12v 100ah Battery Comparison! Budget LiFePO4 VS Battle Born VS Lead Acid

today we're gonna do a fun video we are going to compare the battle board in the rooks ooh these are both lithium iron phosphate batteries they're 12 volt 100 amp power with the same discharge rate but this one costs a lot more money and this one's a lot cheaper I mean we're talking nine hundred and fifty dollars versus I think seven hundred dollars and they have mostly the same stats they have the same capacity the same discharge rate the same charge capability the biggest difference that you will notice on the datasheet is that this one you can put in series this one it doesn't tell you this one it has low temperature disconnect so if you're in a freezing environment and you try to charge this it will stop that from happening it's one of the few drop-in replacements besides a rely on that actually has that feature if you try to charge this battery in a freezing environment it will be permanently damaged and you will lose all of your money for your battery bank if you buy four of these all of that money will instantly go out the window that's why I typically always recommend the battleborn for beginners because you can't really screw it up you just plug it into your system and it will manage itself really nicely no matter what temperature or what kind of loads you put there are a lot of safety features in this one but for the price this thing seems pretty cool so I want to do a capacity test because battleborn has talked a lot about how they match their cells and how they have a really good supplier with high quality cells and if that's true that means that the capacity test will be really good and this one even though it's really cheap I'm not sure what cells they're using or if they're matching them also with the low temperature disconnect you can add a victor on controller to this one and make your own low temperature disconnect system so if you're on a budget there are options available so I'm not gonna try to just throw this out the window just because it's really cheap I want to see if it's good and their other batteries are really good there see no poly cells are awesome so if a cheap option can do it I would think that it's this one and before we test these let's look at the case this thing is fancy and nice you have these huge bolt holes where you can't over torque them it's like a really strong nylon this one feels like a McDonald's Kids 2 it's kind of shiny and cheap plastic feel it feels like it's thinner like it's it's different but the terminals are so cheesy look at this I mean it looks pretty darn cheap don't even though this is cheap and I would never use this you could totally use a bolt and it would work really nicely another big difference I forgot to mention is that the battleborn has a warranty and that is so important with these batteries because usually lithium iron phosphate cells will last a very very long time usually it's the BMS or something around the battery that will fail first and inside of this battery I have no idea what they used a lot of times the wires that go from the terminals down to the BMS can be too small so if you try to drive large loads with the cheaper ones they can actually fail or melt and that's where the warranty comes in you're actually paying for the warranty that's why the battleborn cost quite a bit more and these are also rated for the same capacity they are the same chemistry so I would imagine that they would last the same amount of time the big difference here though also is how well these can dissipate heat if the BMS gets really warm in this next to the cells depending on the design you'll have more degradation so it's hard to tell that because nobody's had a battleborn for like ten to twenty years no one's had a rooks ooh I mean these are very new batteries so we really don't know how long people will actually have these last four so the best way that we can test these is doing a capacity test this will tell us a lot about how well these cells are matched in the design of the BMS and inefficiencies inside it is a direct way to test which battery is better than another battery so what we're going to do is charge these all the way up we're gonna set the absorption until we hit float and then we're gonna do a discharge test now I hit flow voltage so this battery is fully charged and now I have an inverter connected with a Hall effect sensor and a battery capacity or watt our counter so we put the heat gun on mode five and we are pulling nine hundred and fifty four watts continuous you so the battle board has been pulling this load for about an hour and you can feel there is a lot of heat on the top of the battery and that's where the BMS is everything else on the sides is pretty cool to the touch but yeah you can feel a lot of heat up here so the voltage is starting to drop it might cut off soon Oh ten point seven volts alright guys we're gonna turn it down a little bit to see if we can extract even more power out of this battery let's turn it down a little bit more we have three volts at the terminals so yeah this thing is completely finished so we did not pull off the 1200 watt hour capacity that it's rated for but this is a very large load we are like maxing this thing out so it's understandable so now we're gonna swap out batteries and put in the Ryukyu whatever you call it I can't wait to see what the other battery does I'm so excited these stupid Victor on input terminals it just pulled the wire out I hate these terminals man Victor on needs to make them better and this has already been charged but we're gonna charge it up to float so it's at the same exact voltage as we had the battleborn so now that Victor on hit float mode and that means that this battery is completely full the hard part about this test is making sure that we do the same exact load as we did for the battleborn so now we're going to turn on the inverter and we are using setting v and full so we have the same amount of amps coming from the battery as the last test we're gonna power this load until I hits 1100 watt hours and then we're gonna lower it just as we did with the battleborn so that this test is accurate and fair we are at 400 watt hours and these terminal screws are hot like really hot look at that guys 109 degrees Fahrenheit on these terminals they are hot you so it's doing surprisingly well now we're gonna drop down the amp load because if we're at 1100 watt hours okay the battery capacity monitors shut off in about one minute later it turns honestly that is pretty impressive I am amazed the only bad thing are these terminals I can't believe the capacity did that well I was expecting this to fail a lot sooner that's incredible now we're gonna add a bonus test I have a sealed lead-acid high-quality AGM this is a 100 amp power just like the other batteries we tested even says on the front and 1200 watt hours so we're gonna do a capacity test this will be very interesting I've always wanted to do this so the same setup as before I noticed though that they're using the same case as the rooks ooh and this is a high quality brand battery so maybe their case that they're using is not that bad at all it's just a standard case and what's cool to note is that this will suffer from the Pew curtain effect so when we're pulling 80 amps from this small of a battery we are going to notice it's gonna create a lot of heat so there are gonna be more losses first we have to zero out our watt meter and we have the heat gun on the same setting that we did with the previous test look at the voltage drop you guys we're at eleven point nine the moment we started this is why you do not use lead acid anymore that is horrible and due to the losses of using a lead acid battery at this rate we can expect almost eight hundred and forty watt hours out of our 1200 watt hour battery because of the pew Curt effect so when people tell you the lithium cost more tells them to calculate the usable capacity for your application and then compare it to lithium iron phosphate with the charge cycle light these are the most expensive heaviest oldest type of batteries on the planet but people still use them you alright guys this thing's about to shut down its 740 watt hours I don't want to damage this thing so I might actually turn it off sooner we're gonna decrease the load to like that much I hope we can at least get 800 watt hours out of this freakin battery so in the company's website they say that you want to do a depth of discharge at most of 80% so with puker defect that's 672 watt hours so we're gonna stop this test at 782 watt hours so it did well for a lead-acid battery but god that is horrible and we're at eleven point four eight volts so we got sixty seven amp hours ahead of a 100 amp hour lead acid that is just crazy if you calculate the usable for this you'd have to buy two of these almost to make one with the mir phosphate battery for large loads so let's talk about the results I think most of them were self explanatory and yes I dislike lead acid but I know why some people still use it and if you have a large Bank and you have low C rates which most solar power systems have you can get by with a lower puker effect so in this test it was very pronounced but in other circumstances you won't even notice it as much I mean if you have a really large battery bank you will notice that it all really and these AGM sealed they have a coulombic efficiency of around 95% max and these are like 99% so these can technically be okay but man the charge cycle life and internal resistance alone in the voltage sag just make these a horrible idea in my opinion even if you forget about how much cheaper lithium batteries are over the long term these just performance-wise I just can't imagine going back to these next thing we should talk about is the difference in capacity I tested this one first in a colder room when we tested this one we already had the heat gun running and so the hotter the battery is typically the performance will increase and so will the capacity so that's why I think we had a slight marginal increase in capacity with this one he was in a hotter ambient temperature environment and they were practically the same watt hour capacity but this did it I mean I thought that this was gonna be like 100 or 200 watt hours below this one that's just what I was expecting but it actually pulled through it had practically the same capacities and more capacity I mean that's incredible the only problem with diruk su is these terminals I'm going to email them and tell them because man they have a really sweet battery and if you add a victor on smart battery since in charge controller with so that you can have your own low temp cutoff you can buy these first super cheap and actually have an awesome system but some things that I can't really test in any of these videos is how these work over time I wish I could do a capacity test after using it for like seven years and then we would really know how well these perform because honestly considering how hot this terminal got I don't know how BIG's the wires are they're going up to this so I'm gonna tell her name is Rachel she's like the main person that handles distribution through Amazon for rooks ooh and I'm gonna ask her to take pictures inside because I really want to know what's inside of this thing and I can't really cut this open I've seen other people open this exact case in other YouTube videos and it seems pretty dangerous and I might damage the components inside and I really don't want to mess with that and the battle born got pretty hot on the top I was not expecting it to get so warm but that's something we should think about though is that the BMS is away from the cells it's elevated on this one it didn't really get warm anywhere so maybe there be a mess inside is close to the cells and maybe this one will not last as long is the battle born where the cells are down here and the BMS is lifted up maybe they did that for a reason yeah I really don't know how long the rooks you will work I know that the cells will absolutely last a very long time but if everything else around it is not strategically designed then who's to know how long this thing will last for but it is a very big difference in price I mean you can save over a thousand dollars when you buy four of these batteries versus battle borns and the battle burns they just went up in price again I mean when battle borns first came out I would seem for like 900 and then at the trade shows they would sell them for 850 now they're 950 dollars and I love the company everybody there is super friendly and everybody over here is super friendly Rachel is she responds quickly she tells you exactly what you need to know unlike other manufacturers I mean I emailed v-max forever and they would never respond and then when they did I asked for a 24-volt I never got a response back and that kind of matters when you're trying to buy batteries you want the support there if you have a warranty issue and nobody is going to respond to any of your emails you're in for a big bad surprise with the battleborn if this thing messes up I know they're gonna swap it out they will make sure that they figure out exactly what's wrong and I think Rachel are oksu would give you a new battery but it's not nearly as personable as battleborn battleborn is on it they do know what the customers want and they're giving it and there are some other options you can get the Rena g1 and it has a low temperature cutoff and it's cheaper than the battleborn so that's also another option as well but the problem with their energies you cannot put it in series just like the rooks ooh so if you want to use something in series you're gonna have to go with battleborn or maybe a kilo volt and I think riff rely on has most of their so you can put in serious their new lineup you can but I'm not sure about their basic ones that are in the similar class is this because if you're gonna go through rely on with their new system with the can't communication and all that that thing cost like twelve hundred dollars so it makes the battleborn super cheap that's what's funny is a lot of people don't realize like when even though this is expensive there are a lot more expensive options on the market so so you really have to think about all the factors and all of the options that you have and if you want something really cheap but super awesome check out my DIY lithium iron phosphate batteries we did a capacity test last week for my last video and it was like 110 or 105 % of its rated capacity sino poly cells when they're matched properly they work really well you also have this option so yeah check out my website if you want to learn more about these battery kits so as always with solar stuff the more you spend the cheaper it is in the long term and I don't know if I could actually buy like four or six of these I would feel a little bit iffy I don't know especially with how hot these things got that was like a little scary so yeah what do you guys think there are lots of other option on the market and I would love to hear if there's something that competes in this price range if there's something cheaper so please let me know what you guys think in the comments section below super fun test I learned a whole lot and yeah I'll talk to you guys later bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 561,773

Rating: 4.8718576 out of 5

Keywords: off grid solar, will prowse, diy solar, rv solar

Id: WVxvBkeY0UY

Length: 15min 35sec (935 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 23 2019