Even Moar Lithium!! Upgrade to 11.52kWh Lithium Iron Phosphate Battery - How to Build an Overlander

in this video we upgrade our lithium iron phosphate battery bank from eight cells to twenty lithium cells for a combined capacity of 11.5 kilowatt hours welcome back everyone as you might be able to tell from the farm equipment we're back in the prairies of Saskatchewan camped out here next to our shipping container that has the last door stuff in it and we're here to do some upgrades and visit with family and friends of course but mostly upgrades first things first let's upgrade our batteries so if you've seen our other videos you'll know that I blew up our solar controller by not first switching off the solar inputs so be sure to switch off the solar before powering down the system and lastly I'm going to cut the power to all the internals in here so to power everything temporarily while I've got the batteries all out I've got this battery bank actually built out of old laptop cells and so that's 18 650 cells I used to build this pack and that is just jumper cable up to our power distribution block and I have a battery monitor on there just to keep the fridges and lights going while we're doing this so under here these are eight original lithium iron phosphate cells and this space here is where I want to put all twenty so the nice thing about these cells is they can be mounted in any orientation and because they're individual cells they're modular so I could put you know another row down here another row up here stacked up like this and put them all out this way but then I need to find a fancy way to strap them all down and that doesn't have the same visual as if they were all together in one block unfortunately back here to the front if I put them all in one block they wouldn't be fit they stick out too far this way and if I turn them the other way they wouldn't fit so the only way though they'll fit in here is on their sides stacked up like this from front to back like this which you'll see in a moment but it's so tight there's not even a room for a box you see our original one here I made a box with a Plexiglas cover for the terminals and there won't even be room for that so I'm going to put them in here and then build a box around the rest of it okay so when dealing with big batteries you certainly wouldn't want to be swinging around a wrench like this which would have the possibility of shorting out to the next sill so I'm using a socket and I've even put some pakhi tape over the shaft just to keep anything from touching and I'm taking off these bus bars as I do so there's no chance of something moving around it shorting don't watch loosen them all and weave them flopping around okay so a word on why we're doing this upgrade this is five kilowatts of lithium this would be more than enough for a weekend warrior or going out camping a week at a time if you knew you were going to have good sunny weather the solar has no problem keeping this charged and keeping us alive but when you live full-time in a rig like this you're not always guaranteed to have a good forecast and and have good son and we found some situations where we would be charged by 10:00 a.m. and then the solar panels just switch off and then the next week we had 10 days of rain and you know five days in dense forests where we got essentially no solar and then every day we'd be down 10% more than the day before so we could found this deal on these lithium batteries on eBay for a hundred and fifty dollars per cell and it was just too good to pass up so I maxed out the space in here with as many cells as we can hopefully fit and and that will give us eleven point five kilowatts total which would last us for 10 to 15 days maybe of no sign at all so that'll just give us a little bit of comfort that we can go into a densely wooded campground and not have to worry about running out of power and needing to go into the Sun to recharge again okay so to understand how to wire a bunch of individual cells like this you need to understand series in parallel and very simply if we look at the back of our Max Air remote controller you'll see two triple A batteries and those are wired in series so the 1.5 volts each but they're wired positives negative so that you get a total of 3 volts now take that knowledge and come here I have for 3.2 volt lithium cells and if you look at the voltmeter up here you can see there are 3.4 3 bolts and I should check each cell 3.4 3.4 3.4 no surprise so they're each three point four volts now most RV equipment is going to be twelve volts so if you connect the positive one to negative of the other just like in the remote control they're positive to negative positive is negative now when we measure the sum of all of these it's thirteen point five volts which is correct so that's how you get a 13 or 12 volt battery out of four individual cells so if I put these all in series of course that would be way too high of a voltage so then what you do is wire them in parallel so this is what will we do we have 20 cells in total but I'm going to have five wired in parallel like this so then if I measure the voltage of this you can see that cell 3 point 4 volts so this doesn't increase the voltage but it increases the capacity so instead of 180 amp hours per cell I'll have 900 amp hours at 3 volts so basically what I'm doing here I'm gonna make four packs of five cells in parallel and then those four super cells will be wired in series to make the 12 volts at 900 amp hours or 11.5 to kilowatts of power now it's very important that the voltages be the same of each cell so these batteries I'm using right now are all our original batteries that are about two years old and had a couple hundred cycles on them and the new batteries that we just received are also used and there have proximately the same age and you need to be very sure the voltage is exactly the same now I achieved that by setting our surge controller top voltage to four point there rather three point four volts so that yesterday we discharged and then when we were charging today the charge controller stopped charging them at three point four volts which is the voltage of all of the cells that I received another point for the safety police is I will be putting two of our original cells in each of the four super cells that way there the load has been distributed between old cells and new cells in parallel and there should be no risk of anything in that way there's just so many batteries you you okay guys got it all in as you can see 20 cells fits in here super tight if I had put this in a box I just the box wouldn't have fit I have about a half inch left to spare here but you might be able to see is just enough room to squeak through these little wires here which comes up through the floor so I will now box this in a little better and wedge it and and they are all stuck in here but they need to be fastened much better of course and I'll get to that boring stuff maybe even off-camera okay guys got them all busbar it up here as you can see these five here are one super cell and down here these five are second then third and fourth five parallel cells in a super cell and then as you can glean they run positive negative this way and I ran out of the copper busbars the used ones that I bought only came with one cell per battery so I grabbed a scrap of aluminum bar there and made busbars for those and as I'm sure you can tell the balance leads here are all tapped on each of the cells whoops okay guys today is tomorrow it's a windy one out there but do what I can the inverter was installed temporarily last night just so we could get by and then this morning I got to gauge welding cable and ran two leads for positive two for negative in parallel and everything has been zapped tied down all the other cables are zapped tight in place and the batteries are super firm so that's what I've done here on the inside now going outside got this sheet two inch acrylic and I've cut that into shape here over top of the batteries to protect all these terminals and as you can see I've got some classy red LEDs up in there to make it extra classy for when we're giving tours okay I'm pretty sure this is a bad idea and that it will not work but if you're seeing this then it worked flawlessly so everybody said I was going to do I've put a white kitchen bag over the batteries here over top of the wires and everything I want to form it too and I've kind of taped it in place in the corners and I'm going to use great stuff big gap filler expanding foam which you probably know is activated by humidity so I'm going to use a spray bottle and mist some water in there and hope this works this kind of squirrely all right guys I don't have time to make a proper clip for this I've got to get rolling but you can see the wait kitchen garbage bag there the foam is filled up and just almost perfectly filled that space it's pretty firm so I imagine that's putting some nice clamping force on the batteries filling in the top and molding around those big cables keeping them everything nice and secure in there so I think that's a good solution yeah would've been more fun if it had all blown out the side and made a big mess but so I'm gonna get this Plexiglas installed and then roll some b-roll here and get some glamour shots for that thank you all for watching hope that was informative kind of a rush video but good really good so thanks so much for watching I'll see you next time you

Channel: Everlanders

Views: 87,286

Keywords: LiFePo4, Lithium Batteries, RV Lithium, DIY Lithium Batteries, Camper Battery, DIY Battery Camper, Solar, Lithium, BattleBorn, CALB, CALB battery, CALB Lithium, diy solar heater, off grid living, off grid cabin, off grid solar power system, off grid living homesteading, diy solar, off grid, diy solar generator, diy solar water heater, diy lithium batteries charger, lithium ion battery, rv lithium battery conversion, rv lithium battery charger, lithium batteries cold weather

Id: 2uYENzaDBY4

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 02 2019