BLUETTI EP500 Pro — 1½ Years Later

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Last Updated on: 11th March 2025, 08:24 pm

One and a half years ago, in August of 2023, I published a review of the BLUETTI EP500 Pro. It hit me recently that while we publish reviews of such home energy storage systems from time to time, and also write about new ones arriving on the market and special deals, we seldom (or never?) write about our long-term experiences with them. How do the products hold up years later? How much capacity do you lose over time? How much does the capacity hold or leak while sitting in storage for a year or more? Is everything as smooth and functioning as well on Day 500 as on Day 10?

After all, if you want to rely on a large energy storage backup system in the long term, you want it to hold up well over time and you want it to be as good as new if you take it out of the closet a year or two after buying it.

Yes, it might be more useful to do a 10-year review of a product than a 1½-year review. But we haven’t owned any battery storage systems for 10 years. The oldest one I have is the BLUETTI EP500 Pro. (Note: while I can only vouch for and recommend the EP500 Pro, I just found out the similar but slightly older and lower-capacity EP500 model is being discontinued and there’s a flash sale going on right now for the final units. Until the end of March 11, you can get it for $1899, which is -37%, or $1,100 off, and that deal opens up again for a final time March 16–17. The EP500 Pro, meanwhile, costs $3,499 after a $500 discount, and you can then get 5% off with the code CLEANTECH5OFF as well. The EP500 has 5,120Wh energy storage capacity and 2,000W power capacity, while the EP500 Pro has 5,120Wh energy storage capacity and 3,000W power capacity.)

About 6 months ago, I pulled the BLUETTI EP500 Pro out of storage and charged it up fully just before Hurricane Milton hit. (Apologies — I said I thought it was Hurricane Helene in the video below. It’s hard to keep track of the hurricane names here in Florida.) The system seemed to operate like new, nearly a year after I had last tested and used it. We had lost power for about 18 hours in a previous hurricane, and we were happy we’d be able to power the fridge, computers, the TV, phones, etc. when we got hit by Milton. The eye of the hurricane actually went through us, tearing many of the shingles off our roof and causing extreme whistling and wind gusts onto our front door for several hours. Somehow, though, we never lost power. I think about 92% of our county in our utility district lost power, but we didn’t. So, the BLUETTI EP500 Pro never had to do the heavy lifting we expected.

Nonetheless, you don’t want to leave a battery charged at 100% for long, so we used the BLUETTI EP500 Pro to power our computers and phones long enough to wind it back down to ~50%. All worked as expected, just as it had when we first got and tested the product a year prior. But I didn’t document all of that. (We were too focused on other things.)

So, I just pulled the system out of the closet again and did some testing for this article. It was still sitting at 49%, which I think is what I left it at. I got it up to 50%, which just took a few moments, and then it took me 10 minutes to add 5% of capacity from the normal 120V wall plug. So, in theory, it would take 200 minutes to go from 0% to 100%, or 3 hours and 20 minutes. But I kept going and charged it all the way to 100%. It then took a total of 1 hour and 25 minutes (an extra 1 hour and 15 minutes) to get to 95%, and then took another 10 minutes to get to 100%. So, that’s 1 hour and 35 minutes to go from 50% to 100%.

Then, it took another hour and a half of a computer and phone charging to bring the system back down to 95% from 100%. I’ve been using it for the past couple of days to charge computers and phones to try to get it back down to 50% to store it again, and it’s still at 72%.

So, yes, the system still works superbly. There’s still plenty of battery capacity and it all seems to be operating how it did from the beginning. The BLUETTI EP500 Pro would be a savior in the case of a hurricane or wildfire hitting and knocking out power for several hours or days. I love this thing.