6A, and have it use battery power to meet higher loads when necessary. When you weren’t running heavy loads it would recharge at up to 6A (around 1,400W) if needed.
Like most other Bluetti power stations, the Apex 300 can work in several modes, providing standard backup and UPS-like performance, but also allowing you to configure smart behaviour. Its Time of Use mode sounds ideal for people like me, who might like to store cheap energy overnight, and use it during the day to run laundry loads. Helpfully, you can assign various things, including a charging mode change, to the ‘Magic Button’ on the front panel. In this way you could switch between backup and time-of-use behaviour as needed.
I tried configuring the Bluetti Apex 300 to charge only during my off-peak hours, and maintain the batteries’ state of charge at 10-100%. In theory, this should have meant waking up to a fully-charged power pack, using battery power during the day, and the unit reverting to bypass (mains) power if the charge level dropped to 10%. Once off-peak hours came around again, it would recharge the batteries.
It didn’t quite work like that. The Apex 300 seemed reluctant to charge beyond 95% in this mode, and ran its batteries down reasonably quickly when switched on, even if its outputs remained switched off. By the time I woke up at 7am, it was usually already down to just below 90% charge. More curiously, it consumed about 9W of mains power in this mode, even though it wasn’t providing it to any connected devices, or using it to charge the batteries.
I left it switched on and plugged in, but with its AC sockets switched off. After 12 hours it had consumed 0.1 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of mains power, and the battery state had dropped by a huge 48%. This level of self-consumption makes it harder to view the Apex 300 as a whole-home battery solution – its just wasn’t efficient enough in this mode.
Performance
- Stable and efficient even at its maximum output
- Terrifying heavy lifting mode
- Not particularly quiet
Designed to last 6000 charge cycles until it hits 80% capacity, the Apex 300 is one of the longest-lived power stations that I’ve reviewed. It’s also one of the best value. Assuming linnear degredation of the battery, over the 6000 charge cycles, this power station would cost a remarkable 13p per kWh of power stored.
The Blueti Apex 300’s 3.8kW maximum output is fearsome and enough to power my washing machine and tumble dryer with several hundred watts to spare, but I always test battery power stations to their maximum specification. In this case, this required two power meters, a four-gang adaptor, and three other battery power stations configured to charge at a 3.8kW total. Predictably, the Apex 300 seemed unruffled, supplying 2.55kWh before the batteries were empty and it shut off.
I was impressed not only that it could do this, but that it did so quite efficiently: assuming the batteries went from full to completely empty, the above 2.55kWh output equates to an excellent 92% efficiency. Typically for a battery power station, I saw the best efficiency at around half of the maximum output: at 2kW, the Apex 300 could deliver 2.58kWh, an efficiency of 93.5%.
Considering these outputs against how much energy it took to fill the batteries, I measured a best round-trip efficiency of 75.6%, which is a little disappointing: 80% is our benchmark here. With no USB outputs, I couldn’t test DC output efficiency – fortunately, perhaps, as with my standard 60W USB load this would have taken a couple of days.
The Bluetti Apex 300 offers a Power Lifting mode, which lets you plug in certain devices rated above the unit’s maximum output. This is a bit of a fudge, where the power supply limits the output voltage and current to remain within its capabilities, rather than actually providing any more power – it only works with purely resistive loads like kettles or a bar heater. Here, the limit is a colossal 7.7kW – in theory that’s enough to plug in two three-element bar fires and a toaster. I can’t really imagine any circumstances when you’d want to use it, given that the true output is so high.
One thing to note is that this supply is a bit noisier than I’ve come to expect from Bluetti. While never harsh or particularly intrusive, its fans are audible, and they work for much of the time the unit is on. When working hard – particularly during Turbo charging – the top middle tended to become quite warm.
Should you buy it?
You should buy if you want huge power for a home or RV
This is a very powerful AC supply, offering strong backup or supply potential in the home or a camper van. It’s hugely upgradeable, too, if you can afford it.
You shouldn’t buy if you want portability
This isn’t a portable power supply, and it’s overkill for lighter backup duties in the home. If you don’t need its grunt, save money and settle for less impressive performance.
Final Thoughts
Although this is one of the most powerful battery power stations I’ve tested, it’s comparatively affordable – especially at its discounted price below £1,700. We give an idea of a battery power station’s value by dividing its price by the amount of energy it might store over its lifetime. Here, that works out at just 13p per kWh, one of the lowest figures we’ve yet seen.
It performs well, too, and is highly upgradeable – although I’d prefer it if there was a little more storage onboard as standard. The Apex 300’s self-consumption put me off the idea of using it as a home storage battery, but it worked excellently when I connected it to a smart socket to schedule off-peak charging, and simply turned on the outputs as and when I needed them.
The Bluetti Apex 300 also has the potential to make an excellent power station for RVs. Here, its ability to charge swiftly from an optional alternator charger or solar panels means you could keep it topped up while moving, or when parked on a sunny day. Limiting the mains input current would also let you recharge without overloading your hookup, while having the batteries step in for extra power when you needed to put the kettle and toaster on.
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.
FAQs
Bluetti uses high-quality LiFePO batteries in its power supplies. In cheaper models these are usually rated to retain 80% of their capacity after 3,000 full charge/discharge cycles. That’s enough for more than eight years of daily use.
Some models, including the Apex 300, use ‘automotive grade’ LiFePO cells. These are rated for 6,000 cycles so, in theory, they would last for at least 16 years of daily charging. Nearly all Bluetti power stations have a five-year warranty.
The Apex 300 is a battery power station, capable of charging from the mains, a car or solar panels, and providing high power AC outputs to regular mains devices. It’s ideal to keep select appliances working in a power cut, or as the power system for a camper van.
Test Data
Full Specs
| Bluetti Apex 300 Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £1649 |
| USA RRP | $1549 |
| EU RRP | Unavailable |
| CA RRP | CA$1998 |
| AUD RRP | Unavailable |
| Manufacturer | – |
| Quiet Mark Accredited | No |
| Battery | 2764.8 Whr |
| Size (Dimensions) | 525 x 327 x 320 MM |
| Weight | 38 KG |
| ASIN | B0F9F8N8MS |
| Release Date | 2025 |
| First Reviewed Date | 25/09/2025 |
| Battery type | Rechargeable |
| Battery technology | Lithium-ion |
| Battery size | AA |
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(471x244:473x246)/CNN-New-Years-Eve-with-Anderson-Cooper-123124-9952e5f00fc1425f87113ba2bfb97b29.jpg "Anderson Cooper Says He Once ‘Hated’ New Year’s Eve While Co-Hosting CNN Broadcast")
