GEAR REVIEW Li Time Battery Monitor With Shunt. This Should Give Me Accurate Battery Levels

all right so let's take a look at this lead time uh 500 amp battery monitor my battery is 200 amps which I think is huge already but this goes up to 500 so that's great if you uh particularly for people that you know put batteries in parallel then maybe they put uh five 100s in parallel or maybe they want to run two 200s so this is going to be able to handle a good amount of currents [Music] let's take a look what's in the box manual all right so when I open the manual and it's got some good details that's a good thing some manuals are just one page and it's you just kind of have to figure things out but we're going to take a look at that in a second okay here's the the cable for the monitor it's it is 6 M so that's great you know you could see you could put this far away from U your battery and and the shunt that you're going to connect okay here's the battery monitor itself it's not very big okay so it's got these tabs so you'll be able to um mount it up to to something flush you know you push it in and uh that tab will hold it in place let's see it is around just under four 4 in long and let's say two and a qu High oops okay so here's the shunt and yeah it's pretty hefty it's a good heavy duty shunt which I like okay this you're going to C hook up between the battery and your inverter okay this is another wire I think it goes from here to to something we'll figure it out we'll look in the manual uh looks like a little screwdriver so let's take a look at the manual and see okay so here's the diagram uh you have your battery you put the shunt and then you put the inverter after the shunt so before right now my battery is connected straight to the inverter but now it's going to go through the shunt first and that's what uh the monitor is going to connect to this shunt right here and you see this little power line right there that's this right here so this will go to the shunt to provide it with power and this will be uh the the monitoring wire signal that goes to your display over here okay seems pretty simple okay so after you hook everything up it looks like they want you to discharge your battery so that you could calibrate it to zero and from there uh you'll know when you're at the bottom of the battery and I know what a lot of you are thinking right now no I I'm I don't want to discharge my battery completely that's bad for the battery and it might be in some cases it is um and some some batteries actually come with a BMS that won't even allow it to be discharged 100% it'll it'll just stop and in which case you know it'll keep the battery safe but I don't know what kind of battery you have but even if you're afraid let's say you discharge it to 80% or or 90% of your battery and you can use that as your calibrating zero point it's no big deal you know once you understand uh where your zero is that's all that matters so uh that's up to you if you want to discharge completely uh for me I think it's going to be pretty safe and besides doing it one time it's not going to kill anything in my opinion people might freak out about that but I've run out of batteries before and recharged it and it's been working fine okay so let's hook this up and give it a shot you do need a thick big wire to connect this guy so that that's the drawback it is a you know it is going to handle a lot of current through this shunt so you can't use a small wire so let's hook that up all right so I made some um High current Line This is two gauge wires so it's very thick so I'm going to put two in parallel and I put on the connectors and look it is too small so uh this this nut is very big let me measure it all right so it's point8 so you got to make sure your um terminals are big enough to handle this it's .8 cuz it is a really oops big heavy duty shutt okay so keep that in mind I'm going to need to drill a whole board a bigger hole for this so now it'll just barely fit that's good that'll do all right so I got that shunt in between the battery and my um my inverter right there so if you never worked with thick two gauge wires before you just know it is a pain in the butt anyway so um that's in and I may or may not Mount this up to here I haven't decided yet I I think I'd rather prefer it holding like this because of that thick gauge wire it's just so stiff uh this might be better for it but now I'll hook up the sensor the the monitor the battery monitor all right so I got that power monitor powered up there's the hookup so now I need to find a place for this okay so I'm just going to leave it here for now I'm not going to mount it on anything because I plan to build a cabinet it here and I do plan to mount it on the cabinet so for right now I'm just going to leave it right there and the last thing to do is to set this thing up so let's uh follow the directions and set it up okay so let's set up the capacity 200 amps full Voltage we'll say it's 14.4 should be full voltage of the battery okay so step two we need to discharge the battery and uh calibrate the bottom end so uh watching the battery drain is about as fun as watching paint dry so let's uh kind of do that off camera all right so it says to press and hold this to calibrate it at zero so that should be zero and now I'm going to recharge the battery and hopefully that'll be up after that all right so now it's recharging really nicely we're at 82% and uh you could see we're at uh 13.3 volts so that looks like it's working really well so it looks like I'll have a lot more accurate reading of what battery I actually do have left so that's [Music] great

Channel: TINY CAMPERS - Build Adventure

Views: 5,119

Keywords: jackery, ebl, goal zero, power station, solar generator, solar power station, compact solar power, compact power station, camping power, camper power, camping power station, camping battery, portable power station, campervan, vanlife, sienna camper, rv power, diy camper, diy campervan, van build, camper, camping, traveling by car, living in car, living in van, living in camper, boondocking, full time vanlife, 12v usb install, litime, battery monitor, camper battery, li time

Id: JPHrPmVdaEM

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023