Cheapest 48 volt LiFePO4 Battery, Pre-Built with BMS, Testing and Review, Gyll from Signature Solar

100 amp hours and 5.1 kilowatt hours based on the questions emails and comments that i received from you guys i think this might be the battery that some of you are looking for today let's test it hi i'm david welcome to my channel where i like to diy renewable energy and energy efficiency projects wow inside the box it looks like it came with some cables which is great one less thing to buy this is about a 100 pound package it's designed to fit into your standard server rack this is a lithium iron phosphate battery it's sold by signature solar and it's their gill brand it has 100 amp hours so that means we have just over 5.1 kilowatt hours worth of storage now i actually have a few of these and in some future videos we're going to put them into the server rack that signature solar sells for these but these will fit a standard 19 inch server rack the cables say 16 millimeter square we have some folding handles we have the main positive and negative with removable plastic covers we have a circuit breaker looks like a 125 amp circuit breaker some communication ports id dip switches state of charge indicator this is 100 amp hours and 5.1 kilowatt hours no vents on the back or sides it's really great that they have the circuit breaker built right in that means that when you wire this up you can have that circuit breaker off and no voltage present at the two terminals i will verify that of course in a moment i mean i think this is the package we're looking for i'm excited to test this now primarily because the price point that this is sold at is really good now this whole package comes in at about fifteen hundred dollars and five percent off if you use the coupon code davidpaws uh which should probably cover shipping for you uh depends on where you live of course now for fifteen hundred dollars and the five point one kilowatt hours that comes out to about three hundred dollars per kilowatt hour now that's a really good price for a pre-made 48 volt lithium iron phosphate battery if you've been watching my channel for any length of time you know that i love to diy my own batteries i like to buy the cells and the bms and put them together myself typically i can do that total package after all the wiring all the hardware and everything for about a hundred and fifty dollars per kilowatt hour so you're coming in half of this but you have to devote a lot of time to it a lot of research to make sure that the parts are matched and this is coming in at less than half the cost of other pre-assembled 48 volt battery modules so this is a terrific product that hits this middle ground between diying on the really cheap and a pre-assembled battery that's really expensive in the next few weeks we're going to be doing a lot of testing on this battery as well as the other ones that came on the pallet with it we're going to put it into the server rack and i'm just really excited to see what they can do i hope they hold up and i hope they don't fail on me but either way you're going to find out to charge it i did buy their charger which is optional you don't have to but i decided to get this this is a 48 volt charger 25 amp probably in a future video i'm going to be testing the efficiency of this charger but right now let's just top it off so that we can get a test on this battery and find out what its capacity is hopefully it hits the rated mark of 5.1 kilowatt hours so first let's take off our two covers and the circuit breaker is off so let's verify that we don't have any voltage good so there's no voltage present and now if we turn on the circuit breaker 52.79 volts now over here it looks like the little leds we have three out of four so that means it's going to be about 75 percent so the fan just kicked on it's charging away i came out to the garage here and this charger has shut off the fan is not spinning anymore and the light on the side here is green indicating that the battery is fully charged so i'm going to unplug it and plug it back in one more time with the camera rolling close up so we can see what the voltage is that this charger shuts off at 58 0.1 58.2 58 here we go fully charged the charger shut itself off that means the battery is fully charged the charger went up over 58 volts i think it's 58.4 volts is fully charged for this type of battery this will be lithium iron phosphate arranged as a 16s that means 3.65 volts per cell now that this is fully charged i'm going to move some of this stuff around on the workbench we're going to get the tester up here and hook up a space heater so that we can find out what our capacity is so i'm hooking up my meter in between the battery and the inverter now the inverter is currently off but there's capacitors inside the inverter and so what i need to do is pre-charge the inverter to keep from blowing out the capacitors so i'm going to make sure that this circuit breaker is on that way voltage is present at the terminal i've already hooked up the negative lead now for the positive i'm going to use a little resistor and i'm going to touch the resistor together so that we are pre-charging that resistor i'm sorry we're pre-charging the capacitors and at this point we're done pre-charging and i can go over and touch actually i've got to take that screw off so we'll we'll do this one more time together you can see the value of the capacitors in here it's dropping it's 49 volts right now and so the battery is sitting here at like 57 volts so we're gonna put this uh on here and just watch now we're pre-charging that you see we brought the capacitors up to 57 volts now i bring the terminal over to the side now i can put this screw in place and there was no big spark and we didn't blow out those capacitors so it's a good idea to use a little resistor when you're pre-charging the capacitors i have to zero out this meter so it's just a matter of pressing and holding and going through the menu now everything is zeros across the board so we'll turn on the inverter okay and now we'll turn on our space heater and that is gonna run over here you can see we're starting to draw we're pulling about one and a half kilowatts and this is a 5.1 kilowatt hour which means this is going to take about three and a half hours to discharge we've only been running for one minute so far so i'll come back in about three and a half hours and we'll see what we're doing hopefully we get the full rating of 5.1 kilowatt hours out of this battery and a half hours into the test and things seem to be going pretty well yeah three quarters of the way there man this is awesome and i've been touching the box and feeling around feeling the front here i can't find anything that feels warm at all not even the slightest bit so this is really awesome this inverter shuts off at 40 volts and so that's what i like but of course it pops back up once you take off the load so it's reading 45 volts right now but that's because we took the load off and the cells kind of bounced back up in voltage but we did really good 5.29 kilowatt hours and 103 amp hours and it's rated for 100 amp hours so we did three percent better in this capacity test than the rating which is really excellent that it didn't under perform i was i was worried about that so they delivered uh over spec uh by just a little bit so that is excellent you know good job it's really exciting we were able to pull 103 amp hours out of this battery so we actually got more capacity than it was rated for and that was not at a slow discharge that was just over three hours so really good performance out of this battery [Music] all right looks like the inside of the lid is covered in this fish paper or barley paper as i've heard it being called a beautiful layout of the cells let's take a closer look if i put my hand across here i can't touch the cell tabs because the plastic is sticking up higher which is good news that means that even if something was piled on top of the sheet metal lid it wouldn't press down against this which is something i was actually worried about and i'm glad that's taken care of looks like we have our main negative right here and they ran this using 600 volt 200 degrees c 6 gauge and it feels like silicone here's the connection onto the bms all right so there are 16 so it's a 16 s and it looks like this is the main negative and it's going this direction and looping around zigzagging until we get to the main positive over on this side so a nice layout to have the main positive and negative on the front half of the battery right in the middle we have the circuit breaker okay so then it comes out of the circuit breaker and goes to the terminal right there that's our main terminal for the positive the negative side is coming out of here going to the bms and it looks like it travels through the bms and then comes out down here on the bottom to this terminal right here we have a we have a little green circuit board on the bottom with a ribbon cable and that is going to be our communication right here id state of charge different indicators these are temperature sensors and these would be the voltage sense wires i count a total of four temperature sensors i'm kind of surprised the temperature sensors are kind of grouped here two over here and two over here instead of having some like in the middle so these bars certainly look plenty thick enough which is good yeah look how thick those things are go so maybe they just screwed it in place to hold it and then they welded it so the screw was just a temporary hold i'm guessing here because i can't get that to move it looks like looks like they welded it on after it was screwed all of this is looking really good i really am not seeing a fault with this construction but if i was to nitpick i would nitpick right down here there's the negative wire coming out from the bms and it's making contact with the tip of that screw maybe if there was a plastic covering in between the two make me feel a little bit better but really it's it's really good construction overall uh i'm actually pretty impressed with it i'm tugging on these wires make sure that nothing is loose and none of these connections are loose at all not getting any play nope there's no play in any of these one of the unique features of this particular battery is that you're supposed to be able to read the battery on your computer so i pulled out my laptop and i've got this cable here now i think this is called an rj45 but i am not good with computers so if this takes any amount of skill beyond plugging it in i'm probably lost now so far i've gone to signature solar's website where they sell this battery and on the site for this battery you can click a link and it downloads which has the software in this this is the manual so i'm kind of going through the manual at the same time as looking at the software so let's try this i don't know if it matters which port so search for device the manual says to click this button no no fine device all right well so it's going to take me a while so i'm going to turn the camera off and catch back with everybody hopefully once i get it figured out it turns out that when i plugged the ethernet into the battery and the ethernet into the computer that's wrong i needed a usb adapter which i'm holding right here and what we're going to do is cut off the end of this ethernet and we're going to take the brown and brown white wires and plug it into the usb adapter now i have four of these batteries that all came on a pallet together and one of the boxes of batteries had the usb adapter in it and i think these are called rj45s so it's just uh i don't know maybe a four foot cable that i had in my drawer and then this is the usb adapter that came with the batteries on the back side of the usb adapter is a negative and positive symbol now in case that's hard to read here's a drawing i made of it so we have the negative and positive we need to run the brown and brown white wire to this one end i don't think it matters which end so cut that off and we'll strip a little bit of this cable away the other ones we don't so fold the number 26 and it seems to be about the right size there we go so brown and brown white now with the ethernet cable plugged into the usb port search for devices oh no luck and at some point in there i flipped it over to get it together and that was one of my hiccups there so i actually called signature solar and uh they picked up and they were very helpful um you know they asked me to verify that and and they were correct so call them and actually get some technical support right over the phone so thank you signature solar for that okay so i have the brown and brown white wires so now those wires are tinned a little solid brown goes in the negative let's search for the device all right i think we did it whoo yes oh that's awesome so it looks like we have a serial number up there 53.64 volts says here state of charge is at 100 percent that's correct state of health is 100 that's really good 16 cells cell differential 38 millivolts or 39 millivolts all right so 53.62 and let's go over and check that 53.64 now this is the main negative 3.352 and then the main negative over here is usually listed as cell one three point three five two so that's spot on cell two says three point three five zero so this should be cell 2. so here i've got the probes on cell 2 3.349 this is reading accurately i mean 1 millivolt difference there's no way either one of these things is going to be one millivolt accurate so we are good i'm just really excited to see that that's so neat the charger is on if we go over here it actually says charging let's turn on this load and now it says discharging and the state of charge just dropped from 100 to 99 we were able to get the software to work with the battery and that's really exciting well next i would like to test the bms and make sure that it shuts off the pack in an over voltage situation the charger is on check out the top left corner it says that the battery is charging the bottom right corner is showing that some of the cells are in balancing mode charger is doing a constant voltage and it looks like the bms is stopping it when it reaches one amp and it says float stopped i got some new water heating elements and some of you might recall that i had some before and they didn't work out the company replaced them without any issues and we can check them this time around 266 millions so that is going to be the correct reading that we want now i have this off right now and what i want to do is test the over current protection now this water heating element is supposed to be 600 watts for 12 volts we're going to be pushing somewhere close to 200 amps through here at 48 volts or 50 volts this is probably 54 volts right now so somewhere around 200 amps so this circuit breaker should trip or the bms should shut down so i have some water in here with the heating element and we're gonna try this so this is off we're gonna try seeing what the peak hold is so we'll see the inrush current all right we're good so all i'm going to do is use this stick to push it over and hopefully it immediately trips on us so here we go and the bms shut off wow so we got 213 amps through there uh yeah that's a lot but the bms shut off before this was able to trip so let's uh let's try this again there we go all right so let's try this again and it should trip so we overloaded the amps bms shut off it's kicking up 114 amps and it's staying at that oh and it turned off alarm down here again so i may have burned out one of those heating elements because we were only getting half the amps this time well it's off let's uh oh man these wires are hot all right let's check that again we might have burned it out so let's see here did we burn this out see it's higher resistance now it's about twice as much so we burned out one of the heating elements all right well we're done testing the gill battery sold by signature solar so overall i think this was a success the battery looks really well constructed the bms is a whole lot bigger than i thought it was going to be there's a circuit breaker built on it does successfully communicate with the laptop here that i have the computer so i i was happy i mean even when i overloaded it over current uh 200 amps and it's rated for 100 the bms shut down without blowing up and then successfully turn back on without having an error and i was able to see that on the computer screen the most important thing and that's the price point which is just amazing this sells for three hundred dollars per kilowatt hour that i mean that's fifteen hundred dollars for the whole box but you can use a coupon code which is davidpaws that gets you five percent off now that is an affiliate code so it will help out me and help out the channel if you choose to use that code and thank you very much if you do so but 300 per kilowatt hour delivered to your door for a pre-built 48 volt battery with the bms and everything ready to go which is just mind-blowing that they can get it that low that is less than half the nearest competitor for this type of pre-built 48 volt lithium iron phosphate with bms battery uh if you have anything else that you'd like me to tear down and test on this battery please let me know in the comments below what you want to see i'm happy to do more testing in the next video i'm going to put this battery along with some of its friends inside the cabinet now i also got the server rack cabinet for these batteries that signature solar also sells and that cabinet is pre-built with a bus bar with the shelves it's ready to go it comes with the screws and everything to mount these batteries so if you get six of these batteries with that server rack that is a 30 kilowatt hour battery which is just awesome i mean that's more capacity than my current tower of power and anyways we'll we'll get more into those details in the next video on that cabinet server rack thing uh next time but thank you everybody so much for watching if you enjoy the videos please like subscribe comment and share

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 1,279,744

Keywords: Gyll, Battery, LFP, LiFePO4, Lithium, home, powerwall, backup, off grid, off-grid, solar, 48v, 100ah, ah, 51.2v, volt, safe, signature solar, LiFePOwer4, SOC, server rack, 19

Id: SYJ25izYSGc

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021