A brief report on my batteries

A sunrise picture the other morning. It's real handy when I can stick my camera out the window, take a picture and then go back to bed.

I have a small report about my lithium iron batteries.  Now I know the most important thing about these expensive critters is how long their going to last, but that is hopefully going to take a long, long time to figure out so I thought I should at least try to find something I can make an incremental report about, so that's what I'm going to do today.

One of the problems I have talking about the batteries is that if they're working properly there's really not much I can say about them.  Since there under my bed where I tend to store things that I seldom use, I don't get to see them very much.  And because I don't have to water them or clean creeping crud off of the terminals, I don't get to handle them.  In other words, I pretty much forget their there.

My only contact with the batteries is with my little trimetric meter that tells me what's going into the batteries and what's coming out and that's only important enough to look at if it's going to be very cloudy for a couple of days.

But looking at my meter like I'm doing now, because the batteries are still a bit of an unknown, I have determined two things.  One is that I'm taking about the same amount of amps out of the batteries every day that I always have, which is about 50 amps a night.  And more importantly the batteries are charging quicker than the lead acid batteries did in the past.

Normally with my lead acid batteries, on a bright sunny day, this time of year with the sun getting lower on the horizon, my batteries would be charged somewhere  between 12 o'clock and 2 o'clock.  But with the lithium iron batteries there charged up  every day before lunchtime.  

Now that of course is what they're supposed to do because of the way they take a charge.  The lead acid batteries are charged in different time-consuming stages, while the lithium iron batteries can be crammed full of all the amps you've got  as fast as you can stuff them in there.

This of course is a wonderful thing because even during cloudy days, the sun might break through for an hour or so and the lithium iron batteries will gobble up ever amp of sunshine that they can get,  Which in my case is about 50 amps an hour.  Which can make the difference in having a mostly full battery at the end of the day, or a mostly empty battery.

I guess that means that so far I'm happy with the batteries and I'm looking forward to getting three or four days of really cloudy weather so the batteries can show their stuff.  And if they pass the four day test I will pretty much just forget their hiding under the bed and let them do their job without any input from me.

       theboondork

This is the boondocking area I'm staying in, and the road that gets you there

The view from my front door on a cloudy day