Verdict
If it wasn’t for its bigger size, weight and price tag, Bluetti’s Pioneer Na would seem like any other battery power supply. It’s a solid performer, comfortably matching its specifications and even slightly exceeding them in our tests, yet it comes with the advantages of sodium-ion battery chemistry. That could make it viable in cold and exposed applications where standard lithium-ion batteries wouldn’t work. It’s also a potential benefit for the environment. However, with a higher cost per kWh, this power station is currently only worth it if you need its cold-beating credentials.
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Sodium-ion battery chemistry -
Stable performance -
Good durability
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Bigger, heavier, and a little more expensive than you’d expect -
Not optimised for outdoor use
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Key Features
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Review Price: £799 -
One of the first sodium-ion battery power stations
This power station uses sodium-ion, rather than lithium-ion batteries. While they’re a bit bigger and heavier, they can work down to lower temperatures. That could be an advantage in remote or harsh places. -
Unique choice of features
The Pioneer Na has features biased towards remote, off-grid use, but it’s not weather-proofed or especially rugged.
Introduction
Bluetti’s Pioneer Na is billed as the world’s first battery power supply to use sodium-ion batteries, rather than the ubiquitous lithium-ion chemistry. It’s certainly the first we’ve tested. In theory, its sodium cells are safer, less environmentally damaging, and work in a wider temperature window, including support for charging down to -15° Celcius. The down side is that they store less energy, so this power supply is bigger than you might expect for its 900 watt hour (Wh) capacity.
Otherwise, there’s little to visually distinguish the Pioneer Na (sometimes referred to as PiNa) from the rest of Bluetti’s range. It’s finished in a fetching steel blue colour with gold details, but it has the dual handles, display and general layout you’d expect in a typical mid-range power station. At 16kg it’s certainly not something you’d want to carry all that far, but it’s fairly easily lugged around the home, garden, or a chilly camp site.
Design and features
- Sodium-ion batteries
- Off-grid features
- Not ruggedised
Without doubt, this power supply’s defining feature are its sodium-ion batteries. These work in a highly similar way to lithium-ion cells, with the energy stored and carried by sodium ions, rather than lithium. Using sodium has multiple advantages: it’s at least 500 times more abundant in nature, and in theory can be sourced without the political and environmental grey areas that bedevil lithium. It’s also cheaper, although as a claimed world-first, that isn’t especially reflected in the Bluetti Pioneer Na’s price.
More pertinently to this review, sodium-ion batteries have different performance characteristics. While they hold less energy for a given mass of cells, they’re inherently safer and less prone to thermal runaway, which helps reduce the risk of fire. They also operate over a wider temperature range, with Bluetti claiming the Pioneer Na can recharge at -15°C, and discharge as low as -25°C. This is a significant advantage over lithium-ion batteries, which can actually sustain damage if charged when too cold.
All of this makes sodium-ion packs uniquely suited to outdoor, exposed use, so it’s perhaps surprising that Bluetti hasn’t opted to give the Pioneer Na the full rugged treatment, as you’d find on the weather-proofed Bluetti AC240.
While there’s a rubber bung protecting its AC input and the 12V output, there are none protecting its two mains-voltage plug sockets, or its array of five USB ports. Unusually, these comprise four USB-A slots rated at 15W each and only a single 100W USB-C port. There is however a Qi wireless charging pad on the top panel – ideal if you’re wearing gloves but you want to leave a phone charging where you can see it.
The Bluetti Pioneer Na can store a maximum of 900Wh, and supply a peak of 1,500W total across its mains ports. doesn’t support expansion batteries, but it does provide the usual car-type charging port. It also comes with leads for charging in a car, or from solar panels.
This power supply is significantly bigger and heavier than I’d expect for a lithium-ion equivalent with similar specs. In the picture below I’m comparing it to the Anker SOLIX C800 Plus, a 768Wh station.
Like other Bluetti power supplies, the PiNa has a decent screen that shows how much power is entering and leaving the device. You can see the battery charge state at a glance, along with an estimate of how long charging or discharging will take given the power balance. I also like the way each port’s capabilities are clearly marked, helping you avoid accidental overloading.
While you can also connect this appliance to Bluetti’s smartphone app, here it only supports Bluetooth connections. Its lack of Wi-Fi means you need to be within Bluetooth range of the supply to check its status or change settings, but that’s fine if you’re mostly likely to be using this device outdoors away from a handy Wi-Fi router, or even mobile data coverage.
Charging
- Charge from mains, car, or the sun, even at low temperatures
- Maximum 1,400W AC charging power
- Full recharge in less than 70 minutes, but not in extreme cold
The Bluetti Pioneer Na supports mains charging at up to 1,400W, or you can connect it to solar panels with a maximum 500W output. It can handle both at once, for an impressive 1,900W total that ought to see a full recharge completed in well under an hour. In-car charging would be much slower, as most vehicles’ cigarette lighter sockets are limited to 120W – at that rate you’d need to drive for about eight hours to get exhausted batteries fully charged.
Things are much quicker using mains power, especially if you enable the 1,400W maximum charge rate in Turbo mode. This took 67 minutes for a full recharge, consuming 1,090Wh in the process. Assuming the 900Wh batteries went from fully empty to completely charged, that equates to a strong 82.6% efficiency. Both the Standard and Silent modes were slower, and unusually they both also consumed more energy: 1,107Wh (81.3%) and 1,236Wh (72.8%) respectively.
Silent mode recharging isn’t totally without sound, but the fan speeds are limited. In other modes this device has more intrusive fan noise than most other Bluetti power stations I’ve tested, particularly in Standard mode, where the fan speed is variable and harder to background.
Visit Bluetti’s website and you’ll see promotional photos of rescue teams and lumberjacks powering chainsaws and radios from their Pioneer devices. Without access to the Canadian wilderness, I simply froze the PiNa overnight.
My freezer runs at an indicated -18°C, a little below this power supply’s minimum charging temperature. Sure enough, when I removed the freshly frozen device and connected it to the power, it blew out a puff of ghostly cold air, flashed a battery warning light at me, and refused to charge. After about 20 minutes it had warmed up enough to begin, but only at an indicated 90W. In fact, after three hours it had only sped up to 260W and charged to about 50%, at which point it was still blowing cool air – battery packs take a lot of warming up.
Charging continued to accelerate as the PiNa defrosted, hitting a maximum of about 700W. Still, the full recharge took four and a quarter hours: yes, you can recharge this power station at sub-zero temperatures, but don’t expect to see high speeds.
I should point out that it’s generally unwise to use very cold electrical equipment in a warm environment, as I did for this test. A frozen device attracts condensation in warmer, more humid air, which could in some circumstances lead to short-circuits or even a fire.
Performance
- Stable even at full power, and even when frozen
- Useful heavy lifting mode
- Could be quieter
I froze the Bluetti Pioneer Na again then hooked it up to a 1,500W load – its maximum output. Here it immediately fired up and kept providing full power until the batteries were empty. Again, I should stress that using a frozen device in warm conditions could be dangerous.
I repeated this test at room temperature, again with no issue other than moderate noise from the fans. We always measure how much energy power stations actually deliver across a range of loads. The PiNa ranged from 849Wh at 500W, to a low of 818Wh at 1,500W.
As new converts to electric vehicles will be discovering this winter, batteries provide less power when they’re cold. From frozen, I measured 735Wh on my 1,500W output test, a performance loss of about 10% compared to room temperature. I saw a similar efficiency loss during my frozen charging test, in which the PiNa consumed 1,181Wh.
I’m not sure why this device has plenty of USB-A ports and only one USB-C, but I used the latter to measure how much energy it could supply when powering a constant 60W load. Comparing its 848Wh DC output with my most efficient charging results gave me a round-trip efficiency of 77.8% – a few percentage points off the better-than-80% result we usually hope for. The same calculation with my best AC results gave a near-identical 77.9% round-trip efficiency.
You can get an idea of the impact of freezing on overall performance by comparing the frozen round-trip efficiency, which was 62.2%. Again, while it’s great to have a device that works at very low temperatures, it’s important to remember that even sodium-ion batteries really struggle to perform in severe cold.
While this power supply’s wireless charging pad is a great idea, it didn’t get on with the Google Pixel 7a and Pixel 9 phones I had available for testing. Both devices would start charging, then either stop, or enter an endless stop/start loop. Removing their cases didn’t help. I was able to charge an iPhone 12 mini with no issues, though.
Like many other Bluetti power stations, the Pioneer Na has quite a high tolerance for overloading; it could power my 1,800W kettle. Although my power meter suggested it was only delivering about 1,650W, that’s still comfortably above its 1,500W rated output. Bluetti’s specifications say it can sustain up to 1,800W for two minutes, or 2,250W for five seconds – fully 50% over what it says on the tin.
You can hook up more challenging loads in Power Lifting mode, which supports devices rated up to 2,250W. This works by limiting the voltage and current actually provided by the sockets, so it’s not suitable for anything except purely resistive loads like kettles or electric heaters. It’s a handy feature if you want to run a medium-powered kettle, commonly rated at around 2,200W (2.2kW). At 3,000W, the most powerful kettles would still be too demanding.
One remaining thing to mention is our calculation for long-term value, which looks at how much a power station costs against how much power it could store over a working lifetime. The Bluetti Pioneer Na is rated to store at least 80% of its initial 900Wh capacity after 4,000 full charge cycles. Assuming you bought at the discounted price of around £800, and that its batteries degraded in a linear fashion, you’d be paying 25p per kilowatt hour (kWh) of lifetime energy stored; only a little more than the best value lithium-ion supplies we’ve tested. That makes it strong value, although I should mention that while Bluetti typically offers a five-year warranty, here it’s limited to three.
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Should you buy it?
Buy if you want power in the cold
If you want a power station you can use in very cold temperatures, the Bluetti Pioneer Na is currently your only choice. It also avoids lithium, potentially making it less environmentally damaging.
Don’t buy if you don’t care about sodium
If you don’t need cold-weather performance and you’re not looking to avoid lithium, you can get better performance for a bit less money, and in a smaller space.
Final Thoughts
This power station does something that currently no other can: it can happily charge and discharge at properly cold temperatures. If you’re living or working somewhere frozen and you need a way to store a reasonable amount of power, it’s essentially your only choice.
It’s worth offering a couple of caveats, though. While fit for the UK winter, the Pioneer Na would still be out of its depth in the worst North America could throw at it – worth bearing in mind if you are taking friends ice fishing, or you’re building an igloo with an electric chainsaw. It’s also bigger, heavier, and a bit more expensive than the equivalent lithium-ion device. If you don’t need cold-weather performance, opt for a cheaper and more compact equivalent, such as the Bluetti Elite 100 V2.
How we test
We test every power station we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
- We test with a variety of devices to see how long the battery will last.
- We test different charging methods to see how quickly the battery can be topped up.
FAQs
Not better, but different. Sodium batteries work in colder temperatures, and once production scales they should be cheaper and have fewer environmental impacts. They may also be safer, making them ideal for home energy storage. Lithium batteries store more power in a given space, meaning they’re still ideal where energy density is prime, such as in electric vehicles.
We’ve seen 5,000 cycles to 80% capacity quite widely quoted. That’s broadly in line with lithium-ion batteries, which are usually rated from 3,000-6,000 cycles. Note that Bluetti says the Pioneer Na’s cells will provide 4,000 cycles before dropping to 80% of their initial capacity.
Test Data
| BLUETTI Pioneer Na Portable Power Station (Sodium-ion) |
|---|
Full Specs
| BLUETTI Pioneer Na Portable Power Station (Sodium-ion) Review | |
|---|---|
| UK RRP | £799 |
| Manufacturer | – |
| Quiet Mark Accredited | No |
| Battery | 900 Whr |
| Size (Dimensions) | 340 x 247 x 317 MM |
| Weight | 16 KG |
| Release Date | 2025 |
| First Reviewed Date | 23/11/2025 |
| Battery type | Rechargeable |
| Battery technology | Lithium-ion |
| Battery size | AA |
