Upgrading our RV BATTERY from LEAD ACID to LITHIUM with a LiTime Battery #lithium #battery

hello what's up everybody today we have something a little bit different for you all today we are upgrading our RV battery from lead to lithium with the lead time battery so stay tuned for the setup and the explanation of the setup [Music] [Music] so the battery was packaged really well we just took it out of the box so now we are just gonna go over make sure all the parts are here and get to work on installing it [Music] so first we're going to check to see if the converter will work with lithium and double check all the connections and everything and go from there so unfortunately our converter charger was not compatible with lithium so we need to order one that is so we are gonna vacuum this area a little bit because it's a little Dusty put everything back and wait for the correct converter charger to get here so there are a few things to note when you change your RV battery to lithium because the charger of the battery and the converter sometimes can be a little bit tricky in our case we had to replace our charger with one that is compatible with lithium and this is where we ran into some issues the first one we got they sent us the wrong one the second one we got was uh pretty damaged so we were a little concerned to use it because it was pretty beat up I'll show that to you right now so anyways we had to wait a few weeks to get these items in which was kind of annoying I'm sure you guys have had similar situations where you know the shipping of stuff just delays your project anyways here it is so this one came completely smashed I don't know if I got smashed during shipping or what but as you can see down here in the corner it got really uh messed up and inside I don't know if you can see but the what looks to be possibly the electrical board or whatever is damaged too so we didn't want to use this one just because we were concerned that it was something was wrong I don't want to start any electrical fires in the RV that won't be any fun so we had to get another one and return this bad boy which delayed our project a little bit but what can you do so this is the new one it's good to go same thing just not damaged so basically we are just gonna swap out our old battery for this lithium battery and later in the video I'll go over all the pros and cons of each and why you would want to switch to lithium and all that good stuff so stay tuned for that okay first step to replacing the battery you want to unplug all the electrical stuff so the battery of the RV the auxiliary battery the power to the RV it just don't want any electrocution happening so that's what violent is doing right now he's unplugging the RV so we don't have any power to the RV and then we're gonna unplug the battery is nitrile glove man who wears natural gloves for everything but I don't blame him dang what size is it [Music] okay so now that that's unplugged we're gonna go unplug the auxiliary battery so our auxiliary batteries are in our stairs check it out [Music] so we have two six volt batteries in here so you're talking about corrosion yeah we struggle pretty intensely with corrosion there's not much we can do we're really close to the ocean and corrosive area so here's our batteries and here's the little Bay that they're in it's not the the best but it's what we got all right so we'll start doing and connect them yes [Music] so violence just gonna take a second to clean all of this crazy corrosion that we have here violence just gonna clean up all the cables and then we're gonna pull them out yeah [Music] so these batteries are extremely heavy um here's one of them and something that's kind of annoying is they don't really have any handles on them so it's uh it's a little uh tricky but I just had to make some DIY handles with zip ties sometimes you just gotta do what works I guess not the best handles but hey they work that's a good job so uh next one okay next [Music] and here's the second battery so if we can read correctly it's uh both combined uh 150 amp hours and we only can use 50 of that so it's only like 75 amp hours and the new one should be like 200 and 30 for a smaller packages Just One battery so before we install this battery into this little hidey hole under the stairs we are gonna do a little comparison between these guys and the new one so it's not even the weight of one it's probably like 30 percent less evident One battery and we have more than uh and it has handles and you have three times the power maybe more all right let's go foreign [Music] here are a few benefits of switching to lithium iron phosphate batteries they're half the weight of lead acid batteries they have a longer lifespan no maintenance required improved charge and discharge efficiency partial charge tolerant and they are not susceptible to corrosion or leaking which is a huge benefit for us as you can see and here are the features of the lead time 12 volt 230 amp hour battery the handles make it really easy to move around the battery or install it lead time batteries are a level lithium iron phosphate batteries and are free of mercury lead and other toxic substances the ABS flame retardant plastic and ip65 waterproof rating provide protection against fire and water the intelligent 200 amp BMS board prevents overcharging over discharging and short-circuiting ensuring a safer and more reliable battery with the built-in 200 amp BMS board the battery supports a maximum load of 2560 Watts a fully charged 12.8 volt 230 amp hour battery provides 2944 Watt hours of usable energy which is enough to power 1 kilowatt hours of housing demand for around 3 days this lead time battery is 50 more powerful than similar sized lead acid batteries offering a low self-discharge rate and minimal capacity loss lead time batteries are very versatile and compatible with various applications including Marine RVs UPS systems backup power and trolling motors they can be recharged a few different ways such as solar panels generate or plug-in charging though the price may seem high at first with a lifespan of up to 10 years the lead time batteries are very cost effective so with that being said let's install this lead time battery so most RV have two battery six volt battery and this one will fit the same compartment because as you can see it's the same height and it's probably even like smaller than the whis of both of them so that should be the perfect upgrade to replace the two battery by only one 12 volts so we'll remove those three it doesn't need them anymore all right pin [Music] also another amazing purchase we just did that viant found at Walmart is this tiny shop vac this is definitely worth it so strong and it says wet or dry amazing if you have an RV or a small space that you would like to have a shop vac but the shop vac is obviously ginormous it's a good compromise okay so as you can see it fits great in here it fits almost better than the two six volt batteries the cool thing about lie time is they have a couple different sizes and actually this one we got particularly because it fit perfect in this box because it was a little bit more narrow and a little bit taller but they have multiple options that uh that you can choose from a bunch of different amp hours a bunch of different sizes so check out their website link in the description to see if there are any that will fit your needs alright so now that we have the battery in the little battery Bay we need to install the charger the converter charger which I always find confusing is it a converter or charger so something I would like to mention is if you have the chance to renovate your RV and rearrange some stuff do it because the way that they design these RVs is terrible terrible they are impossible to clean and everything that's important is super hard to access like as you can see the auxiliary battery is like you have to undo the stairs as you can see here and all the other parts that are really important like our entire electrical system is underneath the sofa where you have to completely undo the sofa to access it like our little dinette I'll show you in a minute and yeah our fridge has broken multiple times the fridge is like super expensive it's like I don't know two thousand to three thousand dollars for this for this little fridge because it runs on both propane and electric so but yeah moral of the story if you have a chance to kind of like to to one get an RV if you want one and to redesign the inside to make everything easier to clean and easier to access that will change your life because those are my two biggest issues with the RV it's hard to clean and it's hard to access the important parts of the RV if I could go back in time I would have taken a month or so to totally redo the RV how we wanted but back then I thought we were going to build the house in like a year so you live you'll learn okay so here we got part of our little dinette so of course you have to undo the entire thing to get to the electrical system which and we already removed the screw when we didn't receive the good charger so it's not you have like force crew to remove yeah so you should have kind of some sort of emergency that would be out to open it in time you know all right so this absolute mess is our electrical system this is the part that we are replacing it's pretty much the same thing it's just our new one is compatible with lithium yes so what make it compatible is like for the lead battery it will charge at 13.6 and the lithium if I understand well will charge at 14.6 so we just have to change the cheese box to convert the RV which is a pretty easy fix that's uh not too complicated again this is not ideal I really am not happy with how crazy everything is down here and just how messy everything is uh but this is not our forever camper this is just what we have while we build the house after we will do some crazy stuff with uh with what we want to build for our adventure vehicle so stay tuned for that anyways we're going to replace this little box and get going with that [Music] so here's the old one here's the new one as you can see they're just a little bit different everything is pretty much the same except the output right here it's rated for lithium and this one is not and this one Auto detects I know it's hard to see with the glare which battery it is which is pretty cool actually so we plug everything back on it now we can plug the lithium battery again and we'll try to see for our above thread meter still walking to see if we have a proper charge and everything [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] this is broken this is the free one from oh my God and such in searching something so it's almost charged cool together good job my master electrician yeah yeah pretty busy [Music] [Applause] [Music] all good to go so we check the voltage one more time so the battery is still charging so we're just gonna give it a little bit of time to fully charge all right so this one is charging so this is good 14.5 almost across to be good so after a few hours everything was charged up and after we were sure that everything was working correctly we put everything back into place [Music] thank you baby cool good job thank you [Music] okay so we just finished the switch the swap or the upgrade the yeah yeah actually the upgrade to from lead acid to lithium and that was extremely easy I'm actually shocked at how easy that was the most difficult part was waiting for the right uh converter to come in I would say and to undo this stupid sofa to uh or the little dinette to get under there because that's just a little bit annoying the access is kind of annoying but other than that that was extremely easy really straightforward but something really important this is not a one-size-fits all kind of deal it's definitely important to make sure that you figure out what works for you if you're going to upgrade to lithium because there's a little bit of a learning curve you can't just plug and play sometimes you gotta switch up the converter or the charger or things like that so be sure that you are aware of what system you have and all the parameters of the system before you upgrade to a lithium battery yeah it's a it's a good start to uh to upgrade your although RV and especially after if you want to put some solar panel on the roof it's very good to have lithium because you start to we can use like the electricity chain what you want anyway yeah yeah we don't have any solar on this one because like I said this is just for us here while we're building our house once we get to build our adventure rig which I can't wait to get to that stage of our life we will definitely be putting solar and doing a more serious system that's easy to access and with multiple battery yeah yeah and with a few batteries for now this will get us by this is just what we have we got to work with what we have and sometimes that's all you can really do but thank you lie time for sponsoring this video I am so happy to have this upgrade and I hope you guys get the chance to upgrade to lithium as well for whatever application you are going to use it for as I said before don't forget to check the exclusive Link in the description to find a lithium battery that will work for you from Lifetime so thanks to my electrician for his hard work today I was just the assistant thank you babe good teamwork we'll try now let's go use all the plugs help support our Channel by leaving a comment liking and sharing this video as always you guys thank you so much for watching don't forget to subscribe to keep up with our projects and Adventures on the ranch we put out new videos every Saturday and sometimes during the week so be sure to subscribe and hit the notification button so you don't miss any okay bye

Channel: Pacific Pines Ranch

Views: 31,325

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Id: Z1OGIs5uHmw

Length: 22min 27sec (1347 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023