Happy 15th Birthday to my LiFePo4 Bank

[Maine Sail]

Happy 15th Birthday to my LiFePo4 Battery..

https://youtu.be/TkyF976hAxo?si=XDtCd4xAhtqFO8HO

[JPA Cate]

Congratulations on your superb, wonderful recovery, mate! Good on you!

Ann

[GordMay]

You’re looking good, Rod.
Thanks for an(other) interesting and informative tutorial, as always.

[Dockhead]

Great to have you back, Rod!!!


And your battery is a wonder. I guess pretty soon we'll all go that way.

[Wotname]

Great to see you again Rod!!!!

[steamgoat]

Good to have you back with us Rod.Everybody will benefit from your return.

[CaptainRivet]

Originally Posted by Maine Sail

Happy 15th Birthday to my LiFePo4 Battery..

https://youtu.be/TkyF976hAxo?si=XDtCd4xAhtqFO8HO

Great you are back.
No surprise. build myself several Winston banks and all go strong, several past the 15 year mark.
You get what you pay for, still the top notch battery that never lets you down.
You actually don't need a BMS. A victron battery monitor that does LCV and HVC plus via midpoint monitoring cell deviation and an active balancer with BT like the JK or Neey and you are set. You don't need an active balancer but a cell monitor with BT cost the same, so why not have a balancer that fixes every problem.
Simple, easy and reliable.

[CaptainRivet]

What's your opinion on the need of a dedicated starter battery with lifepo4.
...the folks still love their lead starter....I hate it.
For me nope you can also start from lithium house, put LCV at 3.0V and an average 400AH house has more starting AH left then a separate lead starter. House consist normalynof minimum 2 batteries so here you have your redundancy anyhow.
Want a dedicated 2nd battery you could use in emergency for starting my advice is to use Toshiba scib or yinglong LTO as buffer battery to isolate the sensitive nav electronics (the filtering and protection the new chartploters of the big 4 get worse and worse) but in emergency you can start from the LTO buffer too.

[more]

Originally Posted by Maine Sail

Happy 15th Birthday to my LiFePo4 Battery..

and soon be Happy 20th Birthday to my LiFePo4 Battery

[Maine Sail]

Originally Posted by CaptainRivet

What's your opinion on the need of a dedicated starter battery with lifepo4.
...the folks still love their lead starter....I hate it.
For me nope you can also start from lithium house, put LCV at 3.0V and an average 400AH house has more starting AH left then a separate lead starter. House consist normalynof minimum 2 batteries so here you have your redundancy anyhow.
Want a dedicated 2nd battery you could use in emergency for starting my advice is to use Toshiba scib or yinglong LTO as buffer battery to isolate the sensitive nav electronics (the filtering and protection the new chartploters of the big 4 get worse and worse) but in emergency you can start from the LTO buffer too.

It serves a necessary purpose. I was never without a start/reserve LA batt even though I started off the LFP bank.. Too much to go wrong with a BMS not to have redundancy... If I was still using this bank on the boat I would reinstall the REC BMS

[Maine Sail]

Originally Posted by CaptainRivet

Great you are back.
No surprise. build myself several Winston banks and all go strong, several past the 15 year mark.

Would love to see the date codes....

[Maine Sail]

Originally Posted by more

and soon be Happy 20th Birthday to my LiFePo4 Battery

What cells are you using that have been around for 20 years? As fat asI know Thndersky only began selling production LFP cells in 2007..? Their earliest cells were green and most of these went to Universities and industry for testing purposes..

[Plumbean]

Great to see you back Rod!

[CaptainRivet]

Originally Posted by Maine Sail

Would love to see the date codes....

As said nothing documented but i asked my friend to check and send. As said we done mainly car stereo competition and just installed what we got our hands on, in the beginning a lot stuff from scrapped military vehicles and planes...the 3 banks winston banks i know where for our RVs for the competitions to sleep in and got later repurposed as off grid storage or house bank for a boat, thats why they survived :-)
burned a car down when a lishen bank shorted internally because we massivly overloaded it and the 10kA speced class T got arced...
at that time as you said no documentation and no BMS...

[CaptainRivet]

Originally Posted by Maine Sail

It serves a necessary purpose. I was never without a start/reserve LA batt even though I started off the LFP bank.. Too much to go wrong with a BMS not to have redundancy... If I was still using this bank on the boat I would reinstall the REC BMS

My 3 goto BMS are ElectrodacusBMS, JK and REC depending on the purpose and installation.

No need for a BMS in 12V with winston is my experience, the BMV doing LCV and HVC with a relay in combo with active balancer is all whats needed. Like this no BMS can break and using 2 batteries 1p4S or 8S each with a BMV in parallel is more then enough redudancy then.
What does a REC BMS that a BMV 712 and an active balancer cannot do? ...and that for 5 times the cost+complexity.
Kiss for me here...different for 48V systems.
Same for LTOs, no need for a lead anymore for me.