Ecoflow Delta Review: Pros and Cons/ Capacity Test/ Technical Discussion and More (Sponsored Video)

so today we're finally going to review the eco flow delta and a lot of people want to know if this is a good standalone solar power system it has literally every feature that we want it has a great output a great input lots of safety features but before we do the review i want you guys to understand the frustration that i've had with this company so far this unit is sponsored they contacted me and they sent it out but i'm an original pledger for the original kickstarter campaign i put my money down about seven months ago or whenever it started and i was waiting to get it in mid december it is christmas and i still have not received the unit that i paid for with my own cash i have only received the sponsor unit also this sponsored unit came a little late they contacted me after they gave it to all these other bigger youtubers so i really do not like when companies do that and the marketing team is a little slow i contacted them months ago or i tried to and i never got a single response back i trade like three different times also in amazon reviews for other eco flow products there is horrible customer support and service you can look up the reviews yourself but before i even open up this box i have a bad taste in my mouth with eco flow i'm surprised that they didn't respond to any of my messages or calls and at the very last minute then they send me out a sponsor unit and i still don't have the original one that i paid for with my own money so let's move on to the review let's see if this is actually a good unit that's worth our time i'm actually pretty excited because this thing has insane charging capabilities from an ac outlet the first thing you see when you open it says keep this box enjoy the 24 month warranty and support at ecoflow.com but i don't know if i should trust this with all the complaints i've seen on amazon oh wow this is fancy and the carrying case and the packaging it comes with is really nice but i don't really care about packaging like other youtubers i care about the performance of the product so it actually has a very impressive build quality i was not expecting that in the pictures it looks like a cheap toy but it looks really nice in person like this is a very durable nylon so the total weight is 30.8 pounds which is pretty good considering the output and battery size and there are tacky stickers all over this thing and the delta comes with some cables so first we have a cigarette lighter to xt60 charge cable so you can charge with your car's alternator and you have an xt60 to mc4 but these wires are very small you guys this is a 14 gauge wire that's pretty pitiful so yeah you're not going to be parallel connecting your panels but i don't think the input limit voltage is much more than 60 volts so that's not that great but i'm not sure what size the total array is so i'm sure it's specked accordingly so we'll find out in a second then we have a cigarette lighter two car clamps and these are pretty cheap feeling and then we have an ac input cable and this is the front of the ecoflow delta you have a screen that tells you stats about the battery in the inverter and what's going in and out of the battery and then down here we have dc outputs that are usb-c and fast charge usb 3.0 you have an on and off button for the entire system and if you want to turn on these usbs you press right here and it's on but check out the screen you guys this thing is incredible i've been testing it for the last hour and i love it we have a state of charge indicator that tells us a percent in a blue graphic to depict how much power we have left next we have an input and an output for the watts so whether you have an ac or a solar charge controller it will tell you how many watts are going into the ecoflow delta and how many watts are going out through the inverter and the dc outputs and then over here we have a net loss or gain meter and it tells you how many hours we can power the load for if you have inputs and outputs it will take the net loss or gain and it will tell you how many hours you can power it for you also have safety notifications on the top right you have charge sources on the bottom so this is a very quick fast easy to look at meter and it tells you everything you need to know and on this side we have the inputs and we have an ac input for a cord that connects to a wall adapter and this has a circuit breaker with 20 amps max so you could push a lot of power into this and then we have a 65 volt 10 amp max xt60 connector this is where you charge the cigarette lighter adapter or a solar panel or solar panel array but you cannot exceed 65 volts or 10 amps so you're probably not going to put any solar panels in parallel and we're going to get to that later and we have six ac outlets with a max output of 1800 watts and a max surge of 3 300 watts and you can turn these on by pressing this button you have a white light and some fans come on and at the bottom we have a cigarette lighter adapter so let's check with the voltages and we have 13.6 volts so this is a regulated output you guys this is awesome that means that you can run your 12 volt appliances without a problem unlike a lot of other generators on the market they have an unregulated output so they did a great job with this you could actually power a dc refrigerator with this no problem with solar power so so far it's actually very impressive now we need to test it so the first thing we're going to test is the rate at which it charges with ac power oh wow guys it's charging fast we're already at 500 watts you guys it's charging at 1200 watts now 1222 watts i guess it takes some time for the cooling system to start kicking into overdrive mode but yeah we are charging very fast this is like 10 times faster than most other solar generators on the market that's really incredible actually literally it takes multiple days to charge a goal zero and this can do it in one to two hours that is insane so let's do a quick comparison the blue eddy can charge at 168 watts the goal zero with their new upgraded fast charge unit does 300 watts the eco flow delta does 1222 watts which makes it perfect for like weekend travelers if you want to throw this in the back of your truck or van or rv and you want to charge it up really quick the night before you don't have to wait multiple days now you can just get one of these and it charges in a couple hours that's incredible so this thing is pulling as much as a microwave right now this is a lot of power to be pushing into this small of a battery pack some people might argue that this much heat created by a fast charge rate will degrade the batteries and it will but it's not that bad most of these batteries are made to handle a 1c charge rate so charging in one to two hours is totally fine and healthy for these batteries for this chemistry a lot of people get freaked out with like teslas and they're like is super charging bad for my car and as long as it takes about one hour to charge you're fine all nmc chemistry variants can actually handle that charge rate just fine and on the front of the unit you can see the input in watts at the battery so there is a shunt at the cells and it is telling us how much power is going in including the efficiency losses of the charger so if we take this number and we divide it by the number on our watt meter we'll have the charging efficiency and the charge efficiency from our meters is giving us 86 percent efficiency which is pretty good that's a standard now that is charging let's put a load on the inverter to make sure that you can charge and discharge at the same time some of the new so keys i forget how to say the name you cannot do that so we need to test that out real quick we have a 1 500 watt heat gun so we're gonna crank it to the max just to see what happens okay look at guys 2 300 watts going in and 1200 so it's actually bypassing the inverter right now and charging at the same time which is a lot of power 2200 watts is a lot to be pushing through this system that's incredible this thing can only handle 1800 watts so i'm gonna have to plug it in just like this you guys this thing's a beast we're already pushing a thousand watts so let's add the heat gun two thousand 300 watts so it will charge and discharge at the same time at a very fast rate so while it's charging i started reading the manual and it shows a over temperature or under temperature warning on the screen so if it's in a freezing cold environment it will actually tell you and the max amperage for the input is 20 amps which is 2 400 watts so that was the maximum that we could draw while charging and bypassing the inverter for powering the heat gun every converter circuit they have on board is very beefy it can push 2400 watts continuously that's insane now let's see if the same is true for charging with the solar power system because this is a test we're going to just take off these mc4 adapters and the solar cable is tanned copper but man i don't like 14 gauge wire it should be like 12 or even 10 gauge we're gonna bump the voltage up to 30 volts and five amps so let's plug this in and this power supply will mimic a large solar panel we're charging at 136 watts you guys this is so cool well my power supply is freaking out right now oh wow it's because it's tracking the power point this has an mppt the voltage is not decreasing on the output so this is pushing the maximum current that it can at this voltage because if this were to decrease then that means that we would have a switching regulator so this is a true mppt which is awesome so check this out guys we have 1500 watts at the output but when we had the ac input it decreased to 1200 watts even though this is a 1 500 watt gun so that means that when you have an ac input and output it has a bypass it bypasses the inverter which is awesome so let's give it a small load and see what happens so we have 118 watts going in and 75 watts going out so we'll take 12 hours to recharge this screen is really nice i love this it tells me the stats instantly and if i add a load this changes so quickly i love that actually let's do the ac and the solar at the same time and a load and see what happens so with solar power and ac input we have 1100 now let's turn on the heat gun and check it out only 1200 watts so that means the inverter is doing some of it when the ac input is connected so there is some sort of bypass system wow that is really cool actually they pushed everything that they needed into this small little package and going from 66 percent to 100 it says it will do in 26 minutes you guys that is so fast that is incredible you know how much these things cost these converter circuits for charging batteries like for even a battleborn charger from progressive dynamics it's like multiple hundreds of dollars but this actually comes with it and it's cheap man this thing is completely destroying the blue eddy and that's kind of sad because you know the blue eddy was so fun and nice and i liked it but this is like another level this is totally different this is crazy i mean the blue eddie has a thousand watt inverter and this has an 1800 watt and it's like the same size this doesn't have as large of a battery as the blue eddy and i'm not sure what cells they're using and i'm not sure if we can even open this thing up but very impressive so far guys it is fully charged and it took like less than an hour to go from 50 to 100 so incredible so let's do the capacity test so right now we're pulling 1500 watts at the receptacle and the battery capacity of this unit is 1295 which gives us an inverter efficiency of 77 that is not good it should be 85 maybe 90 percent that's kind of strange but that was at a one point one c rate so we're gonna redo the capacity test at a point two c rate and see if we can hit a higher number and now that we're charging it up again we can put our watt meter on and see how many watts it takes to charge this unit and after we have this unit of measurement and also the next capacity test to point to c we can measure the coulimbic efficiency which will be kind of interesting because there is a lot of charge circuitry here i mean this is a very heavy duty powerful charge circuit so i want to see how efficient it is so i just ran into an interesting problem for the past 20 or 30 minutes i've been trying to charge it and it will not allow it to charge because the last test has overheated it so we have an over temperature warning and a battery warning so it's not charging yet but i'm going to give it some more time and see how long it takes till it starts charging guys it's been over 35 minutes and it will not charge it's still showing over temperatures so after two hours of the fans on it finally started charging so yeah the temperature regulation in these systems i think they should have like a water cooled system with a huge radiator on the side but um yeah that took a long time so if you're trying to like charge and discharge quickly you're not going to be able to you're going to have to wait about an hour or two between each cycle but at least it's working i thought it broke i was getting scared i also noticed that the charge rate has been reduced before we were getting 1 22 watts but now we're only getting 640 watts which is not nearly as fast now we're at 71 percent state of charge and look we are not charging 1200 watts so i think the battery has to be very cold if you want to charge it that fast rate so after about four hours and not charging at all for the first one to two hours and keeping under 600 watts it is now fully charged and it took 1.58 kilowatt hours to do that so let's figure it out and that gives us an 81 charge efficiency but that's at a reduced rate i wonder what it would be at if it was at 1200 watts and if we want to calculate the round trip efficiency we're going to take the power out at a point 2 c rate so this will take five hours and it will give us an accurate assessment of the total capacity also before we do this test though i was reading the manual and i noticed that the lifespan of the battery it states 800 cycles and then you will have 60 capacity usually you'll have 80 capacity at like around 600 or 500 cycles for goal zero so this is comparable to a goal zero when it comes to the life cycle count you'll still be able to use the battery after this point but i think because this system is in such a small package and you are dealing with cooling issues um and also the fast charge rate you're going to have degradation more so than what i was thinking so this is much much lower than a lithium-ion phosphate or a dedicated solar battery system where the battery is separated from the inverter with this system as you guys can tell from trying to charge it and being limited you're just creating a lot of heat and all of these safety systems have to throttle back the charge and discharge rate and going by the life cycle count if you want to cycle this thing constantly this is not a good idea so for a dedicated stationary solar power system i would not use this but if you're just using this system to go camping you are fine you can use this for years and years and you probably won't have a single issue you can charge with solar and you probably won't even notice this degradation but if you're cycling it once a day you will absolutely notice this i mean let's just imagine this for a second if you cycle it once a day for three years you're going to be at 60 capacity you're practically almost better off getting a lead acid battery not really but that is just really bad i mean especially a 60 capacity that's not that great so it's great for camping and recreational use but i do not think that it's good for a stand-alone solar power system all right now the next test we're going to do the discharge capacity test at 0.2c rate and for our test of 0.2c we'd have to do 259 watts but the closest i can get is 270 so we're gonna let this run for five hours and come back and see what the results are so that is a very bad result you guys we only produce 920 watt hours from a 1295 watt hour pack also if you guys remember previously when we were charging this up and it was charging slowly we put 1.58 kilowatt hours into the battery that means that the round trip efficiency is 58 so if you put 100 watt hours in here you'll get 58 watt hours out compare that to a high quality lithium ion phosphate system with a high efficiency inverter and a high efficiency battery charger typically you're going to get 79.38 round trip efficiency so this is a very inefficient system if you're trying to use this non-stop every day for solar power i would say forget it whatever inverter and charger that they are using even at a slow 0.2 c discharge rate and at a slow charge rate only 0.5 c it still did horrible we got a round-trip efficiency of 58 where is all that power going i know there's heat being generated but that is not a good figure and these meters are accurate to like 0.1 watts so i've done multiple tests with multiple inverters with this unit and it gives me good results every time something that i think might have happened is that it did not charge itself all the way even though it said 100 percent the reason i thought it was fully charged is that it said 100 percent and then the charging wattage dropped to zero so i thought okay the battery is fully charged but i think you need to top it off over a couple hours with an absorption to get like that last 10 percent and with this speed charger it might say oh one of the cells is really high we're gonna stop charging and it cuts it to zero but i don't think all the packs of cells were charged up all the way with the speed charge method it might be different with solar but i don't even have enough solar right now with winter to find out so i don't know that was a pretty big bummer 0.58 is not good and i do these tests all the time it should have done better than that and if you think something i did in this test was wrong please let me know now let's add another test this battery was discharged at a 0.2 c rate so i don't think we're in an over temperature territory so let's try charging it again and see if we got the over temperature warning that we did last time and it's actually charging within seconds so that's a very good sign but it's only charging at 117 watts so i think it throttles it if the temperature is even moderately warm like this thing is not warm but it really reduces it it's not doing 1200 these cells need to be super cold to be able to pull off that fast charge rate and it's like a low state of charge so internal resistance is low so it should be able to push as much power as it can but it's not we're only getting 116 117 it's pretty slow all right so it just increased the charging rate finally geez so the performance of this unit really depends on the temperature and how you are using it if you want to get the full rated capacity for the input or the output you need the temperature just perfect so after doing multiple tests and technical discussion on how this thing works we're going to talk about a general overview on if you should buy this and what you're getting into and some of the downsides of buying this unit and unlike the previous discussion and testing this will be for lay people you do not need to really understand how this works to understand these pros and cons so this will be a beginner friendly part of this video so first off it has a very fast charge rate capability when you plug this into an ac outlet but it is very temperature dependent in my testing if i use the inverter and this unit gets warm it will throttle the charge rate this has a very great power capability and you can push a lot of power in and a lot of power out but the moment it warms up it will throttle the charge rate but it is still 10 times faster than everything else on the market so it's pretty incredible even at the slowest charge rate that we measured it was still faster than everything else on the market so that was a very good benefit in this unit next benefit is that it's cheap it is cheaper than everything else out there this is eleven hundred dollars and it beats everything for the battery size the inverter size almost every regard also the build quality is incredible i thought that this thing looked like a toy in the pictures and i have not seen any of the eco flow products and i've seen some of the battery views but this looks great this is very solid durable nylon and i might do a breakdown video but i really don't want to i want to actually test this more especially during the summer months this thing is really strong and it looks great so i do like that next the inverter output is 1800 watts for all of the receptacles combined in 3 300 watts for surge so that is incredible anything that you plug into a house outlet rated for 110 volts should be powered just fine with this and that's what the continuous load we put a 1500 watt hour heat gun on here and it powered it for the whole duration of the test we actually got the maximal capacity at a high c rate discharge test so also there's a good warranty and there's a battery specific warranty but i've seen a lot of bad reviews on amazon for eco flows customer service and repairs and in my experience after emailing them multiple times they are very slow to respond or they don't respond at all so it might have a good warranty but i really don't know this company enough to know if they will actually stand by their warranty so only time will tell the next benefit is it's ul listed in safety certified well certification for anything with a lithium ion battery you absolutely want to have so you will know that this will not catch on fire while you're charging it unattended you typically always want to watch batteries when they are charging especially at a fast charge rate but you shouldn't have to worry because we have good safety certifications on this unit so that's a huge benefit and a lot of other solar generators on the market do not have safety certification the next benefit is that the 12 volt output is regulated and you can push eight amps so for rv and van dwellers that want to power a dc fridge from solar power you can use this as your battery it will power it just fine it's at 13.6 volts which is really good the blue eddy has a regulated output but is 12.3 volts and most of the other ones on the market including the goal zero are not regulated at all and with the goal zero you have to spend another fifty dollars or something and the goal zero is so much more overpriced than this thing i just have to drive that point home this is cheaper than the blue eddy it's cheaper than almost everything else out there and it comes with all the cables and adapters which is a huge benefit as well the next thing i like is it shows the high and low temperature safety protection on the screen and it has a really cool screen but i noticed from testing that i think that this screen is using voltage for state of charge and that is not good it doesn't seem like a true coulomb meter and i could be wrong but when i was doing the last capacity test as it was getting lower and lower this thing was giving me weird numbers it would go from one percent to three percent it said it had three minutes left but then it ran for another 15 minutes so i don't really trust this screen readout and when i first used it it was very useful and it seemed very accurate but it seems a little finicky for the seat of charge aspect of it but the watt meter seems good and that's all what most people care about but i would like to see a better state of charge monitor it shouldn't have given me those weird numbers jumping up and down at the end of a capacity test that's unacceptable now that we've gone over the pros let's go over the cons so the first downside that i found in testing is that the over temperature limit throttled my charge rate okay so whenever this thing is moderately warm from even a small or a large load test it will throttle the charge rate and when we have a large load test i couldn't charge this for two hours after i did the test because it was so hot so it makes sense because you have so many circuit boards and temperature sensors and is throttling it so that nothing gets hurt inside but if you're trying to charge and discharge this thing every couple hours you're just not going to be able to do it it will go into protection mode and you will not be able to cycle that fast the next con is that the battery is rated for 800 cycles to 60 capacity so if you're trying to use this unit as a standalone solar power system for daily cycling use i would say forget it i mean that's almost as bad as an agm lead acid just think in three years time you're going to be at 60 capacity if you're using it for solar power every single day or if you do it multiple times per day because it can charge up so quickly in about three years you're going to be looking at a bad time right here 60 percent capacity is not good the next downside is the round trip efficiency in my test was 58 it should be at least 70 percent so if you're looking for an efficient solution for putting power in and taking power out and you have a limited solar panel array and you are depending your life on the solar power system i would not use this absolutely not next we are using nmc variants so it's not lithium iron phosphate so 500 to a thousand cycles is the maximum that you'll get with this chemistry if we have lithium iron phosphate we're looking at 2 000 to 5 000 cycles and that's to 80 so if you want a standalone system that will last a very long time you're going to have to build it yourself because no one is making one of these small solar generator standalone systems with lithium iron phosphate the next downside is you can only connect a maximum of 400 watts of solar panel power we have taken the blue eddy and it has current limiting and over voltage protection we have pushed 600 watts also when you read the manual it states that it recommends having a serial connection it says recommended with three 110 watt solar panels with an open circuit voltage of 21.6 do not add a fourth panel because it will hit the over voltage protection and it says that it actually has over voltage protection and it says that you can actually parallel connect two strings so there is some form of current limiting but and there's also a limit for the over voltage but i would not trust that after reading that i would stick with 300 watts of solar panel power and if you want you can over panel it and put them in parallel but again you have 14 gauge wire going into the eco flow delta if you connect 600 watts of panels okay and you parallel them even current limiting you're pushing this thing to the max so it will only accept 10 amps and that 14 gauge wire can handle it but if you're trying to run that wire pretty far that just seems like a bad idea i would never buy this many solar panels if i can only use 10 amps from it at the nominal voltage of these panels that's just crazy i think that that would be a waste of money but if you have only 300 watts of panels it should work perfectly fine with this and considering the size of battery it would charge up very quickly for some of you guys out there that want to push like four or 500 watts this is not for you in my opinion the next downside was the inefficient charging and discharging i wrote this when i did the initial charging efficiency test because i didn't think it was that great but when i did the round trip efficiency and we found it was only 58 that was a big red flag so overall what should you guys think if you are using this on the weekends and you plan to use it once a week in some light solar charging and you want to use it with camping with like a cpap machine this is perfect you can charge it up the night before in a couple of hours if the batteries are cold you can use it all weekend you can power a cooler a small fridge you can power your laptop but i absolutely cannot recommend this unit for daily solar power system use if you want to depend on this unit for cycling every day i would say forget it you need to build your own system or pay someone to build a system with the lithium iron phosphate battery if you're pushing like 10 to 20 years and you want to use it every day in like a cabin or a small home do not use this you could actually chain these together and have a lower c rate and keep the batteries cold and maybe you will get maybe a thousand to two thousand cycles with limited degradation but with how it's designed in the temperature control system and how it throttles it if you're using it how it's advertised with the fast charge rate you are going to hit the charge cycle life that we talked about of only 800. so for a standalone system do not use it but if you're using it on the weekends for camping this thing is perfect and it's super cheap and i'm gonna actually recommend it because it did pass all of the tests it is highly inefficient okay and we went over every single downside and there is degradation that's significant but there are lots and lots of people that want a simple easy to use fast charge battery not everybody needs to cycle every single day so if you fit that category this unit is for you so that was a lot to talk about but i hope this video made sense if you disagree with anything that i said or any of my testing or any of the logic that led to my conclusions please let me know in the comment section below and i also want you guys to understand that if you buy this thing and you have any issues at all okay with customer service or support email me or post it on my forum so other people can know i do not know this company that well and i've had a troubling time with contacting them and so have other people so if you guys have any problems with these units let me know we are going to test this one for the next couple months and i'm going to see if i like it more or less or if i run into more problems but i think we thoroughly tested it enough and it has a great output and you can charge very quickly so i think this will make people happy anyways i'm gonna keep talking and talking so thank you so much for watching i'll talk to you guys later bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 633,693

Keywords: will prowse, ecoflow delta, ef delta, eco flow delta review, ecoflow review

Id: xjl3s1CdYII

Length: 31min 15sec (1875 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 26 2019