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As the owner of a marine electrical business I go as far back as you can go with Victron and began with them in the BMV -501 in the days (I believe this was their first product) well before they pulled the plug on TBS (Their original battery monIgor manufacturer (same one Xantrex used for the...

When we build a pack with aluminum cased cells we use Garolite G10 between each cell, then use aluminum or G10 end boards to prevent swelling. These cases are live and the PVC wrap is joke and about as robust as 1 ply toilet paper. The only time we saw a failure of this magnitude, in a DIY...

So, yesterday my brother and I made a trip to the dump to get rid of some scrap metal.. in front of the metal dumpster was this! it will hold/house out LFP batts for the homestead.. What a score!

My business manufactures alternators so not at all shooting from the hip on this.. Only a very few alternators are pushing the high efficient numbers you state but there are many other factors to consider. Some of the highest efficiency units have a very difficult time dissipating heat due to...

Ah now we're getting somewhere. Your problem is because Progressive Dynamics has NOT A CLUE how to charge LiFePO4 batteries. They simply slapped a "Li" profile (Li batteries are not rechargeable so really should be Li-Ion or LiFePO4 this shows how little they actually know) on a constant voltage...

Unless you are submersing these in an electrolyte, galvanic corrosion is really not an issue if they are assembled correctly. Datapoint of n=1 (we also have many more banks out there with zero issues) On my own vessel I've been running Winston cells, with SS bolts, since 2010. The cells were...

It's most likely because the OP adjusted the voltage when connected to the load. A variable power supply voltage needs to be set at 0.00A load with the cells or bank disconnected.. When connected to the load, if you adjust the voltage, it will not be accurate when the battery drops to low...

My 400Ah Winston cells turned 14 on May 9th.. Zero complaints

INFO: Pack 4SWinston 400Ah cells In excess of 2200 cyclesI- it takes a long time to get to 2200 cycles a marine application! Most cycles to at least80%. DoD with well over 100 cycles to 3.0VPC /0% BMS= Started with Genasun thenCleanpower auto BMS (Dimitri sold his business to Lithionics and is...

My brother and I own a large off grid property and over the years we have had a slew of generators. Many of them suck donkey dong. for example a neighbor could not get his Ryobi 2300W to start so he added it to our collection. In March I cleaned the carb from ethanol poisoning and it ran great...

Our back up Gen is an 18KW diesel. we will never go back to gas or propane.. We have it connected to a 275 gal oil tank that we only fill every few years.Prior to diesel the only gens we found totally reliable were Honda’s.

Been charging a 400Ah LFP bank since 2010, primarily with an alternator (marine application), at roughly .4C. When capacity tested the bank & cells individually all still exceed the 400Ah rating. This is after more than 2000 cycles, most of which have been to 80% DoD +/-... My buddy Stan has...

My company actually built this alternator. Ripple measurements we do are at a 10A load. We wont ship an alt that has more than a 0.4V ripple. The load you test at number of claws,# of rectifier diodes their ratings etc.etc.will all change the measured ripple. Into an LFP bank ripple is almost...

A car is worth nothing with no manufacturer. Ask Saab owners how their values held up. Hell my brother pre ordered a Ford Lightning it is the biggest POS on the planet and the Ford dealers won’t even take it on trade towards a diesel F series… It’s worthless…

I have only ever used genuine Stäubli MC4's. Never had a failure or melt down when using the real Stäubli MC4's (they invented it). If a product comes with knock-off MC 4's, and all but Stäubli are knock-offs, I cut them off, round-file them and replace with genuine Stäubli MC-4's so they all...

We have been using the CBA's since they came out. Early on they were a bit quirky but with each generation they have gotten better. One feature we've begged for, for years, finally came out in the CBA-V and that is voltage sensing. All of our early units required calculating the voltage drop...

That’s not an MPPT…

I own a YR 1035 and the SM8124A. the YR1035 is very accurate for the price (I did a head to head with a $4000.00 B&K) the SM8124A. is not worth the cost of the cardboard it ships in.. Cant speak to the first one but Winston battery turned me onto the YR1035 12+ years ago..

and guys like this are why we have codes….

We've done a lot with A grade CALB cells going all the way back to 2010, and they consistently test at 107% - 112% of their rated capacity depending upon the batch. We can extract this charging to 3.45V and allowing current to taper. Pushing to 3.65V gains a gnats hair in capacity and is not...

Read about this: https://sterling-power.com/products/alternator-linearisation-device-17-5v-70f-ald-17500

Once the tester hits the disconnect voltage you do not start it again. The test is over when the battery hits the stop voltage. Trying to massage/coax the capacity out of the cell is not going to give you what you paid for. You also have an inexpensive and likely not very accurate discharge...

Alternator to B2B ratio, for marine applications, is about 50-60% of the alternators rated power. The Sterling Power BB1260 (12V 60A) may be a bit too large (would depend on the quality of OE the alternator and on-board loads). The other options would be the Sterling Power BB1230 (12V 30A) or a...

The trick here is those graphs are not derived from testing but rather a mathematical assumption. As one of the first marine electrical businesses in the country offering capacity testing of AGM & Gel batteries I can assure you going to 80% DoD murders AGM batteries including Odyssey &...

MC4 crimp tools are inexpensive

Voltagee does not speed the charging here. The 5A limit of the charge source is what controls the speed. The course and fine voltage adjustments will absolutely work, but they need to be set into 0A load before the cells are connected.. Fine or course voltage cannot be set when connected to...

We just had a Rich Solar 2kW “industrial pure sine” inverter fail in 13 months. Dealing with Rich Solar has been better than Renogy by a mile but still absolutely infuriating. The inverter to bank is all 4/0 Ancor marine wire and total circuit length is 4.5 feet. The bank is Kilovault LFP. When...

Funny I tried to contact you guys for an entire week about a failed DC to DC charger.. You guys could start by answering the phones and providing even a small level of customer service..I finally gave up and our customer returned it to Amazon.. He replaced it with a Victron that works perfectly..

The ABYC marine standards suggest the proper fuse for LiFePO4 is a Class T fuse. This is due to the 20,000A AIC rating of the Class T fuse. This 20,000A AIC rating is at 125VDC which means AIC is actually significantly higher at 13V. The Class T is also fully metal encased.

I have noted this with some of the blue aluminum prismatic cells too. Course I don't push them into the upper knee so don't see evens a 1 degree change. Keep in mind that these blue prismatic are mostly 1C rated and my Winston cells are 3C.That is likely part of the difference

I like that and will give it a try... Bottom line, please don't buy LFP on price and don't buy bottom of the barrel junk...

To properly capacity test a lead acid battery it is discharged at the 20 hour rate with the current held as steady as possible. For a 100AH lead acid battery this is 5A. The battery must also be at or close to 77F and discharged to 10.5V where you stop the discharge and record the discharge time...

Unless your Klein has a specific in-rush feature it is probably not fast enough...

I started in 2008 so understand this well and I too remember the blueish green and orange Thundersky cells. There was no data, no white papers and only incorrect guessed at data sheets. Then there was Jack & EVTV... My first top balance, on Thundersky 60Ah practice cells (waaaaay beofre Yttrium...

I ordered my Winston 400Ah cells in 2009 they shipped identically. Far more robust than cardboard...

LiFePo4 is one of many Li-ion chemistries but it is still Li-Ion..... FWIW I destroyed a bank of Winston LiFeYPO4 batteries at our off grid property. Seems their cold weather charging claims were pure BS...

Xantrex in the 90’s & early 2000’s. We took on Victron & Magnum out of spite from how shitty Xantrex treated it’s dealers & customers.

Between my brother and I we own way too many generators. We have multiple off grid cabins on our property and a generator for each. The worst we have owned are Generac, Ryobi and Predator. Harbor freight could not even get us parts to fix our 3500.... The best we own are a 15KW Kubota diesel...

Convert it to external regulation and use a wakespeed WS500 external regulator

Once they were purchased by Sensata everything went in the shitter. They used to be great and very reliable.

We have a couple of cheap LiFePO4 100Ah drop-in batteries (brand not important) here in the shop that feautre a Daly BMS. When ever we fire up a charge source the immediately trip the BMS on High Voltage. OK, no problem we've seen this before with elcheapo LFP drop-in batteries. We usually open...

Make sure they understand you're charging LFP and that this use will be considered "continuous duty".. Most smaller auto type alternators are not at all continuous duty. I would also advise having them build it as externally regulated and use it with a Wakespeed WS500 Advanced Alternator Regulator..

Simply to point out that matching cell voltages does not meant the cells are balanced. keep in mind I come from the days of LFP when cell volt matching was gospe…

They are now owned by Winnebago…

We have seen folks destroy cells this way more times than I care to count. An adjustable power supplies voltage is always set in to a 0.00A load, not when connected to the battery, and then you connect the battery. Also be sure the connection leads have minimal voltage drop.

Absolute BINGO! In just a few short years since Renogy started putting stickers on the cheapest products they can source, they have become the #1 most dangerous brand we see installed on boats. These failures are not just DOA stuff, glitches or nuisance failures but, actual fires or darn close...

We have experienced four failures of the Renogy DC to DC units. Their tech support is impossible to deal with. You already have Victron why not use an orion TR Smart?

If by design people you mean the guy who peels a sticker and puts it on another manufacturers crap…..

Sadly, Clark has little clue what he is talking about in regards to the ABYC. Manufacturers do not run the show nor do they write the standards. The #1 failure of Alt’s we have seen with LFP is Heat damage, then diodes..(ex marine alternator manufacturer) Alts like those tiny Hitachi’s try to...

If this is a factory alternator it likely has a temp gradient built into the regulator. As the alternator heats up the regulator reduces the maximum target voltage. Reducing the voltage reduces the amperage accepted by the bank and the alt gets to cool down. An external regulator, such asn an...

We Unfortunately folks get frustrated their 80A Hitachi is only putting 12-15A into the LFP bank so they upgrade the alt B+ & B- wires and cook goes the alt. We had a recycle bin in our shop full of cooked stators. We first started seeing heat damage when AGM’s hit the scene. then when FDC &...

We've had multiple customers destroy LFP batteries withProgressive dynamics chargers.14.6V 24/7/365.....D'oh

My business has bought a number of meters the is the claim to do in rush but none of meters do it well they perform like crap. We have a Mastech that claims to do it but does not. We have a Uni-T that claims it but it does not work. The only DC meters we have that work for in-rush are fluke.

That is a good video and while there are some issues, such as not cycling the LA batteries to break them in, and that the batteries are rated at 77F and at a 20 hour rate to 10.5V, none of this will change much in the results of the testing. While they took some of the LA batteries to 9V the...

In the marine market the ABYC is calling for Class T fuses for any Li-Ion bank. Class T has 20,000 AIC at 125V and much more at 12 or 24V (MRBF is 10,000 AIC at 14V. A single 100Ah G-31 AGM is capable of 5000A into a short.. While no MRBF fuses failed unsafely in that test, some ANL fuses did...

The Sterling Power BB241236 24V to 12V 35A battery to battery charger will do what you need.

The house is not huge, a ski chalet style, but ,as it is now the town has it clasified as off-grid which basically means woodlands and some outbuildings. The minute we conect to the grid it gets treated as if it is some palatial estate on 300 private acres. As long as it remains off grid the...

I think you will be happy with it...

don’t hold your breath on the warranty claim. Renogy is awful at standing behind what they sell.

Anyone selling Victron at below any other legit dealer wont be a dealer for long.. Victron has strict dealer pricing constraints. Buy only from a dealer who can support it. Bay Marine Supply is excellent.. Current Connected is also excellent..

Our property is off-grid so, I decided up-front not to care about bottom end SoC. In a marine application no, but on the homested no big deal. For example last weekend I changed the fuel filter on the tractor. I was just test driving it in the driveway and it ran fine, I got side tracked, and...

We've seen quite a few dead ones in the marine market. I don't know why people keep spending money on this brand? Perhaps it's all the phony/fake/BS reviews on Scamazon...? Hands down Renogy has the highest failure rate of any brand we've seen in the marine market in the last 35+ years. They are...

Any tear downs on LPFMAX batteries? They have killer pricing on bluetooth BMS/ heated batteries..

Please udnerstand that there are two types of internal FET based BMS's. #1 Catastrophic protection only: It is not designed to really care for the cells just to prevent them from thermal runaway. These are the BMS systems that have extremely high HVC eg; 15.5V - 16.0V and extremely low LVC eg...

Worst company I have ever dealt with!

With BLM cutting field potential that much I would not expect that alt to over heat. the Al170x is typically a 115- 120A alt depending on who did the reman and what stator they used. You’re running it at approx 65% of its potential so yes it will like that and lead a long life.

The Honda EU 2k is an inverter generator not traditional.

My own 400Ah Winston bank is made of cells produced in May of 2009. The bank is used 6 months for marine use then in the off season it is used as the load bank for an alternator testing machine in our shop. It routinely hoovers at between 5% SoC and 20% SoC and is only recharged during the...

Absolute joke of a pump. Ours never worked right, then leaked we tossed it and went with legit well pump equipment.. This pump is 120V and works perfectly

Please be careful with used Valence batteries. We had a client bring us some used 138Ah Valence U27-12XP batteries that only tested at 91- 94 +/- Ah. The bigger problem however was the zipper-like discharge curve on one of the batteries, a battery that could only deliver 94.79Ah under a 10A...

Kind of odd to suggest -20°C charging when the BMS is supposed to, based on the specification sheet, cut off the charge at -4°F? Also, be aware that "operating temperature" is not the same as "charging temperature" on many specification sheets..

Bingo! And why the banks I design and build only charge to 3.45VPC. Most of our installations are Frac C, and not charging at high C rates, so 3.45VPC is as fast as is needed. Going higher serves no purpose, unless the end user wants to use a cheap Chinese BMS that has miniscule balance current...

Yeah, we have it in its own outbuilding connected to a 275 gallon oil tank that we also use as our diesel filling station for all our diesel equipment.. You can barely hear it from the deck just a distant hum..

These EVE 280 cells were sold to a customer of ours as "A grade", matched etc.... They were so poorly matched his Daly BMS could not keep them in balance..Three cells were pretty well matched the fourth was junk..The seller refused to replace the bad cell and as usual for Aliexpress you have...

Maybe spend a bit less on marketing and give the customer service team a bit more of a budget...

As a marine electrician I will give you the same advice I give to all my sailing clients. start with a good quality battery monitor such as a Victron BMV so you have a dataset to build from. You will want to learn as much as you can so you don’t get taken advantage of..

Alternators can easily be used to directly charge LFP banks. I've been doing so for about 11 years. It does take some consideration and expense however. With a 300A alternator make darn sure your BMS, especially if internal FET type, can handle that charge current. Large Frame Industrial Type...

Yes, I've known that since 2009... Still does not stop many from repeating the same rubbish about matching voltages with a resistor etc...

It can be a life or death issue. Sleep apnea caused my brain hemorrhage/stroke. the survival rate is only 50%. I am very lucky but I lost the left side of my body. My sleep apnea they call "silent" as I do not snore and this is why I did not have a cpap.. I keep a 100Ah battery under my night...

This is because the tester is trying to use the discharge/load wires as the voltage sense wires. Your cut-off voltage will not be accurate doing this unless it is properly accounted for. A quality DC load bank does not measure it this way. They have a separate set of wires to measure the...

As a US Sterling dealer/distributor we would never, ever advise the Sterling A2B chargers for LFP. You are far better off to convert the alt to external regulation then use a quality external regulator such as a Balmar 618, Wakespeed WS500 or ARCO ZEUS.. The only time we ever sold A2B’s was when...

We own and off grid property and we are converting it the solar I would like to use lithium iron phosphate batteries without having to have a heated room for them. Winston make some rather bogus claims that there yttrium doped LiFEPo4 cells can be charged at below 0F.. They sure can, if you want...

The Wakespeed WS500 Advanced Alternator Regulator can do what you want and more..

In the Marine market (ABYC). This would be considered an unsafe fuse failure. As the fuse let the sparks out

"rated at 2050 cycles" sure, in a lab with kid glove treatment. Northstar is owned by EnerSys the same company that makes the Odyssey TPPL AGM's. We've not seen the Blue+ series do much if any better than the Odyssey TPPL AGM's, and those don't have carbon fairy dust in them. The only "carbon"...

If Victron would only add a Peukert compensation for "low current" (slower discharge than the 20 hour rate) to their BMV battery monitors, not just high current Peukert compensation, we'd be getting better accuracy for SoC..;)

Victron sizes this way due to DC ripple and to help the inverter live a longest life possible.

We had a ZKE here and found it quirky and not quite as accurate as I wanted. I Just top balanced and ran two charge discharge cycles on four EVE 304's from 18650. For this discharge test I used our CBA-V Pro with a 500W amplifier. This thing is accurate and agrees with our NIST calibrated Fluke...

No, an external regulator physically dives the alternators field and does not sit between the alt and the LFP battery. An ER, such as a Balmar MC-618 (very good) or Wakespeed WS500 (best ER money can buy), can allow the alternator output to be limited to a safe output level so it does not cook...

Do yourself a favor and set "amp-manager" to cut the alt output by 40-50% and then be sure to use an alternator temp sensor as well.

I realize they don't "move" current and just burn it off but this allows the other cells to catch up, poor word chosen on my part... This Daly WILL NOT balance when not charging. The light for balancing remains OFF. There is nothing in the app that will allow for this. Every parameter, setting...

Rolls makes their own FLA batts in Nova Scotia. Their AGM batts are made by Fullriver.. Trojan was sold and they have been moving some production to China..

Charge = 3.45VPC Cut Off = 3.6VPC

Yes, most auto alts also feature a voltage fold-back that is based on alt temp. Between the voltage drop in the factory wiring, voltage sensing location (typically self sensed) and the voltage fold-back, some automotive alternators are barely capable of delivering 20 or 30A to an LFP battery...

At a minimum the ability to enable / disable is always preferred. The Daly does not even give you this ability and thus it is impossisble for the Daly to balance the cells inside this battery without physically destroying the case and doing a manual top-balance. Cheap junk on both the cell front...

The stream that runs downing side of our off-grid property in Maine is busting at the seams. The garden is done for the season from too much water....

Yes, we've seen ReLion banks with pretty severe capacity degradation. What were your absorbtion & float voltages set to? What was your absorption duration? Please do not trust your BMV empirically. The SoC calculation can very easily get itself out of sync with the bank. This article explains...

please don’t base anything on these battery testers they are junk! even the highest quality industry gold standard testers such as Midtronics are garbage. CCA has zero correlation to Ah capacity…. https://marinehowto.com/are-battery-conductance-testers-worth-it/