Hi!
This is my first post, and I've only been following this crowd for a few months. But I do want to share my (
positive) experience with Docan Technologies.
I live in Texas, and as you may have heard our electric grid is made by cowboys of barbed wire. So it goes down a bit
The January freeze was a shock, and another recent 3-hour outage in my area made me get serious about researching what I can do to ensure some semblance of backup.
First I bought a Bebene "Generator", which works fine and would run my CPAP for about a week.
Then after a lot of thought I bought a 100Ah SOK. It got here, I bought a variable PS and load tester, I charged it, and got 105Ah on the load tester.
Next was deciding on my system architecture. For various reasons, I chose to go with a 24v inverter.
It was about then that I checked this forum, and saw this post by
ghostwriter66. I was very excited to see that the warehouse was in Houston, where I live.
So I reached out to Jenny Wu, and asked for a quote on 8 280Ah batteries. She responded VERY quickly, and I had the PI in a few hours.
The price was certainly good, but I felt like I should use my SOK. Further research and I realized the cost difference between a 24v and 48v inverter was minimal, so I decided to go with 48v instead. To help make the decision I asked Jenny if they had any 100Ah cells (to match the SOK), and she replied that they would have some CALB 100Ah cells in the Houston warehouse in about a week. The price was great, so I got a PI on 12 of them. A little more research and I saw a flaw in my design, as I'd have to buy a 12v BMS, a 24v BMS, and some kind of balancer for the three components. So I decided that since I wanted to get Overkill Solar BMS, it would be cheaper to buy a total of 16 cells, then I just need one 48v 16s BMS.
So again I reached out to Jenny, and purchased an additional 4 cells.
The next day I got an email from Jenny providing the contact info for Jade, the staff at the warehouse. It was late, so the day after that I called Jade, and found out that the cells had come in, and were ready to be picked up.
I put off picking them up for 2 days, so I could take Friday afternoon off and go out there (it's far enough away from work, and there's an excellent Thai restaurant about a mile from the warehouse.)
So Friday afternoon I left work early, went to lunch with my best friend, then went by the warehouse.
It is a tiny nondescript location, thankfully
Joe BoyKey posted a pic of the location in the
Good Review on Supplier thread, which matched what I saw in Google maps. When we showed up the place was completely full of boxes, but right next to the door on a table were my 3 boxes. Jade was super friendly and helpful, and I was out within 5 minutes.
Getting the cells home I found the same meticulous care in packing that others have reported. The cells have the welded studs, and they came with curved insulated bussbars and nuts.
the label and Positive sign are my own
My phone couldn't read the barcode, here it is:
These were their voltages when pulled from the boxes
Serial | Vinitial |
LFP001 | 3.218 |
LFP002 | 3.221 |
LFP003 | 3.222 |
LFP004 | 3.218 |
LFP005 | 3.220 |
LFP006 | 3.221 |
LFP007 | 3.221 |
LFP008 | 3.219 |
LFP009 | 3.220 |
LFP010 | 3.220 |
LFP011 | 3.220 |
LFP012 | 3.220 |
LFP013 | 3.219 |
LFP014 | 3.218 |
LFP015 | 3.221 |
LFP016 | 3.220 |
I assume that's close enough.
I did notice that a few of the cells have issues with the insulation
So I'll probably be using some kind of foam to slightly separate them in their final enclosure.
I charged one of them to at least 3.6v on my PS, then ran a capacity test at 15amps
Obviously I'm happy with that.
I'm attaching the data sheet. Interesting to note they don't mention compression.
For now I'm using the SOK BMS to charge them all to it's cutoff, then I'm going to top balance to as close to 3.65 as is reasonable. Then decide on an inverter...
So between my first communication with Jenny to the cells being ready to pick up was about 8 days, and most of that was me changing my mind.
I am very excited to read that Amy in the other thread is exploring them supplying BMS, and it looks like enough people are recommending JBD that they might be those.
Needless to say my experience has been as positive as it could be. Jenny and Jade are both great, and although I'm not likely to need batteries any time soon, it is great to see a local option. Thanks to everyone for sharing their experience, it helped me make up my mind, and of course to
ghostwriter66 for being an awesome resource to the community!