Battery Bank Options + Wiring Solar Batteries from 6v to 12v vs 24v

hey guys Michael here with do it justice welcome to today's video and thank you for joining us on our next video in our DIY solar power series today I'm going to be discussing solar batteries and I'm gonna talk about three different types of batteries that you can install in your solar battery bank I'm also going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages to each of those batteries and then lastly I'm going to talk about how to wire six volt and 12 volt batteries into 12 volt and 24 volt configurations so we have a lot to talk about let's jump right in the three different types of batteries I'm going to talk about today are flooded lead-acid batteries absorbed glass mat batteries or AGM batteries and then lithium ion batteries flooded lead-acid batteries are the tried-and-true traditional battery technology this technology has been around for well over a hundred years and it is still in use today granted they've adapted this technology into more renewable energy applications but it's still an old technology so that should give you a good idea of the kind of battery landscape that we're sitting in today absorbed glass mat or AGM batteries are still considered a LED acid battery at his lead acid technology inside of it but it is configured just slightly different than the flooded lead-acid battery lithium ion batteries are the new kid on the block it's the latest and greatest technology when it comes to solar batteries but that comes with major advantages but also one major disadvantage I could drone on and on about the differences between these batteries but for this video I'm gonna simplify it down into four major categories and compare that between the three batteries that has to do with maintenance percentage of usable energy the longevity of each battery and the cost for each battery when it comes to maintenance of each of these batteries flooded lead-acid batteries have a huge disadvantage they need to be both watered as well as equalized and when I'm walking about watering I'm talking about physically adding water to each of the battery cells and when I'm talking about equalizing I'm talking about doing an over charging method to prevent sulfation which is one of the major causes of battery failure now with AGM and lithium-ion batteries you don't need to really worry about that the only type of maintenance you really need to worry about those two batteries it's just making sure you're consistently charging them properly the next thing I'm going to talk about is the percentage of usable energy when it comes to each type of battery now this is a huge advantage to lithium-ion batteries because they can use about 80 percent of their total capacity when it comes to the battery storage when it comes to flooded in AGM batteries you can really only use about 50 percent of the total capacity for those batteries and this is kind of unfortunate because you have the ability to store all this energy but you can really only use about 50% of that energy and the reason that is is because when you drop below that 50 percent threshold you start to damage those batteries which can then affect the lifespan of the batteries speaking of lifespan that takes me right into the next category that I'm going to compare between these three batteries flooded lead-acid batteries can last anywhere from maybe seven to ten years or around a thousand cycles if they're properly maintained same with AGM batteries if they're properly maintained they can last anywhere from maybe six to eight years or around 700 cycles now the huge advantage goes to lithium-ion batteries which can last anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 cycles this is significantly better than the flooded and the AGM batteries and it could last you 20 plus years if you treat them right the last category I'm gonna compare is the price differences between all these batteries flooded lead-acid batteries will run you anywhere from a hundred and fifty to a hundred and sixty dollars per six volt 225 amp hour battery now this is going to obviously vary depending on the cost of lead in the market because these batteries are created with lead AGM batteries will run you about double the cost of flooded lead-acid batteries so a 220 amp power 6 volt battery I just checked online and that will run you around $300 lithium-ion batteries are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to the initial startup cost in this category to give you an example a 100 amp hour 12 volt lithium-ion battery will run you around 900 to $1,000 now that may seem like a crazy cost for the amount of battery that you get but I'm gonna teach you guys how to wire 6 volt and 12 volt batteries into 12 volt and 24 volt configurations to kind of give you guys an idea on how to calculate the total cost of the life of the battery so for this section I need to define what batteries I'm going to be using to wire them in series in parallel to get 12 and 24 volt configurations so for the 6 volt battery I'm going to use a flooded lead-acid 225 amp hour battery and for the 12 volt batteries I'm gonna use a lithium-ion 100 amp hour battery now I'm going to show you how to wire for 6 volt batteries into a 12 volt and 24 volt configuration now if you haven't seen last week's video on solar panels I talked about wiring the solar panels in series in parallel and all of those concepts will be repeated in this video so if you haven't seen that video go check that one out first but if you have seen that video this is just gonna be a refresher for you guys so that you really get those concepts and you can apply those when installing your own system so we have 4 6 volt batteries that we need to wire in a 12 volt configuration to do that what I'm going to do is I'm gonna take 2 6 volt batteries and another 2 6 volt batteries I'm gonna wire each of those pairs in series and if you remember from last week's video I talked about wiring it in series and it means that you're kind of marrying these batteries together so in an electrical sense when you wire to 6 volt batteries together and another to 6 volt batteries together you in theory have a single 12-volt battery and another single 12-volt battery but you'll also remember that when wiring in series you don't change the amperage you only change the voltage so the voltage of the batteries changes to 12 from and the amperage stays the same at 225 amp hours now that you have two 12 volt batteries you can wire those in parallel now because you don't need to double the voltage now what you need to do is pair those two batteries together to double the amperage of your system so when you wire those in parallel what you're doing is you're doubling the amperage so we just took four six volt batteries and wired them in series in parallel to get a 12 volt battery bank now you're gonna take those six volt batteries and wire them all in series to get a 24 volt battery bank the reason this is is because 24 volts is four times the amount of 6 volts so to quadruple your voltage you need to take all four of those batteries and wire them in series so what you're doing is taking the positive side of one wiring it to the negative of the of the other and so on and so forth and what you're gonna get now is a single battery that's 24 volts at 225 amp hours now you may be wondering if there's any differences in the amount of energy that each of these battery bank configurations can store you have a 12 volt 415 power battery bank and a 24 volt 225 and power battery bank now if you remember from last week we talked about watts is equal to volts times amps so if you take the bolts and the amps of each of those battery banks and you multiply them together it comes out with the same amount of watts that you can store so each of these battery banks are equivalent in the amount of energy that they can store it just depends on if you want to configure your solar system in a 12 volt configuration or a 24 volt configuration now that I've got the 4 6 volt batteries out of the way I'm going to go ahead and jump over to the 2 100 amp hour batteries that we have that are lithium-ion that I'm gonna wire in both 12 and 24 volt configurations now if you want these lithium-ion batteries the wire in 12 volts you're in luck each of these batteries are both 12 volts so if you remember from earlier once we had 12 volt batteries all we had to do was wire those two batteries in parallel to double the amp hours so if I wire the two 12 volt lithium-ion batteries in parallel that's gonna change my amperage because I'm wiring in parallel so I'm gonna wire the positive side to the positive side and the negative side to the negative side and that's gonna turn those two 12-volt batteries into a 12-volt battery bank that's rated at 200 amp hours instead of single batteries at 100 amp hours each now to take these two 12-volt batteries and wire them in a 24 volt configuration what you need to do is double the voltage of the batteries and to do that we already know that we need to wire them in series meaning you need to wire the positive side to the negative side and then that will take the voltage and double it from 12 to 24 and it will leave the amperage the same so you'll have a 24 volt battery bank that's rated at 100 amp hours now again I'm going to do that same calculation earlier to compare those two battery banks to show you that the wattage is the same with both of those battery banks it just depends on if you want to go with a 12 volt or a 24 volt configuration so now that we know how to wire the batteries in both series in parallel to get different battery configurations we're gonna use that to compare the overall price of the battery bank and the long-term usage of each battery bank to give you a general idea of the total cost over the lifespan of the batteries so let's take those for six full flooded lead-acid batteries that we just talked about and let's say we wire those in both series in parallel to get a battery bank that is 12 volts at 450 amp hours that system is going to cost you around $600 if each battery runs a hundred and fifty dollars now let's jump over to the AGM batteries as I said earlier you can get a six volt 220 amp hour battery for around 300 dollars now if you take those for 220 amp hour batteries and you wire them in series in parallel that's going to give you a 12 volt battery bank that's rated at 440 amp hours that battery bank will run about $1,200 now keep in mind even though these two battery banks are 450 amp hours and 440 amp hours the usable energy in each of these battery banks is only 50% so on the flooded battery bank you only have 225 amp hours of usable energy and on the AGM battery bank you only have 220 amp hours of usable energy to get something comparable when it comes to lithium-ion batteries let's say we have those 12-volt 100 amp hour lithium-ion batteries from earlier each of those batteries that hasn't 100 amp hours and we know that lithium-ion batteries we can use about 80% of the total capacity of the battery so with each 100 amp hour battery we can use 80 amp hours now each of our flooded lead-acid battery and AGM battery banks are about 220 to 225 total usable amp hours of capacity so to get the lithium-ion batteries equivalent to that what you need to do is you need to have three of those 12-volt batteries now what you're gonna do is wire those three batteries all in parallel because we want to leave it at 12 volts but what you're gonna have is a 300 amp hour lithium-ion battery bank that's 12 volts and you have about 240 of those amp hours that are usable so that's about comparable to the flooded lead-acid battery bank and the AGM battery bank now the lithium-ion battery bank is going to run you about 2700 to $3,000 but when you compare everything together when you when you really tie it all together the lithium-ion batteries will last you about five times longer than the flooded lead-acid batteries so when it comes down to total cost over the lifespan of the batteries lithium-ion batteries are without a doubt your best bet and coming in just behind that is flooded lead-acid batteries and then behind that is the AGM batteries now keep in mind all of these batteries are just four examples I you can have so many different configurations 12 volt 24 volt batteries eight volt 4 volt there are a million different combinations of batteries that you can use I was just using these as administration's to compare and contrast everything together and to show you how to wire them in the ways that you'll need to wire them so I hope this video was helpful to you guys it was a ton of information I tried to make it as easy to understand as possible if you liked this video make sure to hit that like button down below and comment if you have any questions be sure to subscribe to our channel for more videos on solar power and for more videos in the solar power series and as always guys I will see you on the next video [Music]

Channel: Duet Justus

Views: 480,705

Rating: 4.9086814 out of 5

Keywords: battery bank, solar batteries, solar battery bank, solar battery options, solar batteries pros and cons, 6v to 12v, 12v vs 24v, 12v vs 24v solar system, battery bank wiring, wiring solar batteries, solar, solar power, solar power basics, solar for beginners, diy solar, off grid solar, rv solar, rv solar systems, solar for rv, off grid solar power, solar power system, solar video, solar power series, solar power how to, solar how to, duet justus

Id: GMns62-ZVDc

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2017