Lithium - Charging
Picked up a couple 12v 100amp-hr Lithium batteries off amazon ($150 each delivered including bluetooth monitoring). My charger has a lithium setting and I have 240w of solar. I've had them installe...
Forum Discussion
who said you don't need them at 100%? I do it two different ways when I am at home, with the camper I don't plug it in and adjust my custom settings on my solar controller to hold it at 70%. a night or two before i go camping I change it back to 100%
I think to many people are getting confused with voltage for long term storage where if you are going to have no voltage in and out for 3 months then you set it down to 50 to 70% and let it set for the off season.
when your actually using it 100% to 0% is perfectly fine that will just give you the cycle life. the other situation is for people who use it as battery back up for their house that is on solar, they set 90% as a top charge for a bit longer life as they cycle a lot more than normal so they want to squeeze some extra cycles out of their battery. in fact not charging to 100% long or frequent enough can be harder on the battery as they go out of balance and lower your actual capacity until you top balance them again. with the cheep batteries that seams to be one of the most common issues, so I would charge it to 100% and hold it at a 14.4V float charge for a day or if they have blue tooth see what there actual cell voltages are and how far they are out. Ideally they should be with in 20mV of each other
the only setting I take off the top and bottom when I am camping is I set my floor at 10%, not for any reason really aside from that's where they bottom knee is and the voltage drops below 12V
as for letting it sit the issue comes in if an equalization phase starts, if your confident that won't happen then you could switch it to lead acid when your sitting at home, but I would switch it back to Li a few days before you go out to make sure your battery is 100%, why leave extra capacity sitting in the driveway?
