• Have you tried out dark mode?! Scroll to the bottom of any page to find a sun or moon icon to turn dark mode on or off!

diy solar

diy solar

How far apart do the cell voltages need to before I need to worry about balance?

jdege

New Member
Joined
Dec 16, 2020
Messages
175
I have two 48V 100Ah and four 12V 100Ah batteries, all LiFePO4.

They have Bluetooth apps, so I can see the voltages of the individual cells.

The cell voltages on all the batteries are pretty close, but not identical.

How far apart can they get before I worry about balancing them?
 
Put a HC02 on the 4 x 12V, if one get to far off you may have some bad alternatives.

If one of the 12v BMS opens up you could have 2/3 the voltage across one 12V BMS and if it can't take it bad things could happen. I used to do this and the HC02 balancer will kick in at the top during charging.

Hard to put a number on it but anything over 40mV per cell starts to bother me. What is safe and harmful is another question. I prefer withing 10mv.
 
Monitor cell voltages for imbalance only when all cells are above 3.4V. If the cells are lower than that, voltage is no longer any usable indicator, except to detect when the lowest cell is fully discharged. The threshold when balancing kicks on depends on the BMS, but is usually around 3.4V and on any cell more than maybe 30mV higher than the lowest cell. I've seen people say they are within 5 or 10mV also (1mV = .001V).
 
One of the great features of LFP batteries is also one of the big pains.

The voltage curve is nearly dead flat from 20% to 80% charged. You could have a cell at 70% and another cell at only 50% and they could measure within a couple millivolts. Anywhere in the middle of the charge/discharge curve, all the cells will be very close in voltage. But that does not mean they are balanced.

The only way to be sure they are truly balanced is to bring them up to full charge. As LFP cells reach full charge, they hit a "knee" where the voltage will star to climb quickly. That is the true full charge point. Ideally, you want all of the cells to get into that knee, and then if they are at the same voltage, the cells are then balanced to 100% charged. Anything over about 3.45 volts, with all the cells at the same voltage is great. Most LFP BMS units don't have a lot of balance current. As the first cell exceeds 3.45 volts, the BMS can apply a small load on that cell to slow the charging a bit to allow the other cells to catch up. But if the charge current is more than 10 times the balancer current, it may not slow the near full cell enough to keep it from running. This is what causes a cell over voltage error, even though the total battery voltage is still fine. IF you can't get to the individual cell leads, the only real fix is to charge at a vey low current where the BMS balance current is enough to nearly stop the high cell from charging at all. This can mean charging at less than 1 amp until they finally balance out.
 
I found that many BMS won't detect under 400mA so if you have a BMS keep going into alarm go to 250ma and let it just sit there and try to balance out. The balance shunt current could be a low as 65mA per cell so you may need to drop to that level.
 
As to how to balance a battery, the most detailed instructions I've seen are here:

How to balance your brand new LiFePO4 battery

But he suggests this is necessary only if a battery is out of balance.

So I'm looking for suggestions as to how far out of balance is far enough to justify this.

I suppose I should ask if his procedure is correct, as well.

I have four new 12V batteries. The first, after a full charge, shows a Vdiff of 0.008V, which I suspect is close enough.

I haven't looked at the others, yet. Or at my two-year-old 48Vs.
 
Usually my batteries are pretty well balanced, but if I don't get a full charge over a couple of weeks cells drift apart. Occasionally over 100mv. Balancer fixes that in 30 minutes (I absorb 30 min). If it's not fixed that 'first' full charge it will be the next.
Just monitor the cells at full charge. If they don't get closer and the difference is growing, you might need to tweak the absorbtion-/balancing time, or the amount of energy into your batteries, so you get them fully charged more often
 
IME, above .015 volts per cell above 3.4 is when I like to balance.

The only time balancing did not fix that, a bolt had come loose on a cell causing a bad connection. I cleaned the connection, set the BMS to always balance above 3.4, came back five days later and the cells were balanced.

Also, cells do not spend much time charging above 3.4 since resting voltage is around 3.35, so a top balance is importany.
 

diy solar

diy solar
Back
Top