Power stationsGuide
Best power station for apartment backup (fridge, router, lights, phones)
Which portable power station to keep in an apartment for outages, picked from manufacturer specs by battery size, AC output, published surge rating and solar input, with a plain account of what our data can't answer yet.
Last updated
- 9 power stations
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There are no runtime tables on this page. Our data covers CPAP machines and 12V camping fridges, not kitchen fridges, Wi-Fi routers, lamps or phone chargers, so we can’t tell you how many hours your apartment gets out of a given station.
What we can do is compare the stations on the specs that decide whether they’ll handle apartment loads at all, and show you how to work out the hours for your own things.
How we picked
Four specs, all from the manufacturers’ manuals:
- Battery capacity. More of it means more hours of whatever you plug in. This is the main one.
- Continuous AC output. Apart from phones on USB, what you’d back up in an apartment plugs into the wall, so it goes through the station’s inverter. The total of what’s running at once has to stay under this rating.
- Published surge rating. A fridge compressor pulls a lot more for a moment when it starts than it does while running. We don’t have startup figures for any household fridge, so we can’t check one against any station. What we can say is which stations publish a surge rating and how high it is. Where a manual gives none, our tables use the continuous rating instead. That’s a cautious stand-in, and it means we can’t recommend those stations for a fridge until the maker says otherwise.
- Solar input, for an outage that outlasts the battery and a balcony that gets some sun.
All the stations here are LiFePO4, so chemistry doesn’t separate them. We don’t have weight, size, noise or how much charge a station loses sitting in a closet for months, so none of those are part of the ranking.
The specs side by side
| Power station | Battery | AC output, continuous | AC surge | Max solar input |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EcoFlow RIVER 3 | 245 Wh | 300 W | Not given in EcoFlow’s manual | 110 W |
| Bluetti EB3A | 268.8 Wh | 600 W | 1,200 W | 200 W |
| EcoFlow RIVER 3 Plus | 286 Wh | 600 W | Not given in EcoFlow’s manual | 220 W |
| EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus | 1,024 Wh | 1,800 W | 3,600 W | 500 W |
| Bluetti Elite 100 V2 | 1,024 Wh | 1,800 W | Not given in Bluetti’s manual | 1,000 W |
| Bluetti AC180 | 1,152 Wh | 1,800 W | 2,700 W | 500 W |
| Jackery Explorer 2000 v2 | 2,042 Wh | 2,200 W | 4,400 W | Not yet confirmed from the manual |
| Bluetti AC200PL | 2,304 Wh | 2,400 W | 3,600 W | 1,200 W |
| EcoFlow DELTA Pro | 3,600 Wh | 3,600 W | 7,200 W | 1,600 W |
Working out your own hours
You’ll need a figure for each thing you want to keep running, then add them up for a day.
- Fridge: most US fridges carry a yellow EnergyGuide label with an estimated yearly electricity use. Divide it by 365 for a day. That’s an average, and your kitchen in a summer outage with the door opening may use more.
- Router, lamps, chargers: the watts are on the label or the power brick. Multiply by the hours a day you’d run each one.
Compare the daily total with the station’s battery, and leave room for the inverter’s loss. Everything here runs on AC, and our tables assume a station delivers less than its rated capacity through the AC outlet. The methodology page gives the figure we use. The runtime calculator only covers appliances in our data, so for these you’ll be doing it by hand for now.
The picks
Router, phones and a few lights for an evening: EcoFlow RIVER 3 Plus
If all you want through an evening outage is internet, light and charged phones, start with the small stations and check your own watts against them. The RIVER 3 Plus has the most capacity of the three small ones and takes a single folding panel at full rating. The Bluetti EB3A is nearly the same size and is the one of the two with a published surge rating, so pick it if you might plug in a small fan or anything else with a motor.
Keeping the kitchen fridge going: EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus
For a fridge we’d start at the kilowatt-hour stations and only look at ones with a published surge rating. Of the kilowatt-hour stations, the DELTA 3 Plus publishes the highest surge figure. That’s headroom on paper for the compressor starting, not a guarantee, because we don’t know what your fridge pulls at startup.
The Bluetti AC180 has a bit more battery with a lower published surge, and it’s the one to pick if hours matter more to you than startup headroom. We left the Bluetti Elite 100 V2 out of this pick because Bluetti doesn’t publish a surge rating for it.
A multi-day outage: Bluetti AC200PL
If outages where you live last more than a day, battery size is what counts. The AC200PL has the most capacity of the stations around that size, and both a published surge rating and a confirmed solar input. The Jackery Explorer 2000 v2 is close on battery and publishes a higher surge, but we haven’t confirmed its solar input from the manual. If you won’t be relying on panels, it’s worth a look.
About the solar part: a balcony usually has room for one or two folding panels at most. The ones in our data are rated 200 W to 220 W, which is well under the AC200PL’s input limit, so in an apartment it’s the panel that limits charging, not the station. The solar recharge calculator will tell you what one panel gets you on your hours of sun.
The longest outage: EcoFlow DELTA Pro
The biggest battery and the highest published surge in our data. Most outages won’t come close to using it, so it only makes sense if yours run for days and the fridge has to stay on.
What we’d skip
The EcoFlow RIVER 3. Its continuous AC output is the lowest we have, EcoFlow gives no surge rating, and its solar input is below the rating of any folding panel in our data. The RIVER 3 Plus is barely bigger and has double the AC output and double the solar input.
If you’re also weighing a balcony solar kit, read plug-in solar vs. a power station for an apartment first. A plug-in kit shuts off in a blackout, so it doesn’t replace any of these.