Rebuilding a LiFePO4 18650 pack

[Jeff.Martin]

Hello everyone,

I just joined and would love your experience and expertise on selecting replacement replacement cells.

LiFePO4
18650
2600mAh

I am surprised how hard they are to find online at a reasonable cost per cell.

If I go all in ans replace all 92 of them I would like to upgrade to 3200mAh cells if the cost is reasonable.

Is it actually less expensive to buy a pack and remove the 18650 cells?

Thank you
Jeff Martin

 

[sunshine_eggo]

Hello everyone,

I just joined and would love your experience and expertise on selecting replacement replacement cells.

LiFePO4
18650
2600mAh

I don't recall a single soul that's built a 18650 LFP pack. It's generally more cost effective to buy the big prismatics.

I am surprised how hard they are to find online at a reasonable cost per cell.

Probably because they're not that common?

18650 is far more common for NCA cells.

If I go all in ans replace all 92 of them I would like to upgrade to 3200mAh cells if the cost is reasonable.

Given that you're rebuilding a pack you need to select replacements such that series elements have the same capacity. Any old cells you leave in the pack need to be capacity tested and re-mixed into the parallel groups such that each "cell" has the same capacity.

 

[Bud Martin]

OP: do you have the name of the company that made these 18650 LiFePO4 cells?
A123?
92 cells, that is a lot of cells.