Make Your Power Station Last Longer! Power Queen 200AH LiFePO4 - DIY Expansion Battery!

hey everybody welcome back to a new video in this video i'm going to be showing you how you can expand the capacity of a large power station using a drop-in replacement uh lithium-iron phosphate battery now power queen sent out this large 200 amp hour battery for review and i thought it'd be perfect way to demonstrate how to expand your power station by using a battery like this so thank you power queen now they offer a ton of different sizes on their website and i'll include the link down in the video description to check out their products and we'll be talking a little bit more about this in depth a little bit later but the main purpose of this video is to show you how you can take power from this battery and dump it into your power station now there are some power stations that offer expandable battery options but they are fairly expensive so this is just a cheaper way to do this and let me show you how it's possible now let's go ahead and talk about the simplest way to take power from this battery and put it into this power station what you're going to be doing is treating this battery like a car battery and the power station of this size most of these average around 10 amps charging input so if you do the math 13.3 volts by 10 amps it's around 133 watts now all you'd have to do is take a wire from the main positive and main negative put a fuse on the positive line and connect it up to your charging input on your power station and you'd be charging at around 133 watts now the only downside to that is it's going to take a long time to charge up your power station at that charge rate and also if you have a large load it's not going to be able to keep up with the 130 watts charging so i've come up with a pretty inexpensive way to boost the voltage of this battery so that we can charge this power station faster so let me go and show you what i've put together so that we can take more power from this battery and put it into the power station now let's go ahead and take a closer look at this diy project that i put together so that we can charge this power station at three times the amount now remember before we were charging at 130 watts that was around 13 volts times 10 amps now let's look at the equation of power so that we can see how we can get more power into the power station because remember this has a 10 amp charging input that is fixed so the equation for power is volts times amps equals watts and if this has 10 amps that is fixed then the only way to get more power is by increasing the voltage and so that's what this device does here it takes the 13 volts from this battery and steps it up to 36 volts so we can put three times the amount of power into this power station now remember it's power in equals power out so if we're charging at three times the amount here that means we're also pulling three times the amount here which is around 30 to 40 amps so make sure if you are going to attempt a diy project like this you need to be very careful with the wire selection that you go with because you're pulling a lot of power from this battery and you don't want to use small of wires or they will burn up and cause an issue so just be aware there is some risk involved with polarity and wire sizing when you're dealing with this much wattage okay so here's a closer look of the voltage step up converters let me give you guys a brief overview and then we'll zoom in so it may look pretty complicated here but it's fairly simple i have two step-up converters these are 36 volt 5 amp converters connected together in parallel so on the output here we get 36 volts at 10 amps now your input here is going to be pulling around 35 amps or a little bit more from your main battery so you want to make sure that these can handle the load this is eight gauge wire and i have a 40 amp fuse here and i have it connected up to the inputs of both those voltage converters now the outputs are connected into parallel as well so you have both yellows tied together as positive and both negatives tied together and that connects up directly your power station now on the top i have this cooling fan that's soldered directly into the negative and positive because these get fairly warm as you're passing 400 watts through them so with the fan running as it's plugged in i've noticed that these stay very cool so here's a closer look of how i have this mounted to this piece of wood so i have both voltage step-up converters on top of a small aluminum plate just to help with the heat it's probably not needed because this fan does a really good job keeping those cool and then they are screwed into the piece of wood now these are three inch number six bolts then i have some small nuts that basically hold the fan above these and then you can see the positive and negative of the fan are just soldered into the negative and positive of the connection here so whenever this is connected up it powers the fan and these are cooled down now i will include a wiring diagram right after this so you can see how these are all wired up now this video is just a way to kind of give you an idea of how you can take power from a large battery like this and put it into your power station in a higher method than just connecting them straight up positive negative 130 watts so hopefully you guys found this part of the video helpful on showing you how i put this together i'd love to get your guys's feedback have you guys seen anything that's like off the shelf that you can purchase that will do the same thing throw a comment down below i'd love to hear back on that now of course i wanted to test this out to see if everything worked so i hooked up the power station to the power queen 200 amp hour battery with the converter and i was able to get around 430 watts of charging input sitting right at 36.3 volts and 11.9 amps now that is way more power than what we saw using just the battery to the power station at 130 watts now when i was testing this out i put my clamp meter on and i did see around 38 amps so a lot of power going through this 8 gauge wire so overall pretty cool to see this putting so much power into the power station okay so now there are two other tests that i want to do in this video to see how useful this setup would be first thing is i want to actually do a capacity test on this humongous battery here to see if we can get advertised capacity this is rated at 200 amp hours or a whopping 2560 watt hours so we'll do a capacity test on this and then what we'll do is we'll plug in my full size refrigerator to the ac200p let that run all the way down and then we'll plug in this battery to charge it back up and see how much longer we can extend the runtime so pretty interesting to see a real world application of this let's go ahead and jump into those tests now i've been charging this up it's sitting right around 14.4 volts which the manual states that is full charge and i have my 2000 watt inverter hooked up with a smart shunt in between so as all the power comes out of this battery through the inverter it's going to be going through the smart shot it'll tell us all the power that we pull now during this test i will be discharging this battery at a 0.2 c rate which is right around 500 watts and that's why i've come up with this system here where i basically use two 250 watt heat lamps plug it into the inverter and it'll pull 500 watts consistently until the battery is completely run down okay so i unhook the charger plugged in the load so let's go ahead and let this run and see if we can pull full capacity many hours later okay so let's go ahead and look at the test results we pulled a total of 196 amp hours 2 510 watt hours the test ran for 5 hours and 12 minutes now just to clarify my inverter actually shut off the load at 10.8 volts it's pretty hard to find an inverter that's going to go lower than that so there probably is still a little bit of power left in this battery but i don't have an inverter that's going to support that low of voltage so you probably could pull 200 amp hours out of this battery if you took it all the way down until the bms shut it off but we pulled around 196 amp hours with using this inverter okay guys we're coming to the end of the run test now i've had this full-size fridge plugged into the ac200p for about 18 hours i started the test yesterday at 1 pm and it's around 7 00 am the next morning so let's go ahead and see how much power we have left okay so right there in the middle it's really hard to see but we're sitting at three percent so this thing's basically as low as you'd want to take it and the compressor is running on the fridge pulling around 155 watts so let's go ahead and plug in the battery and start charging this up to see how much longer of a runtime we can get with the expansion battery so we just plugged in our diy expansion battery into the ac 200p and we're charging at 429 watts so this should be full in about four to five hours so we're taking the power from this battery and putting it in here to extend our run time so i'm guessing we're going to be able to run this full size fridge for an additional 24 hours okay so it's been a couple hours and i thought i'd check in to see how things are going so the battery itself feels just fine the voltage converter is just barely warm which is great the fan is doing its job now i did feel this fuse holder and the fuse holder got warm so i basically put it underneath the airflow and it's definitely cool and the wires aren't warm at all now the ac 200p is still running the fridge which is awesome and it's charging at the same time and it's sitting at 48 still charging at 429 watts so definitely this expansion battery is giving this a longer runtime we should expect this to be full in a couple hours and get at least another 18 hours of runtime after that okay guys it's basically been about six and a half hours since we hooked up our expansion battery to the bluetooth ac 200p so i thought i'd give you guys an update now if you look closely here our fan has turned off which probably means that this battery has hit its low point and shut off the output now there is a battery management system or a bms in these lithium iron phosphate batteries to protect the cells inside so i took my volt meter hooked it up to the positive and negative and i got zero volts this basically means that this needs to be charged back up now let's go ahead and take a closer look at the ac200p so it looks like the power station is sitting at 77 and the fridge is pulling around 168 watts while the compressor is running now it's pretty hard to estimate how full this power station was able to get because i did not see the exact time when this shut off now i'm guessing it probably got up to around 85 to 90 percent before it got shut off you got to remember we had the fridge running at the same time as charging this so that's probably why we weren't able to get it completely full now the goal of this project was to use an external battery to extend the life of our power station so i definitely feel like we were able to accomplish that goal what did you guys think of the results well now that i've used this setup quite a bit i've cycled this battery six or seven times and i've charged multiple power stations testing this out let me go ahead and talk about some of the things that i'd like to change and some of the things that i that i just like about the setup the first thing that i want to talk about is this actual battery from power queen now is great to get almost 100 capacity in our capacity test very good results on this battery it shut off properly when we took it all the way down i didn't have any issues charging it up they offer many different options on their website i'll include the link down in the video description so you can check them out and thank you again power queen for sending out this battery uh for this video now about the actual converter setup here there is one major change that i'd like to make with this and that has to do with these fuse holders and the main power leads now we're pulling 38 amps through this connection here and they're rated at 40 amps but when you're pulling 38 amps on a rated 40 amp cable it gets pretty toasty and in fact looking at the actual fuse it got deformed and a little bit melted it didn't completely break the fuse but what i would do is have two main positives two main negatives put fuses on both positive wires and then connect it straight up and you'd see better performance and not get so toasty on the fuse holders now everything else about this i really like i like how quiet the fan is i like how well it keeps everything cool and it's just really easy to install yeah it's you know it doesn't look the best but it does the job uh the next thing that i just want to briefly talk about is just some of the chargers that you would use to charge up a standalone battery like this there are so many different options so let's take a look at some of the chargers i'd use to charge this battery up now of course once you've depleted your expansion battery completely you have to charge it up so these are some of the chargers that i use on a daily basis and i just briefly want to talk about each one there's tons of different chargers out there and there's a lot of different budgets and charging speeds so these are some of the chargers that i'm going to talk about and there's a lot of other options so let's go ahead and start with these adjustable power supplies on this side now both of these adjustable power supplies plug into ac power and you'll notice that they have two different knobs on them so what you do is on the first knob you'll set the voltage limit so it'll be you know 14.4 volts or 14.6 volts according to your battery manufacturer and then the second knob is for the charging speed or the amperage so this one here will go up to 10 amps and then this one here will go up to 60 amps so this is a very fast charger puts out a lot of power now this one here is a circuit specialist adjustable power supply i'll include the link down to that in the video description and same with this one this is the min leaf adjustable power supply so what's nice about these is you have the freedom to charge it to a certain voltage and at a certain speed now the next option is a standard battery charger now this is a pro logix pl2320 this is a 20 amp battery charger for a car and what's nice is this has adjustable settings here so you can see you can charge a lead acid gel battery an agm battery or a standard flooded battery at 20 amps 10 amps or 2 amps and what's nice is it gives you the voltage and the battery percentage now if you have this set to agm mode it charges up to 14.4 volts which is very similar for uh full charging voltage on lithium iron phosphate so if you don't want to be a purist when you're charging a lithium iron phosphate battery you can use a charger like this on agm mode and this one is plug and play plug into the wall connect it up to um you know your battery and you can charge at 20 amps now the last charger that i'm going to talk about which is probably my favorite is this abso kisay dmt 1250 now this is a dc to dc charger and a solar charge controller in one unit so you can actually charge off your car alternator by connecting it here or you can charge off solar panels by connecting them here and the other connections go directly out to the battery so i've had this in a few other videos i have it in a portable setup that's why it's just in this hard case you could hard mount it as well now this charger comes in at around 250 dollars and limits out at 50 amps charging with the dc to dc charging or 30 amps charging with solar panels so it's a very good price for having two chargers in one and they do offer a smaller model that is limited at 30 amps if you're interested in that but i always like to charge my batteries off solar when possible so that's where this type of charger would come in handy now there's also another budget mppt solar charge controller that i've talked about on the channel it's a powerworks 300 watt model i'll include that down in the video description also there's another really good budget solar charge controller it's called an app ever and they have different uh amperage limits there's a 20 amp and 30 amp and i'll include that down in the video description as well but these are all different ways that you can charge up your standalone batteries now let me just take a second to give you guys some of the technical specifications on this lithium iron phosphate battery now power queen offers a full five-year warranty on the product and it's rated at 4 000 life cycles to 80 capacity now this is a big battery it comes in at 49.6 pounds but it's nice that it has the two handles so you can actually carry it around pretty easily now there is no low temperature charging protection on this battery so make sure that whenever you're charging it it's above 32 degrees and you won't have any issues now one nice thing about this battery is that it has a full 200 amp bms in it it's rated for 2500 watts continuous so hooking up a 2000 watt inverter on this would be no issues at all you should be able to power anything that you'd plug into your wall okay so here at the end of the video i just wanted to clarify which power stations would work for this type of mod so most of your larger power stations accept a higher input voltage when they're charging for solar panels in series for example the blue eddy power stations the eb120 eb 150 ac200p ac200 max ac300 those all accept a high input voltage of charging and so those will all work with um this setup here your eco flow models work extremely well the delta series they accept up to 100 volts inputs so any of the delta series you'll be able to use this as well and your ocatel p2001 ff power p2001 those accept up to 48 volts input so this will also work now i did test this on other large power station it works just fine plugged in the ecoflow plugged it into my ff power p2001 no issues now this will not work i repeat this will not work with the smaller power stations because this puts out 36 volts which goes over the voltage limits on small power stations for example the eb55 eb70 ev3a the ecoflow river pro and other river products you got your golabs products your small energizer the upez models all three of the models up to the 1800 they will not accept this high of a charging voltage and you could damage the power station so you may be asking well what do i do instead to use a battery like this well what you'd want to do is buy 12 to 24 volt converters and they will charge a little bit slower but it's still a faster way than just dumping 12 volts straight into your power station so what you would do on a small power station is very similar to this but you just do 12 to 24 volt 5 amp converters instead of the 12 to 36 volt converter so hopefully that information is helpful i'd love to hear your guys's thoughts about how this works or maybe any modifications that you would make to make it better this is just a video to kind of get your guys's thoughts going and of course you guys can choose to you know use this and build your own setup i'd love to hear about what you guys are doing to use a huge battery like this to dump power into a power station hopefully you guys liked the video please give me a thumbs up if you did and if you like this content i invite you guys to subscribe to the channel thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you guys in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Jasonoid - Solar Power, Batteries, and More!

Views: 136,230

Keywords: Power Queen LFP battery, Power Queen LiFePO4, Power Station Expansion Battery, How to Expand Your Power Station Battery, LiFePO4 expansion battery

Id: dTTneUtz4Jk

Length: 19min 36sec (1176 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022