lithium question
Can you charge lithium batteries with a regular charger or do I need to buy a special charger?
Forum Discussion
BFL13 wrote:
More idle thoughts:
You could stash the LFP and its inverter in the tow vehicle. Run the extension cord from it to the trailer shore power cord.
Note the 45 minutes won't put many AH back in even doing 50-80s.
Say you have a 60 amp charger and you are down 100AH /50%. 45 minutes will get you 45AH (minus a few for heat) so you are now at 145AH and you used 100 the first day, so by next day you are down another 100 to 45AH remaining.
Conserving to 50AH a day means you are down to 150/ 75% and where Bulk ends so your 60 amps will taper from the start doing the 75-90 so it will take longer. ( You don't do past 90 on generator on low amps and waste a lot of gen fuel for little return.) So you only are back to 180AH- restored 30AH of that 50. Next day you are down another 50 to 130AH and so on.
You could splurge the first day to get down to 50% and then do 50-90s. but in any case you will be running the gen for a couple hours a day or even longer depending, so you will need lots of propane or gasoline for it. Doesn't help if they are LFP--an AH is an AH no matter where it came from.
Having an EV for a TV you can plug into is very interesting--IMO that is the way to go if available. Nobody cares about efficiency while camping. You just want to get to tomorrow without freezing in the dark.
True. But it depends on how far your recharge point is for the EV. You are from BC so you know we are kinda blessed with charge infrastructure here and it’s growing super fast as well. But to make it worth while one would have to be camped within 30 or 40 kilometres of a fast charger. Totally possible but not a given. In that case your car is your fuel carrier. The other thing is getting the power to the RV. With something like the Ford Lightning that’s easy as it has a built in 7.2 KW inverter for operating power tools. Just plug in the RV. But for those of us towing with an EV SUV we are relegated to the 7 pin plug or small inverter and battery charger. This is super inefficient as the car has to be “on” which uses about 200 watts just for “housekeeping”. Etc.
Anyway, using the Tesla as a big battery is at best a back up plan. Leaning more to a little champion 2000 watt propane generator at this point. Probably 45 minutes to an hour of operation per day would do it.
