Why are people NOT buying raw LiFePO4 cells?

so these are all grade a eve 280 amp hour lithium iron phosphate cells and today we're going to talk about them um these companies sent out these cells because they want me to review them but guess what people are not buying raw sells anymore across every distributor i know they have all said that they have seen a massive decrease in sales for raw sales and these are really nice like these are very diy friendly and i always recommend the eve cells because they have better quality control than lysine um they do not expand and contract as much as cattle because those are made for evs and to be fixated in a special type of container and these are two but they have thicker walls so these are great for beginners to do your own diy battery but why build your own battery when you can buy a server rack battery the server rack batteries have grade a cells a warranty typically better than a raw cell warranty and they come with a high quality bms and everyone's using the bms that has current regulation pre-charge resistor circuit and communication with inverters or other batteries so why build your own battery when you can buy a ready-built battery and hook it up in a couple of minutes you don't have to worry about matching your cells or doing a top balance or anything you just buy it and it comes in a box and that's it and people were going crazy for raw sales not long ago but that's because they were super cheap and now server rack batteries are not nearly as cheap as raw cells but they're cheap enough where it's not worth people's time to build a battery in my opinion and the same is true with my system it's all server rug batteries um it just takes a couple minutes for me to wire them up and i have these cells just sitting around now but let's do a quick price comparison of these cells versus a server rack so for four of these they cost eight hundred and eighty nine dollars and with those four cells you get about 3.5 kilowatt hours of storage capacity and that comes out to 24 cents per watt hour if you spend five cents more per watt hour you get a full size battery that's already assembled so i see why people are not buying these anymore and these are really nice i do like these cells but man that that price for the server rack is hard to beat now let's say you buy grade b cells off of aliexpress i've gotten lucky and got some pretty good sells at a very low price the lowest i've ever gotten was 17 cents per watt hour but understand that you might get some bad cells and you might get ripped off or you might never get any cells at all so i actually remove those from my website and i only have american distributors with grade a eve cells and a lot of people do not want to deal with that headache and for good reason you can buy like six server rack batteries and be good for like the next 15 or 20 years you'll never have to wire up a battery cell you'll never have to top balance anything um some people get really into their diy battery banks and they watch like the cell drift over time and they do capacity tests all the time personally i do not like checking on my batteries if i have to check on them it shows that i did a bad job in building it but some people want to you know modify the cycling bandwidth and try to get the most cycles that they can out of these batteries i was looking at some of the data and i posted some of the literature on the forum and i think most people will kill these batteries through calendar aging before they will from cycling with solar and that's because with solar you're charging and discharging at a lower c rate than other applications for these batteries these are designed for use in evs and typically they have to run inductive loads so a high surge capacity and people are charging and discharging a lot and very quickly with speed charging like a 2c rate sometimes when you charge and discharge with solar it's very easy for lithium iron phosphate to handle it with very low degradation a lot of people use studies from nmc and nca to figure out cycling bandwidth recommendations for lithium iron phosphate and this could actually cause some problems and i mentioned this on the forum um some people will not set their absorption high enough to trigger the balancing circuit and it would take a while for excessive cell drift to occur but it would reduce the performance of your pack especially if you have a large battery bank and i could talk a lot more about this or you could read my post what people really need to know about lithium iron phosphate is they should charge to 100 percent discharge to zero percent and then keep it in a relatively cool environment um also with solar charging and discharging typically you hang out around 50 state of charge if you're actually cycling them every single day um if you're not using the batteries and they hang out at a high state of charge and it's a high ambient temperature environment you will have increased degradation but again it's not that bad most people will run these for like the next 15 to 20 years um you can see the data in the literature i'm gonna post some studies below so you can see that data now what's really sad is that these cells are now available through good distributors with good warranties and return policies you're you're not waiting for it to come from a boat from china and waiting four to five months after ordering it on aliexpress but nobody is buying these anymore like the sales have decreased so much it is crazy like i can see it on the stats for all of my affiliates and cells are not selling at all people buy the server rack batteries now the server rack batteries are nice also the solar generators are getting better too a lot of them have lithium iron phosphate and they are higher quality on my ac 300 i have not had any issues that the blue eddies of the past have had even the ac200 max and i have ecoflow delta pros in my shop right now and i'm going to be charging my tesla with them all week i'm just waiting for some adapters everything's wired up already but it's a pretty nice unit i mean it's actually working so yeah people just don't want to build their own battery and screw something up like batteries are dangerous these terminals if you short something it's like a little mini explosion so you really got to be careful when you're working with these things but for those who still want to build their own packs i'm going to recommend eve cells um every distributor that sells eve has less problems with those cells and better quality control than all the other cells that they work with except for gafang cells people really like those too but it really depends on which distributor you talk to each distributor will have a different relationship and also a different experience with some of these um cell suppliers but overall i haven't heard anyone complain about eve cells yet now what's really sad is the fortune cells i love these these are probably the best they are way more expensive than the eve cells but these are so nice the walls are thicker and they're made for diy builds they do not expand and contract nearly as much as any other cell and these are very durable especially these terminals but the amount of people buying these through my links is practically non-existent now and it sucks because these are so nice but why buy these cells when you can buy a server rack battery with a warranty why even mess with the potential problems that you can cause while building the battery if you're a beginner for me i'm still going to buy raw cells if i see a deal but for most people that are scared to work with batteries and batteries are dangerous they're just going to opt for a server rack battery instead now in the future i'm going to still make raw cell videos especially if there's something that people need help with but a lot of my attention is focused at server rack batteries because there's tons of companies trying to beat eg4 and now the sok server rack battery so we'll see how they do and i think it's more exciting to see how they build them it's really fun these cells people kind of settled with eve cells and they're just going to keep supplying these so it's getting a little bit boring unless you guys think of a new video idea that i could do that that would be cool that's pretty much it for this video if you disagree with anything that i said please list your comments below i would love to hear what you guys have to say about diy packs in raw cells we'll have some new review videos coming soon with really cool products and i think you're gonna love it so anyways thanks for watching and i will talk to you later bye

Channel: DIY Solar Power with Will Prowse

Views: 2,042,585

Keywords: off grid solar, will prowse, diy solar, rv solar, server rack lifepo4, diy lifepo4 battery, raw lifepo4 cells

Id: ICPDTq-ePP4

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022