I have got a sore sore
head after reading 236 pages of the using
lifepo4 thread as a house bank including where it went
solar :-(.
So here i am
posting to try and establish the basics......what do i need and where to buy and of course anything else that others feel are important...lots of room for thread drift there i expect.
Hopefully this thread will not end up being 200+ pages long
OKIDOKI HERE GOES!!
We have about 1,000 AH of house bank that are Gel Cells two are 13 years old now and still going strong (ish), the
Engine start Gel just died and we have replaced it with a 180 AH 4D gel cell
battery that we got for almost nothing used. Also I have fitted a switch so that we can connect the house bank to the
engine battery just in case we have a duff engine start battery again and of course we have increased the size of the house bank if i close that switch. We have around 480W of
solar , (we are going to upgrade that to 820W soon ) and have a
Rutland 913
wind generator that produces a few amps when it blows like sink. Probably going to change the 913 to a D400 soon as well.
We sail in the
Caribbean for six months of the year.
I was wanting to go
electric not all
electric but to seriously cut down on our use of
propane and
heating the
boat big time when we are
cooking and use the solar for more than just keeping the
batteries happy. So we now have a Xantrex 1800i
inverter, two induction cook tops, a rice cooker, and a 1,000 W microwave. If we cook during the day things are great the solar holds up the house bank voltage quite well. But if we start
cooking once the sun has gone down we can end up with problems with the Xantrex complaining (alarming) then shutting down with a low voltage situation if we don't reduce our 110V
consumption.
So I guess our house bank is struggling to handle these new and serious loads on it. We have a Seafrost XPBD twin cold plate system that is quite
power hungry and we would like to add another so we can have a separate fridge and
freezer. At that moment we have a divider in the box and we do have both in the same box and the bleed through to the other box from the
freezer side lets that box be a half decent fridge as well (this is the {smaller} box that we will turn into a freezer) but at the expense of serious AH's used. Typically even as an all LED
boat we are 40/50 AH down in the morning, but with the
batteries fully charged by lunch time.. When sailing we have other loads of course a big
Raymarine autopilot and an E120 plotter plus other
instruments and one or two PC's running on a small
inverter.
We have a 80A Delco Remy10Si
alternator but are thinking of upgrading that to a 140A 12Si model and keeping the 10Si as a spare. The present
alternator is regulated internally. We have a 80A three stage battery
charger and a big Heart inverter
charger that can output 120A (this only functions as a charger now and a
repair is totally uneconomic) and a wee
Honda 2000EUi for emergencies as well as battery
charging with either one of the two chragers and running the hot
water heater - we like hot showers now and again.
We do have room and the mounts and engine pulley for a second alternator or CAT
Pump for a
watermaker (we removed the engine driven F/F compressor).
I think that is about that for now.
Four new Gel batteries will cost around $4,000 and obviously I am thinking of new batteries
LiFePO4 ones. I guess I am thinking about around 600/800AH. Having read all the long long fairly technical thread and looked at the pictures as well, obviously i have a few questions
My first question is - will a
LiFePO4 cell/battery be the same height as a 8G8D gel cell 21” L 11” W 10”H. Width and length are not big issues I suspect but height is, if I want to place them in the same location as the present house batteries. I think that i can put them edge on if they are too tall?
Second question is - what batteries to buy and from where? We are in
St Martin at the moment so I suspect a US based supplier would be the most sensible as we have an account with a good
Miami to SXM shipper.
I think I am more into bigger cells AH wise rather than building my house bank from multiple small cells of 90/120 AH size. I also think I would prefer one house bank to keep the
charging simpler though I am open to being convinced that two banks are the way to go.
I don't want a BMS that will be me, but do want to keep an eye on things so I guess I will be using my HobbyKing account We do have a
Victron EM and might need a Low voltage control though the Xantrex 1800I does that quite well ATM.
All of what I read was rather technical while none of that threw me I was really looking for and expecting something more like
LiFePO4 for DUMMIES.
For sure that thread is overly long and seems to be more focused on experimentation rather than just people who can see and understand the advantages of
LiFePO4 and who want to change over to LiFePO4 but need a little hand holding........LIKE ME!!!