Lwiddis wrote:
With Lithium battery prices today, lack of need to recharge fully on a daily basis, and their long life, the choice is clear.
Catch fire? Similar to the “you’ll see blown off solar panels all over the road” opinions of years ago.
Blanket statements like this need a bit of balance.
Lithium battery prices today have come down, but they are still substantially much higher than FLA.
Example, the most recent lowest price I have found on 100Ahr Lithium battery is $299, but that is an unknown fly by night import brand with unknown quality, assembled with unknown and untraceable parts, with unknown reputation.
Yes, it is possible you can use all 100Ahr, but keep in mind, the real capacity contained in a Lithium pack is higher than 100 Ahr.. The BMS is designed to allow less usable capacity than what is contained inside the pack intentionally.
One of the major downfalls with the flood of cheap Lithium packs is quality. Cheaper does not mean it is better and cheaper may be made from grey market cells which did not make it through the QA process for top quality which were literally pulled out of the floor sweepings.. Manufacturers do not scrap parts that do not make the top quality specs, instead they often take the "seconds" and sell them to the grey markets.
Additionally you have the possibility of a BMS that may or may not do it's job properly..
BMS malfunction can be catastrophic in nature as it can fail in many different ways and some failure modes can result in less than desirable outcomes..
On the other hand FLA is a well known stable old school battery tech manufactured on a very large scale by well know good reputation battery manufacturers.
FLAs do not need or use a BMS.
one pair of 6V GC2 batteries gives 210 Ahr of capacity, their charge/discharge cycle rating typically allows for up to 80% of that capacity to be used with no reduction to the life of the batteries so in reality you have 168Ahrs to play with. If you want longer life than the rated cycles you can discharge them to 50% and increase the life span which gets you 105Ahrs worth of capacity.
Current price of FLA 6V GC2s at Sams club is running about $90 each or $180 for 168Ahr at 80% use or 105Ahr at 50% use..
$180 FLA is still a lot less than $299 for Lithium.
If weight is a factor, Lithium wins on that aspect.
If cost is the factor, FLA wins hands down.
If it comes down to life, FLA can easily last 7-10 yrs even with using as much as 80% of the capacity. My first set of FLA GC2s which I use to power a home fridge conversion resulted in 9 yrs of use before I noticed a reduction in capacity and I heavily beat those batteries at times.
Track record of lithium life is still in flux and not really known for sure and what little published information is out there is typical manufacturers over hype to sell a product.
A lot of the decision boils down to usage, space, weight, cost..
My own experiences with smaller lithium packs used in industrial settings makes me shy away from going large scale whole hog into them.. Often the BMS would fail after a couple yrs of 24/7/365 usage resulting in batteries that stopped charging and would not power the devices.. A couple of BMS failures resulting in device malfunction and overheating with a few reports of serious burns..
I have a great respect for the energy storage potential in such a small package..
