If your power goes out, what’s the first thing you check on? After you’ve got lights, I recommend turning your attention to your food in refrigerators and freezers. According to the USDA, an unopened fridge will keep food safe for about four hours, while a freezer will keep it safe for 48 hours if full and 24 hours if half full (assuming the door stays shut the whole time).

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Beyond that, things get sketchy, and where a power station becomes the most useful. The Bluetti FridgePower is designed just for this sort of eventuality.

The truth about most power stations

I’m a massive proponent of power stations, and firmly believe every household could benefit from one. But I’m also the first to admit they don’t fit the aesthetic of most homes — these things are big, bulky, and industrial.

In the garage or a shed, yeah, they’re great, but once you bring them inside into a living room or kitchen, they change the whole decor. That’s fine if you don’t mind the Mad Max vibe, but for most people, it’s a step too far. To address this, the FridgePower has been designed to look like a home appliance and designed to fit into spaces rather than take up floor space.

FridgePower tech specs

The power station is a 2,016Wh unit that can output a healthy 1,800W (and up to 3,600W surge) via two 120V power outlets (ignore the fact that my test unit has UK 3-pin sockets).

That’s enough power to keep your refrigerator going for an extra day, or a chest freezer for two and a half days, with variations depending on actual hardware. Or, if your priorities are a bit different, it will keep your router going for two or three days, again, depending on your router model.

The power station uses lithium iron phosphate batteries (that mouthful is normally shortened to the chemical formula, LiFePO4, and nowadays it’s shortened even further to LFP), which are good for 4,000 recharge cycles (those are complete charge/discharge cycles) and should last a decade. So far, pretty standard for a mid-sized portable power station.

But the FridgePower has some tricks up its sleeve. First, it’s very efficient, using only 4W of power in standby, which means there’s more power to run devices. Second, it can switch from passing through mains AC to internal battery power in 10 milliseconds, so fast that any connected devices won’t notice.

But what really sets the FridgePower apart from your typical power station is its form factor. Most are shaped like big boxes, but Bluetti has broken the mold and made the FridgePower less than three inches thick, measuring 13.78 x 22.83 x 2.95 inches and weighing 42 pounds.

According to Bluetti, the FridgePower will fit into “99.65% of kitchen gaps” such as behind the fridge, on the wall, or on the side of a cabinet. I’m not sure how this number was calculated, but I think most kitchens will have a spot suitable for a FridgePower.

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The idea is that the FridgePower fits on top of or beside appliances. And to help with this, Bluetti has made it white so it blends in and you forget it’s there until it kicks into life. It reminds me of an Xbox game console, just scaled up to home appliance proportions. And to help you fit the FridgePower into your home, it comes with leveling feet, a handle, mounting brackets, and all the fasteners you need to make them work.

It also has a feature called Storm Alert that notifies owners via the app of an approaching storm and, if the unit isn’t fully charged, activates a turbo charging mode to bring it up to full charge as fast as possible. My only complaint — and it’s a minor one — is that there’s no carry handle on the unit, so lugging a 42-pound bit of kit around can be a workout.

Even better: it’s modular

Feel like 2,016Wh of backup power isn’t enough? Want to be able to weather bigger storms and longer power outages? Bluetti has you covered with the BC200 expansion battery (also known as BlueCell 200). This adds an extra 2,016Wh of capacity, and you can connect up to three BC200s to a FridgePower for a total of 8,064Wh.

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The expansion units are easily daisy-chained together, and again, the kit includes all the cabling and fasteners you need. To make everything tidy, the expansion batteries are the same size as the FridgePower unit.

The FridgePower could save you money

Power stations and battery backup systems aren’t cheap, but you can put the Bluetti to work to save money by using its Time-of-Use (ToU) mode in the app, which shifts energy use between grid charging and battery discharge.

How does this save you money? Because (if your tariff allows) you can charge the FridgePower, and any expansion batteries, during off-peak periods when power is cheap, and switch to battery power during pricier on-peak times.

This is why the turbo charging mode ahead of a storm is handy: it switches the unit out of ToU mode and prioritizes charging. Based on some basic number-crunching using a median US time-of-use plan (assuming $0.22 per kWh peak and $0.08 per kWh off-peak prices), you could save $55 to $80 a year with judicious use of a FridgePower.

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You do have to factor in wear; however, given the FridgePower’s 4,000-recharge-cycle rating, even when pushed to a full cycle a day, it still boasts a battery lifespan of 11 years. In all likeliehood, I’d bank on something other than the cells failing first, like the inverter, fans, or charging circuitry. But over those 11 years, the battery capacity will drop from 100% to about 80%, so the amount of energy you can capture will slowly diminish.

I think that saving anything is better than nothing, but be realistic and don’t expect a setup like this to make you Scrooge McDuck money.

If you have solar or plug-in solar, then the FridgePower becomes an additional battery store for the energy you’re harvesting. It even has a PV input port ready.

Final thoughts

A Bluetti FridgePower will set you back $949, and each BC200 expansion battery is $899. If you played your ToU cards right and your unit lived to serve a decade, you could make a good chunk of that back.

A complete setup would cost you $3,646. It’s a lot of money, and for most people it’s overkill. But the nice thing about a system like this is that it’s modular, and you can start with a FridgePower unit and add expansion as needed. Ultimately, I think this is a truly innovative bit of kit; Bluetti has actually made something new, rather than just putting more batteries into big, ugly boxes.