Advice on Lithium Solar setup
Hello, I'm about to move into a conversion van full-time, 80% boondocking, and would like your advice about what I'm planning. My electrical requirements won't be much. I don't expect to use more t...
Forum Discussion
Almot wrote:brulaz wrote:
... will get you you to ~95% SOC soon enough and allow cell-to-cell balancing. And just about any 1 or 2 stage charger with an AGM setting, or even an adjustable V Meanwell cc/cv power supply should be able to do that.
... as long as it's able to terminate charging at this point (or, better yet, few % below). These chargers will keep it in Absorb where you may not want to be, and/or drop to fixed Float where it "should" terminate charging, but I recall some reports few pages ago that it doesn't always stop charging in Float. Can anybody provide a link to that discussion, btw?
You want to be able to adjust charging profile. Meanwell looks better in this respect. Perhaps, coupled with $3 kitchen timer.
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I suppose so. But do you really need to terminate the charge and why?
With lead acid you *do* want to terminate absorb because of out gassing, loss of water and so on.
With LiFePO4, if you fix the CV charge at 3.65V or whatever per cell, the current does eventually drop way down according to all the charts I've seen. So basically a Meanwell could just sit there, applying V but not pumping any (or very little) current into the battery? I dunno ... would that be a problem?
But this may not be what happens, as on another forum there's a guy who said he can still pump 20A into a 300Ah LifeBlue battery after it reaches 100% SOC and his charger's V drops below 14V (EDIT: actually his weak solar charger never gets up that high). A mystery. Where do those 20A go? Feeding the BMS, raising the internal temperature, maybe the SOC estimate is wrong (he doesn't think so)? He ends up manually stopping the charge.
