BLUETTI Apex 300 Review: The Two Accessories That Are Not In The Box

BLUETTI sells the Apex 300 as home battery backup, and that’s the honest description of it. This is a utility room, garage and campervan unit: something you put down once and forget about until the lights go, and then it keeps the fridge, the freezer and a few sockets alive.

That framing matters for everything below. Judge a power station against the wrong job and it scores badly for no useful reason, so we’ve asked one question throughout: does it do the job it is sold for?

Every performance figure on this page is attributed to the named source that measured it.

BLUETTI’s headline recharge is 80 percent in 45 minutes at 3,840W. The catch sits inside the manufacturer’s own specification table, which lists AC charging at 3,840W maximum and states, on the same line, that it requires the Hub A1.

The Hub A1 isn’t in the box. Turn to the manual’s What’s in the Box page and you get the unit, an AC charging cable, a car charging cable, a grounding screw and the paperwork. No hub.

As shipped, the AC input ceiling is 2,300W. Trusted Reviews measured a mains recharge of 95 minutes in Turbo mode, and around two hours in Standard mode at 1.4kW.

Those two numbers agree with each other, which is what makes them convincing. A 2,300W ceiling is what produces a 95 minute recharge. A 3,840W input is what produces a 45 minute one. The difference between them is an accessory, not a manufacturing tolerance.

Nobody in the top search results leads with this. The 45 minute figure gets repeated as though it describes the product that arrives on your doorstep.

A second source watched the same ceiling

Digital Reviews Network, working with an Australian 230V unit on the other side of the world, watched AC input start near 1,350W, peak close to 2,200W, then taper off as the battery filled.

Two reviewers, two countries, two units, one ceiling. The 2,300W limit isn’t one site’s odd reading.

The Apex 300 has no USB ports. Not a slow one, not a single one. It has no 12V DC output either.

Both need the Hub D1, a second accessory, also sold separately. The manual’s Power Your Devices page states plainly that a Hub D1 is required for DC output, then lists the USB figures underneath it.

Attach the Hub D1 and you get USB at up to 100W per port, plus 12V and 24V DC and a high-current option. Without it, this battery charges nothing over USB. Not a phone, not a head torch, nothing.

Trusted Reviews in the UK and Digital Reviews Network in Australia both raise it unprompted, which tells you how surprising it is in person. Anyone arriving from a power bank or a smaller power station will assume USB-C is there, and the retail listing does nothing to correct them.

What comes in the box

The unit, an AC charging cable, a car charging cable, a grounding screw, and the manual and warranty card. That’s the whole list, taken from the manufacturer’s own manual.

The car charging cable is capped near 120W, and Trusted Reviews calls it close to useless. They have a point. At 120W, filling this battery from empty would take more than 20 hours of engine running, which is not a thing anyone is going to do.

Rated AC output is 3,840W at 230V, across four AC sockets on the 230V unit. Per-socket current limits change by region: 16A each in the EU, 13A each in the UK, 15A each in Australia.

Digital Reviews Network put real kitchen appliances through it rather than a resistive load bank. Single items, a microwave, a kettle, an air fryer, a toaster, gave it no trouble at all.

Two running together drew about 3,500W sustained and the unit held. Three together pushed past 5,000W and it shut down.

So 3,500W is the figure to plan around. The 7,680W on the box is Power Lifting mode and applies to resistive loads only, which makes it a headline rather than a planning number.

Trusted Reviews measured 2.55kWh delivered before shutdown at rated load, against 2,764.8Wh rated. That’s about 92 percent, and it’s an honest return for a battery this size.

Output efficiency on its own measured 92 percent at the full 3.8kW and 93.5 percent at a 2kW half load. Both are strong.

The loss sits on the charging side instead. Charging efficiency measured 81.7 to 82.4 percent across Turbo and Standard, and that’s what drags round-trip efficiency down to 75.6 percent.

Darleene’s version: for every four units of electricity you put in, you get about three back out again. The battery’s fine. It’s the filling where the waste happens.

Digital Reviews Network’s multi-day figures are the most useful numbers published on this product, because they’re the ones that answer what people ask.

A fridge and freezer together over 24 hours took the pack from 100 percent down to 25 percent, with roughly nine more hours available once it reached a 5 percent state of charge.

A washing machine on a 40 degree cycle for one hour cost 35 percent. A heat pump dryer for 90 minutes cost a further 45 percent.

Read those together and you get a clear picture: this is a unit that carries a fridge and freezer through a long outage without drama, and that covers one hot appliance cycle. One. Not a laundry day.

Trusted Reviews found the Time-of-Use mode drained 48 percent of the battery over 12 hours while the unit sat otherwise idle. For a mode whose entire purpose is shifting cheap energy into expensive hours, that’s a serious finding, and it undercuts the feature’s whole reason for existing.

They also measured the Silent charging mode running at roughly half efficiency, consuming more than 1.7kWh to charge a battery that was only a third full.

Idle self-consumption measured 9W, which is better than the 20W BLUETTI advertises. The point isn’t that the claim fails, because it doesn’t.

It’s the one Trusted Reviews makes: even at 9W, standing loss across days adds up on a battery sold to sit and wait.

On paper the Apex 300 takes 2,400W of solar across two XT60 ports, 1,200W per port, at 12 to 60V.

Battery Skills measured 380 to 395W combined from two 200W panels in full sun, against a 400W nameplate. The panels behaved themselves. There were only two of them.

Reaching that ceiling needs an array most buyers will never own. The 2,400W figure describes the socket, not your roof.

The Apex 300 has a UPS mode, documented in the manual alongside Grid Self-Adaption.

No switchover time has been published by BLUETTI or measured by any independent source, so this review doesn’t give one. If a millisecond figure matters to the kit you’re protecting, treat it as unknown rather than fast.

A single Apex 300 expands past 19kWh with up to six battery packs, and up to three units can run in parallel. The pack to look for now is the B500K, which supersedes the B300K our earlier pages name.

BLUETTI’s larger marketing figure assumes several units, each carrying its own packs. That isn’t a single-unit number, and this page won’t print it as one.

The Apex 300 weighs 38kg and measures 525 by 327 by 320mm. You don’t carry this anywhere. You place it.

In a utility room or a garage, that costs you close to nothing. One person can’t reposition it alone, which is worth knowing before you choose the spot, and that’s the whole of the penalty at home.

In a campervan or a caravan the sums look different, and almost no competing review raises it. That 38kg comes straight off a legal payload allowance, sitting alongside water, gas, bikes and everything else you’re already counting before a weighbridge.

Against that allowance the Apex 300 gives 72.8Wh per kilogram, from our own arithmetic on the published capacity and weight.

The EcoFlow DELTA 3 Max Plus gives 92.7 and the Jackery Explorer 2000 v2 gives 114. So the weight is not merely the price you pay for the extra capacity, and in a van that difference is real.

If you’re camping and hauling gear from a car to a pitch, this is the wrong unit, and our portable power station roundup has lighter picks built for exactly that. Sending you elsewhere isn’t a mark against the Apex 300. It’s a different job.

Darleene’s takeWeight has never been the question for me. The question is what the weight is buying. My big power bank is heavier than the small one and I still take it to the airport, because on that day it earns its place.

At 2,764.8Wh this is roughly 27 times the 100Wh limit airlines apply to batteries in the cabin. No approval process brings it anywhere near, so it cannot fly in the cabin or in the hold.

That does not make it a stay-at-home product. It travels by road perfectly well, so it goes in a van, to a pitch or to a site, and it is the thing you want at home when the power is off. It never flies.

If the trip involves a plane, the answer is a different class of product rather than a smaller version of this one. A power bank at or under 100Wh is allowed in the cabin and is built for exactly that job.

Full rules are in our can you take a power bank on a plane? guide. Check any capacity in seconds with our mAh to Wh calculator.

The pack is LiFePO4 in a 51.2V, 54Ah configuration, rated by BLUETTI for 6,000 cycles to 80 percent of its original capacity and covered by a five-year warranty.

Confirm the exact certification marks on the unit and packaging when yours arrives.

Want one battery to carry a house or a van through a power cut, and have somewhere to put it? The Apex 300 does that job well.

The capacity is real, the delivered figure is honest, and the cycle life and warranty are the best in our line-up.

Buy it with clear eyes about the two accessories. The unit you receive recharges in about 95 minutes, not 45, and it charges nothing over USB until you add the Hub D1.

Neither is a fault in the hardware. Both are a gap between the marketing and the box, and pricing the two hubs into your decision is the difference between a good buy and a nasty surprise.

The Apex 300 is a strong home and campervan backup battery with a marketing problem rather than an engineering one. Its capacity, cycle life and output all hold up under independent testing.

What doesn’t hold up is the impression the listing creates. The recharge speed and the entire USB and DC output belong to two accessories in separate boxes, and the manual admits it while the headline never does.

Know that going in and this is a good unit. Find it out afterwards and it’s an expensive surprise. See how we test, or see where it ranks against the rest in our best portable power stations roundup.