271 Ah upgrade

JohnAM wrote:
Late to the thread but interested in your project. Please explain your capacity. I get the 4 3.2 batteries have 271AH. but don't two 12V 100Ah Lifelines have 200Ah? So you have a significant improvement, but not 2.5 times. Or am I missing something?

A flooded lead acid battery (FLA) can only be discharged %50 otherwise damage to it will occur (namely less charge/discharge cycles or kill it all together).

So the reality is that a 100AH FLA battery only has 50AH of usable capacity.

LiFePO4 batteries can use %100 of AH capacity.

One of the other items to consider is rated cycles. While inexpensive FLA's might be rated at ~300 cycle (or not at all) and expensive ones (like the Lifeline FLA's) rated at ~900 cycles, many LiFePo4 batteries are rated at ~3000+ cycles (otherwise over 3x the usable life)

While personally I'll be replacing a perfectly good 100AH Battleborn LiFePo4 battery (I bought a year ago, ~$960) with what seems to be a fun DIY 271AH project, others that have not made the LiFePo4 switch yet might be able to take notes and consider switching the next time they need to replace their FLA batteries.


Does that make sense now?


- Mark0