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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Capacity and Recharge, 8.0. 2,764.8Wh of LiFePO4 at 6,000 cycles is class-leading longevity, and the delivered figure is honest. What keeps it off a 9 is the recharge headline needing an accessory, and a round-trip efficiency of 75.6 percent.

Fit for the Job It Is Sold For, 8.0. Sold as fixed household and campervan backup, and it suits that. It stays where you put it, it carries a fridge and freezer through a long outage, and the footprint is manageable in a garage or a utility room. The one place the weight is a real charge against it is a campervan payload allowance.

Value for Money, 7.5. Six thousand cycles, five years of warranty, app control, parallel operation and a path past 19kWh are a lot of product.

Against that, two accessories stand between you and both the advertised recharge speed and any USB port at all, one supplied cable is close to useless, and Silent charging wastes about half the energy it draws. Trusted Reviews rates the unit four stars and Recommended.

Power Output and Ports, 7.0. The output is the most in our power stations line-up by a wide margin, and it runs kitchen appliances rather than laptops. The ports pull it down hard. No USB and no DC on the base unit is an omission at this size, not a nitpick, and two independent reviewers raise it without being asked.