Best Battery System for RV - AGM vs LifePo4

[Music] hello everyone welcome to diy outdoor life today we are going to be talking about why you should not upgrade your rv battery to a lithium battery there is enough content out there telling you that you should surprise most of that content is sponsored so i've been working with these lithium batteries for years i install them in a number of locations and i would not use one on my rv now when i'm doing a battery install for somebody typically i do not even consider lithium iron phosphate batteries until the customer's budget is over four thousand dollars so i'm going to share my findings with you today and hopefully you can make with it what you will and we'll save some money so for starters i kind of have to admit that a video like this seems impossible to make this is an extremely complicated topic and most people who want to upgrade the battery on their camper do not want to become an electrical engineer but this is not a three minute type of video there's some dense content that i'm going to try to move through and keep it beginner friendly now the other issue going on here is that millions of dollars are being spent to market lithium iron phosphate batteries they're being marketed as drop in ready the situation going on here is that the camper and rv industry is enormous we go through a lot of batteries obviously these companies want a market share of these batteries they're doing a really good job i'm not talking about posters in an rv dealership i'm talking about targeted ads social media presence they're answering questions on the forums and to be frank they're spending money on people with better youtube channels than me to get them to sling these batteries so i'm going to try to counter this today and it's a little difficult you'll probably have to be patient but i'm going to try to get you a system that works great and save you a ton of money so let's check it out so we got to start somewhere we might as well start with the basics your rv needs a battery most of these rvs are 12 volt systems and they need a 12 volt battery a lot of the converters on rvs require a battery to function properly so whether you're plugged into shore power or not you still need to have a high quality battery on your rv now the type of battery that i recommend is an agm an absorbent glass mat battery you can use gel marine hybrid batteries but what we're looking for is a deep cycle 12 volt lead acid battery now back in the day we used to refer to batteries two different ways it was either a car battery or a house battery a car battery does a really good job discharging a lot of energy very quickly it starts our car and the alternator takes over a house battery has deep cycling capabilities you can draw small amounts of energy off of it for a very long period of time so we're going to want to go with a deep cycle house battery so whether it's agm gel hybrid marine or a lithium iron phosphate battery you're getting a deep cycle battery for your rv this is very important for starters the reason i say this is because a lot of times when i see people with a thousand dollar lithium iron phosphate battery like a lion energy or like a like a battle born battery when you talk to the customer a lot of times they had a cheap car battery something measured in cold cranking amps it didn't do the job for them and then they were convinced to upgrade and spend a ton of money that they didn't need to do so we're moving along quickly here but now we have a high quality deep cycle battery like an agm the next thing we have to learn about is capacity capacity is what matters to us reserve capacity if we like to go disperse camping obviously most people that end up with a lithium battery are looking to go disperse camping for longer the truth is you can get whatever capacity you want with a battery like an agm you're not limited to a specific number so you can get a very large agm just like you can get a very large lithium battery so capacity in and of itself is not a limitation here now it's very difficult for me to calculate your capacity without some sort of consultation so i'm gonna make some blanket statements with an agm battery a hundred amp hours is considered entry level for boondocking or dispersed camping that means if your battery is under 100 amp hours you might be able to go a weekend using lights and a few small things but if you have refrigeration you watch a movie you charge your phone you use a cpap machine 50 amp hours is not going to cut it so just like with the car battery a lot of folks have a camper with a very small capacity when it doesn't work for them they are now susceptible to be hooked with lithium iron phosphate being the only alternative for a larger capacity so if agm batteries are so good how come so many people are switching to lithium the truth is agm and all deep cycle lead acid batteries have some inherent shortcomings the marketing for lithium is that they solve these shortcomings and for the most part that's true but on an rv application what i'm going to tell you today is the problems the lithium batteries bring with them are more complicated and expensive to solve than the problems they're fixing on these agms so let's start with talking about the shortcomings of deep cycle lead acid so the shortcomings with lead acid batteries start with the fact that there's lead in them they're heavy they're large you can only use 50 it's got a 50 working capacity and they don't last forever the listed life expectancy is three to five years if you take these things in in the winter and put them on a battery tender and you don't subject them to a super discharge or you run them to low voltage it's not uncommon to see a high quality agm battery go seven years just like the car battery that you use to start your car if you take care of it you don't have to replace it every three years so these shortcomings are real and the way that we have worked around it has been successful for decades so we're going to talk about the simple workarounds and the hidden issues with the lithium replacements so it's true these lead acid batteries are large and they are heavy typically what people don't know is that your rv was engineered to carry these batteries oftentimes it's factored into your tongue weight ratio and your overall tongue weight that you can expand these batteries to some serious capacities without tipping things out of balance of course you should know some basics about tongue weight i'll tag that video up here so you can learn about balancing your trailers but even this tiny teardrop can handle 225 amp hours of agm battery without getting out of balance or overloading the towing capacity of some of the smallest tow vehicles on the road so if your batteries are located inside the camper or you've already loaded up on weight up here it gets a little bit more tricky but what i'd like to explain is that it's always cheaper and easier to rebalance your trailer to carry the weight up here than it is to change the chemistry of your battery so weight and size alone need not be a determining factor when switching to lithium so the next thing that's a pain with lead acid batteries is the 50 working capacity we can only use 50 percent of what's inside this battery as far as capacity this is one of the things that contribute to their size and weight and it's one of the reasons why lithium batteries are lighter and smaller but we've already factored this in and accounted for this for years we keep these batteries above 12.2 volts so you can get a little cigarette lighter input that tells you the voltage i'll throw that in the description you can use your multi-meter but if your camper came with a meter inside that's rated for a lead acid battery when that meter says you're empty you're usually at 50 percent of your lead acid battery capacity if you switch to lithium that meter is not going to work anymore you're going to have to upgrade that and you're still going to have to test the voltage of your battery just because you have a hundred percent working capacity doesn't mean you don't know need to know what capacity you're at so you're gonna wanna know if you're at ten percent twenty percent or ninety percent whether you have a lead acid battery or not so this uh 50 working capacity is more related to the weight and size that we've already addressed okay so i hope you're still with me we're trying to move quick the last one is the biggest one and it has to do with life expectancy and this is what i hear most people refer to when they are speaking of the virtues of a battle born battery or any lithium iron phosphate battery your agm has that three to five years you can get seven a lithium iron phosphate battery is advertised as having 2500 life cycles that's a ton of life cycles these are the only batteries i would use for home energy backup off-grid cabins but what happens when you apply them to a trailer is that all of that changes do not believe the hype of drop in replacement for one they're subjected to more abuse and it's not the cells that are gonna go bad it's the bms it's the wiring it's a temperature sensor when you're shaking this thing down the road that does have an effect on life cycles but the much bigger effect is that those life cycles are based on perfect charging and perfect charging is not what we're gonna get in a drop-in replacement so the first thing that has to go is the charger on your camper this uh teardrop camper here has a charger that's built into the converter this is a three or four hundred dollar component and it can cost as much as a thousand or even fifteen hundred dollars to replace now the folks advertising and trying to sell lithium iron phosphate batteries will tell you that you do not have to change the charger but when you open the owner's manual or read the data on the profiles it becomes very clear that you do you see lithium iron phosphate batteries require a top balance it means that they need to be 100 full the charger has to recognize that and then it steps up into high voltage this equalizes the cells and keeps the battery healthy your camper charger will never do that it is not going to do that and when you call lion energy battleborn and talk about that they say it's a drop in battery as long as periodically you take it out and install it to a lithium charger most people don't know about this when they make the swap to this battery so it's really important to know that although your rv charger will bring this battery a lithium battery up to about 80 percent it does not take it to a hundred percent so your 200 or 225 amp hour agm even with the 50 working capacity has more juice in it than this thousand dollar battle born battery when you're subjecting it to a standard wfco on your camper so the same is true with our charge controllers for solar you can subject agms to pwms and really cheap charge controllers you can spend fifty dollars on one and get a good fast charge with an agm battery with lithium iron phosphate it is super super important that we go with a high quality mppt battleborn has set up a hotline that you call when you buy one of their batteries to help you select a solar charge controller they almost always recommend a 300 victron charge controller that can match the parameters of the battery so you've spent a thousand dollars on the battery you've spent over a thousand dollars on the charger you need to buy another couple hundred dollar charger when you take the battery out you spent three hundred dollars instead of 50 on the charge controller you've now spent thousands of dollars to get this lithium battery to work properly and to get the most value out of the battery these agm batteries are three or four hundred dollars for super capacity batteries most of us don't even need more than 100 amp hour battery but if we do we can put two six volt golf cart batteries together in series to get 225 amp hours we can buy a simple box to drop it in and we are literally spending less than a quarter of the money that you are when you're installing uh lithium iron phosphate system properly and if you're thinking that you can skimp out on a lithium iron phosphate battery if you take nothing else from this video take my word that you cannot having serviced these batteries for years i won't go anywhere near these aliexpress alibaba and now they're flooded on amazon these cheap lithium iron phosphate batteries when you open up a battle-borne battery you have cylindrical cells some of these batteries use prismatic cells some of them use flat packed cells they are networked together with copper wiring there's a computerized battery management system there's a low temperature sensor and a high temperature sensor these batteries are advanced and a battleborn battery is a work of art and i would recommend them they are the gold standard lion lion energy is excellent too these knock off cheap ones that you're buying on amazon when you open them up have cells put on in them with spray insulation to hold them in place there's little tiny fine speaker wires holding things together some of them are missing temperature sensors with a lithium battery if you charge it below freezing you cause lithium plating it ruins the battery if you use it at very cold temperatures like you know four or even negative zero fahrenheit you ruin the battery as well that's why the quality batteries have temperature sensors these cheap ones do not and when they do have them and you test them half the time they don't work so very important here i work with lithium batteries i would not put one of these cheap ones near where i go to sleep so maybe you knew all of this already or maybe money is not an object and you don't mind upgrading these components the truth is you're going to have an excellent system with a high-end mppt charge controller an upgraded power converter and a high quality lithium iron phosphate battery the thing that not enough people are talking about is the most expensive part of this whole equation this is a seven pin plug when you install this into your tow vehicle you're creating a parallel connection between the electrical system on your camper and the electrical system on your tow vehicle most of you don't even mix and match the batteries in your tv remote at home and you are taking one of your most expensive investments and turning it into a science experiment your poor tow vehicle now a lot of different things can happen here but most of the time you have an alternator in your vehicle that is a very inefficient system typically they waste 50 of the energy they create in the form of heat energy when they get too hot they shut off so if you're towing your very low resistance lithium iron phosphate battery with a high resistance alternator and tow vehicle battery what happens is you can overheat your alternator then your electrical system is going to run off your car battery your car battery is going to break down more frequently and most of the time folks are not even noticing that they're spending thousands more dollars in the life of their lithium iron phosphate battery now what's worse about this whole equation is that when you go on the forums and you see people saying hey i got a new lithium iron phosphate battery and it's not charging from my tow vehicle i try to tell them you should just cut the charging cord from your tow vehicle don't subject your poor tow vehicle to your new science experiment spend money back there on the camper upgrade the charge control yada yada you guys know that stuff unfortunately if there's thumbs downs on this video it's the same people that give me a thumbs down on those forums they've drank the kool-aid and they swoop in and say oh no no no what you need to do is install a dc to dc charge controller another several hundred dollar device big thick copper wires another thousand dollars down the drain to get this lithium iron battery to work what they don't tell you most the time is you should also probably get a super duty alternator if you're gonna install a dc to dc charge controller when are we gonna stop the insanity can you see where we're going here you've now spent like five or six thousand dollars in order to be able to say that you have a lithium iron phosphate battery or a battle borne or a lion energy battery on your rv we can do so much more with agm so now for the solutions maximize the size of your capacity as per your needs do you need 100 amp hours do you need 200 amp hours go with the biggest set of agm that you can handle you can buy big ones like i do 110 amp hour batteries you can put those in parallel to add to the capacity you can go with a golf cart battery that's 225 amp hours and wire it in series i know somebody that has two of those series wired together in parallel that's 450 amp hours of agm capacity make sure you understand what your size and weight restrictions are and go up to that point if you need that much energy next take the money that you saved buying a lead acid battery and start investing in charging we're gonna put water back in the bucket as fast as we take water out of the bucket so with all of the money that you saved with the agm go with solar panels solar panels on the roof are great because they're always charging there's no setup and they're hard to steal solar panels on the ground are great because they collect more wattage you can park in the shade and put the panels in the sun you can move the panels once or twice a day to redirect them to the sun that's a very effective strategy to get more wattage back into the battery so an agm with a nice solar array is cheaper a lot of times than a lithium iron phosphate battery take the money that you would have spent updating your converter and adding things to your tow vehicle and buy portable power stations this one is a thousand bucks it costs the same price as a as the lithium-ion phosphate battery and it has 91 or 92 amp hours instead of a hundred you're also getting a pure sine wave inverter and high-speed usb port to be able to run your cpap machine regulated ports to run your refrigerator plug your refrigerator into a device like this it's regulated it's going to run it better and take that load off of your camper battery you can charge this thing from the same solar panels that you charge your camper with so for the same price as a lithium battery you can use this thing in a lot of intelligent ways and the 300 and some days a year you're not camping bring this thing to a barbecue plug your refrigerator or wi-fi router and when the power goes out there's wiser more valuable ways to spend your money when you're looking to upgrade your rv's electrical system now back up for a second because i got to wrap this thing up i'm going to put videos maybe like here and down here on reviews for portable power stations there's links in the description for different batteries and gadgets you can use to help out make sure that you like and subscribe the video and there's a new feature in the description called buy me a coffee you guys know i'm never gonna get a sponsorship if i keep telling you how to save your money instead of how to spend your money so if you saved a couple bucks today or i helped you out with something consider buying me a coffee it really hopes uh helps support the channel i'll see you guys next time thanks a lot

Channel: DIY Outdoor Life

Views: 81,163

Keywords: Best Battery RV, best rv battery for boondocking, best rv battery for dry camping, best rv battery charger, best rv battery setup, best lithium rv battery, best budget rv battery, lifepo4, agm vs lifepo4, agm vs lithium, best battery for rv travel trailer, best 12v rv battery, Selecting the best bettery for camper, Battle born

Id: uBGXJ75lfoY

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021