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DIY LiFePO4 Starter Battery?

Tiktaalik

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Apr 3, 2021
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Has anyone ever attempted to build your own Lithium Starter battery for a car?

DCS makes one that you can start your vehicle with and even use for winching. I’m just wondering how one might go about increasing the CCA in order to match AGM and Lead Acid Batteries.

 
 
Wonder how it rivals an Optima battery, those things are pretty good and last for around 10yrs under the bonnet.
Optima has had quality control issues for quite a few years now. I have owned several Yellow tops but switched to Odyssey and now I am hoping to switch to Lithium.
 
The only chemistry that really fits the bill for a starter batteries are the LTO cells.

A lot of the people with the crazy powerful audio systems in their cars are replacing the lead battery with a huge LTO pack that gives them more power.
 
The only chemistry that really fits the bill for a starter batteries are the LTO cells.

A lot of the people with the crazy powerful audio systems in their cars are replacing the lead battery with a huge LTO pack that gives them more power.
That’s just not true.

 
That’s just not true.

To say I am skeptical of that temperature range is an understatement ..... but even if that -20 is accurate that won't cut it where I live unless I don't want to start my vehicle or charge the battery when it's really cold. Others have tried to claim that kind of low temperature performance and have had to modify their specs when questioned. This chemistry will be damaged if used at -20C.

Please buy one of these and try to use it at these kind of temperatures and let us know how it goes.

LTO cells really do have massive current and a huge temperature range.
 
Has anyone ever attempted to build your own Lithium Starter battery for a car?

DCS makes one that you can start your vehicle with and even use for winching. I’m just wondering how one might go about increasing the CCA in order to match AGM and Lead Acid Batteries.

Given that you're linking an Australian website, I wanted to let you know that we're working on an innovative new LiFePO4 starter battery that uses supercapacitors to start your engine and the battery to keep the caps charged.
The innovative part about it is that even if you accidentally leave your lights on, you won't be able to run the battery flat and it will still be able to start a car in the morning. We're looking at getting this part of it patented.
The battery will be a 40Ah Lishen or CATL battery and include a custom 100A BMS as well as a 16.2V (obviously operating at a lower voltage) 500F supercap.
 
Given that you're linking an Australian website, I wanted to let you know that we're working on an innovative new LiFePO4 starter battery that uses supercapacitors to start your engine and the battery to keep the caps charged.
The innovative part about it is that even if you accidentally leave your lights on, you won't be able to run the battery flat and it will still be able to start a car in the morning. We're looking at getting this part of it patented.
The battery will be a 40Ah Lishen or CATL battery and include a custom 100A BMS as well as a 16.2V (obviously operating at a lower voltage) 500F supercap.
Very cool. Keep me in the loop! Under what brand will this be manufactured?

Antigravity Batteries already has a Lithium starter battery on the the marker with the “run flat” protection feature so my may want to run a patent search before proceeding.
 
Very cool. Keep me in the loop! Under what brand will this be manufactured?

Antigravity Batteries already has a Lithium starter battery on the the marker with the “run flat” protection feature so my may want to run a patent search before proceeding.
Will do! It will be "Muller Energy". We're trying to expand into the battery market further, initially we were just selling cells, but we're getting a 12V 200Ah custom-made battery shortly and the starter battery will be our next offering.
We felt like there were a lot of cheap (but also low quality) batteries in Australia and a lot of high quality (but also extremely expensive) batteries in Australia, but we felt that there was a battery lacking that was built with quality components and sold at a reasonable price.

Here's a video of the 12V 200Ah battery. I'll post one of the starter battery once we have finalised the development phase.
 
I run a 48V SLA system at the moment. Do these play nice in series and how much?
Unfortunately no, given that they're a Daly BMS, they do not. I have to say that I'm not a big fan of serial connections on LiFePO4 batteries either, if you have a single bad/low cell in any of the four batteries, it will pull all of the battery packs down to the same performance of the worst cell.

We've had one order from a customer that wanted to replace 8x 155Ah AGM batteries (4S2P, so 48V). We found a good solution that uses 4 banks of 16S 76Ah Lishen cells, for a total of just over 300Ah or 15.5kWh, which is able to output 480A. Perhaps that would be something more suitable?
The cost of this order was $6,700, which sounds like a lot of money, but for a custom made battery at under A$0.50/Wh, I think it's a pretty reasonable price.
 
Unfortunately no, given that they're a Daly BMS, they do not.
OK, thanks.
I have to say that I'm not a big fan of serial connections on LiFePO4 batteries either, if you have a single bad/low cell in any of the four batteries, it will pull all of the battery packs down to the same performance of the worst cell.
It's doable, just needs some care.
We found a good solution that uses 4 banks of 16S 76Ah Lishen cells, for a total of just over 300Ah or 15.5kWh, which is able to output 480A. Perhaps that would be something more suitable?
That kind of thing would be nice but...
The cost of this order was $6,700
That's just too much $ for my application at this time. I do agree it's a pretty decent price for that amount of useable storage. Will keep in mind for the future.
 
That's just too much $ for my application at this time. I do agree it's a pretty decent price for that amount of useable storage. Will keep in mind for the future.
Fair enough. The good thing about this approach is that it's modular, so you can have anywhere between one and 10 (I think, I'll have to check the maximum amount) of batteries in parallel.
The cheapest option is still to DIY, if you're into that sort of thing.
 
The cheapest option is still to DIY, if you're into that sort of thing.
I am, sort of.

My off-grid system is DIY but hooking up 4xSLA batteries (48V 190Ah) to an all in one inverter isn't exactly hard. Use the right battery settings, add an active balancer, a fuse, a breaker, a battery monitor and it's all good.

Building a ~48V DIY LiFePO4 pack requires a bit more care.

I'm sure I could do it with the correct guidance. Importing the cell packs and adding in the BMSs etc I guess it'd come out at around $3.5-4k ish. But that starts to get up into territory where the comfort of professionally pre-built system with warranty/service support makes more sense to me.

DIY for my grid-tied system is a no go. That would be a certified installer and that's big bucks relatively speaking ($10-15k).

I can double the SLA capacity of what I've got now for ~$1k.
 
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