It’s hard to prepare for a natural disaster if you’ve never lived through a similar event before and that’s the situation I found myself in at the beginning of the week.
Although I grew up on the East Coast, I’ve been living in Houston for the past six years with my family and during that time, I’ve learned a lot about what can go wrong when the power goes out for extended periods. We dealt with The Great Texas Freeze back in 2021 and more recently in May, the Houston Derecho storm unexpectedly brought winds of 100 miles per hour.
During that last storm, we used my trusty old Jackery Explorer 300 to keep a fan going and to charge our phones. However, when the fan died in the middle of the night and we had no way to recharge its 293Wh battery the next day, I knew it was time for an upgrade. Fortunately, my colleagues at Tom’s Guide stepped in and started reaching out to get me everything I’d need to make it through the next big storm or worse, a hurricane, where I'd be faced with a power outage.
To that end, Bluetti sent over one of their larger portable power stations and a solar panel to go with it for review. I had brought it with me over the 4th of July weekend to use while on a family trip in South Texas last week. However, our trip got cut short when we found out Hurricane Beryl had shifted direction and was heading right for Houston.
Here’s how I used this portable power station to beat the heat and keep all of our devices charged during my first real hurricane.
Ports for your phone and a plug for your fridge
Compared to my Jackery Explorer 300, the Bluetti AC200L is a massive upgrade with a 2048Wh battery. It’s also a much larger device at 16.5 x 11 x 14.4 inches and weighs over 60 pounds. However, it has handles on either side instead of just one at the top, though I do wish it had wheels.
On its front panel, the Bluetti AC200L has two 100W USB-C ports for fast charging devices, two USB Type-A ports, a 48V DC port, a 12V accessory outlet, four AC ports and even a 120V 30A NEMA TT-30 outlet for plugging in a refrigerator. Suffice it to say, you have all the ports you’d need to charge your smartphones and tablets as well as to power several appliances while camping or during an emergency.
Since I haven’t really had a chance to put the Bluetti AC200L through its paces, I used the device very conservatively during the day as I knew it would get hot and humid at night. For instance, on Monday when Hurricane Beryl first hit and we lost power, it was 100 degrees during the day and 81 at night with 85% humidity.
It wasn’t only my first hurricane but also the first time my toddler experienced something like this. He has a hard time falling asleep without a fan on and he likes to watch a bit of TV in the afternoon, so I unplugged the power strip for my bedroom TV and plugged it into the Bluetti AC200L. After using it for a few hours this way, the device’s power level was at 77%. My inclination to wait to use it was right and we still had enough power left for overnight.
As I’m writing this article on Friday, there are still over half a million people without power in Houston and over the course of this week, 2.3 million out of 2.6 million people lost power in the city and in the greater Houston area. Our power was restored fairly early on but that wasn’t the case for my mother-in-law and our friends with a 3-month-old baby. They eventually all stayed at our house to beat the heat but not before I lent the Bluetti AC200L to my mother-in-law to use at her house.
Lending a lifeline
As we were away on vacation before Hurricane Beryl hit, our fridge was mostly empty and we only had to throw out a few things. My mother-in-law on the other hand has a chest freezer filled with meat that she didn’t want to go bad, which is why she asked to borrow my larger portable power station. She’s not the most tech savvy but after I explained how it worked, she brought it over to her house and got everything she needed to power plugged in.
The Bluetti AC200L kept her freezer running for several hours along with a few lights before its battery eventually died. Thankfully, I also let her take the Bluetti PV200D solar panel over to her house with it. It was a bit harder for my mother-in-law to get set up as there were a few additional cables she needed to connect to get it working but eventually she got it sorted out.
As the sun was at an angle in the afternoon, she decided to hang it up on the side of the house and the holes on the top and bottom of the solar panel made this easy to do. My mother-in-law started charging the Bluetti AC200L at around 5pm and the portable power station was completely charged up in three hours, right around when the sun went down.
When her power didn’t come on after a few days (it’s still not on yet actually), my mother-in-law headed to our house and brought the contents of her freezer with her. Still though, if she had gotten power earlier the Bluetti AC200L would have done the trick.
Great for emergencies
If you’re a fellow Houstonian reading this, you might be wondering why I didn’t just get a generator instead. Truth be told, we only moved into our house a few years ago and up until then, we lived in an apartment where we wouldn’t have been able to use a generator. I may get one eventually but they’re not without their own hassles.
Generators need to be refueled more often depending on their size with small portable ones lasting 7-10 hours on a full tank while medium sized ones can run for 10-15 hours. These generators are more common as they’re less expensive, though after Hurricane Harvey and the Freeze, more people here are investing in more expensive, large standby generators for whole-house backup. Waiting at the gas station to refill your tanks can take a long time too during a big storm like this one and you also need to remember to check your generator’s oil. Plus, you should run your generator at least once a month to ensure it’s in good working order for when you need it most.
A larger portable power station or several of them daisy-chained together (which you can do with this one) would have allowed us to power our whole house and that’s definitely something I might consider in the future. However, as we got power back fairly quickly, the Bluetti AC200L helped us weather the storm and make it through Hurricane Beryl. If you live in an apartment though, where you can’t use a generator, a portable power station like this one is certainly worth investing in.
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