Swapped batteries in golf cart out for lifepo4. Same capacity as the lead acid but the cart is about 600lbs lighter. Charged them to about 90% because my battery management system didn’t come in the mail yet.
I’m here to tell you it rides a lot rougher. It bounces a lot more.
I’m here to tell you it rides a lot rougher. It bounces a lot more.
If you live in a house that is about 20 years old with PEX tubing, you my friend are sitting on a time bomb. We are replumbing my mother's house this week. It was a planned job as we found a couple rotted and weeping pex connectors a few months ago. Every single PEX connector I replaced today was in some state of corrosion. The hot water lines are in the worst shape.
What we are doing for mom is running a manifold system. One continuous pipe to each fixture. No joints until you get within 12" of a fixture. For all sinks and lavatories we ran 3/8 pex tubing. The decreased volume of water in the pipe changed the hot water time in the back bathroom from 1:48 to 32seconds. Also each fixture can be shut off individually. Think of it as a circuit breaker panel for your water.
What we are doing for mom is running a manifold system. One continuous pipe to each fixture. No joints until you get within 12" of a fixture. For all sinks and lavatories we ran 3/8 pex tubing. The decreased volume of water in the pipe changed the hot water time in the back bathroom from 1:48 to 32seconds. Also each fixture can be shut off individually. Think of it as a circuit breaker panel for your water.
Great video on basic electrical theory.
This guy explains things very well
There are many parts to this series
https://youtu.be/OGa_b26eK2c
This guy explains things very well
There are many parts to this series
https://youtu.be/OGa_b26eK2c
YouTube
Lesson 1 - Voltage, Current, Resistance (Engineering Circuit Analysis)
This is just a few minutes of a complete course.
Get full lessons & more subjects at: http://www.MathTutorDVD.com.
In this lesson the student will learn what voltage, current, and resistance is in a typical circuit.
Get full lessons & more subjects at: http://www.MathTutorDVD.com.
In this lesson the student will learn what voltage, current, and resistance is in a typical circuit.
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Forwarded from White Phoenix
To be the most successful in life, you must stay ahead of the curve lest you fall victim to it. When everyone else was buying thousand dollar iPhones, I was buying guns. When they were buying guns, I was buying ammo. When they were buying ammo, I was buying canned food. When they were buying canned food, I was buying shares of cows and other animals. When they start doing that, I’ll be selling to them.
Instead of worrying about what you’ve already missed out on—and believe me there’s a lot—focus on what you can do NOW to best prepare you and your family for tomorrow. The next big boom will be land, and it’s already beginning. The rich and powerful are buying hundreds of acres in the middle of nowhere and actually *living* there, not just visiting once in a while like they once did. The curve of the general population is quickly catching on, and if you wait much longer you will be paying the same high prices as the rest of them.
Even 10 acres is enough to make your own and most can easily get a mortgage or even save up the funds to buy that much in a cheap part of the country. With how quickly infrastructure is expanding, the value of rural land will be increasing exponentially—and soon. Take Starlink for example: soon everyone in the continental US who wants it will have high speed internet access, which means many of us will no longer have a need to be within the service area of a hard-line ISP. Shipping services are getting fast enough to deliver cold and frozen groceries anywhere as well.
The age of the city is over, but if you’ve lived near one or been to one lately you knew that anyway, so what is the next step? Get out and get invested in small communities or build your own from the ground up. We are the masters of our land, and we are the sons of men who built this place into the great country it once was. Let’s start acting like it.
Instead of worrying about what you’ve already missed out on—and believe me there’s a lot—focus on what you can do NOW to best prepare you and your family for tomorrow. The next big boom will be land, and it’s already beginning. The rich and powerful are buying hundreds of acres in the middle of nowhere and actually *living* there, not just visiting once in a while like they once did. The curve of the general population is quickly catching on, and if you wait much longer you will be paying the same high prices as the rest of them.
Even 10 acres is enough to make your own and most can easily get a mortgage or even save up the funds to buy that much in a cheap part of the country. With how quickly infrastructure is expanding, the value of rural land will be increasing exponentially—and soon. Take Starlink for example: soon everyone in the continental US who wants it will have high speed internet access, which means many of us will no longer have a need to be within the service area of a hard-line ISP. Shipping services are getting fast enough to deliver cold and frozen groceries anywhere as well.
The age of the city is over, but if you’ve lived near one or been to one lately you knew that anyway, so what is the next step? Get out and get invested in small communities or build your own from the ground up. We are the masters of our land, and we are the sons of men who built this place into the great country it once was. Let’s start acting like it.
Today I got to hook up one of three LiFePO4 batteries. That makes 16 x 3 sets of cells... 48 cells total. Shown here are 16. They were ordered back in Feb and took a while on the slow boat from China. I've paired them with a Chargery 16s BMS and also a 300amp solid state relay. Tomorrow I'll make a nice box to keep these 16 cells in and I've got to order some better bussbars.
Here's the breakdown of a Lithium battery system....
Batteries:
16 batteries in series makes ~48v. The cells pictured are 280ah. If you multiply it out, 3.25v x 280ah x 16 cells = 14.5 kwh. That "little" stack of batteries has as much energy as 24 trojan golf cart batteries. Each cell weighs about 5lbs.
Battery Management System
The BMS monitors each of those 16 cells. If one of them gets over 3.7v or one of them under 2.5v, it will shut off the contactor. This one has a display that is remoteable and is used to program all the critical settings like what voltage something happens at.
This BMS can also figure out which battery has the highest individual voltage in the stack and apply a little bleed off to it. If all the cells are within 12mv of each other, the pack is considered balanced and this function stops. This BMS has a 1amp bleed rate and it got noticably warm (not hot at all) when it was doing it's thing today.
This BMS also monitors the voltage drop between batteries when under a load. This allows you to identify a loose or corroded bus bar connection.
Current shunt
I've installed a current shunt directly on the negative terminal of the battery before the contactor. Note that the positive sense wire goes TOWARD the battery, and the negative sense wire goes toward your loads/charger. This is used to count the number of watthours in your battery and gives a better estimate of State of Charge than simply looking at voltage. It also allow the unit to sense when the discharge rate is too high (like over 300amps) and shut off the contactor.
Contactor.
The black box on the right end of the battery is a fancy contactor. It has two large connectors and should be installed between your battery and your loads/chargers. Inside it has two rows of MOSFETS that can be turned on individually. The idea is that if the battery is full, it can stop charging but still allow your inverters to run.
It also has inrush protection. When you first turn on something like an inverter, it will cause a big ol' spark at your switch. This device uses pulse width modulation to "slowly" come on when you manually turn it on. The issue with it is that when it is commanded off and back on remotely by the BMS, it does not use this soft start feature. When playing with this rig today, it literally made the cables on the bench jump due to the high current and magentic field around the cables.
Note on this one the "A" terminal goes to the battery via a current shunt, and the "B" terminal goes to your loads/chargers.
......
So this thing is a mess right now. Setup to make sure all the parts work. The bus bars the manufacturer sent are substandard. These are 280ah batteries and are rated for 280amps peak. Heck you could double that briefly. But the bus bars they sent are 1.5mm x 25mm. The handy dandy formula is 1.5 x 25 = 37amp rating for those buss bars. That's hardly passable. So I've got to get on ebay and get some 1/4" (6.2mm) x 1-1/2" (37mm) 234amp copper flat bars.
Hey, the batteries come with screws sometimes and with little studs other times. The official name for the stud is "grub screw" and in my case m6 x 1mm x 25mm long.
So the cells came from China with about 93% charge on them. I switched on the 48v solar charger and instantly was dumping 20amps @ 48v into them. The max current for my solar DC charger is 60amp, so it didn't even break a sweat. It was late in the afternoon too, and the panels feeding that charger were getting shaded by the minute.
Here's the breakdown of a Lithium battery system....
Batteries:
16 batteries in series makes ~48v. The cells pictured are 280ah. If you multiply it out, 3.25v x 280ah x 16 cells = 14.5 kwh. That "little" stack of batteries has as much energy as 24 trojan golf cart batteries. Each cell weighs about 5lbs.
Battery Management System
The BMS monitors each of those 16 cells. If one of them gets over 3.7v or one of them under 2.5v, it will shut off the contactor. This one has a display that is remoteable and is used to program all the critical settings like what voltage something happens at.
This BMS can also figure out which battery has the highest individual voltage in the stack and apply a little bleed off to it. If all the cells are within 12mv of each other, the pack is considered balanced and this function stops. This BMS has a 1amp bleed rate and it got noticably warm (not hot at all) when it was doing it's thing today.
This BMS also monitors the voltage drop between batteries when under a load. This allows you to identify a loose or corroded bus bar connection.
Current shunt
I've installed a current shunt directly on the negative terminal of the battery before the contactor. Note that the positive sense wire goes TOWARD the battery, and the negative sense wire goes toward your loads/charger. This is used to count the number of watthours in your battery and gives a better estimate of State of Charge than simply looking at voltage. It also allow the unit to sense when the discharge rate is too high (like over 300amps) and shut off the contactor.
Contactor.
The black box on the right end of the battery is a fancy contactor. It has two large connectors and should be installed between your battery and your loads/chargers. Inside it has two rows of MOSFETS that can be turned on individually. The idea is that if the battery is full, it can stop charging but still allow your inverters to run.
It also has inrush protection. When you first turn on something like an inverter, it will cause a big ol' spark at your switch. This device uses pulse width modulation to "slowly" come on when you manually turn it on. The issue with it is that when it is commanded off and back on remotely by the BMS, it does not use this soft start feature. When playing with this rig today, it literally made the cables on the bench jump due to the high current and magentic field around the cables.
Note on this one the "A" terminal goes to the battery via a current shunt, and the "B" terminal goes to your loads/chargers.
......
So this thing is a mess right now. Setup to make sure all the parts work. The bus bars the manufacturer sent are substandard. These are 280ah batteries and are rated for 280amps peak. Heck you could double that briefly. But the bus bars they sent are 1.5mm x 25mm. The handy dandy formula is 1.5 x 25 = 37amp rating for those buss bars. That's hardly passable. So I've got to get on ebay and get some 1/4" (6.2mm) x 1-1/2" (37mm) 234amp copper flat bars.
Hey, the batteries come with screws sometimes and with little studs other times. The official name for the stud is "grub screw" and in my case m6 x 1mm x 25mm long.
So the cells came from China with about 93% charge on them. I switched on the 48v solar charger and instantly was dumping 20amps @ 48v into them. The max current for my solar DC charger is 60amp, so it didn't even break a sweat. It was late in the afternoon too, and the panels feeding that charger were getting shaded by the minute.
It ain’t as pretty as I would have liked but it is done. Now that I’ve gotten all tubes formed into their bends and zip tied, I may take the bend protectors off.
Off The Grid
It ain’t as pretty as I would have liked but it is done. Now that I’ve gotten all tubes formed into their bends and zip tied, I may take the bend protectors off.
Also, we used 3/8 lines to every sink in the house and 1/2” to everything else. Back bathroom used to take 1:48 to get hot water , now 38sec. Laundry sink gets hot water in 12 seconds.
Three things every man should own:
1) Heavy duty truck
2) Dump trailer
3) tractor / excavator
You can do a lot of stuff with these.
1) Heavy duty truck
2) Dump trailer
3) tractor / excavator
You can do a lot of stuff with these.
Off The Grid
Three things every man should own: 1) Heavy duty truck 2) Dump trailer 3) tractor / excavator You can do a lot of stuff with these.
I tell the boys my daughter dates that I have a back hoe and several hundred acres. Lol.
The busy season is well underway, everything from taxes to gardening gets piled on this time of year it seems. Leaves me with no time to post! I do want to share with y'all a nice greenhouse setup I recently built for a family from my church. Came out great and really simple to put together!
Construction: Weed blocker base (cut open on the inside of the beds for healthy roots), 2x8 raised bed with center walkway and 16ft cattle panels curved over the top and secured to each side. I plan to mulch the spaces between beds and through the center isle. After that we cover with GH plastic and plant! Going to have a bountiful harvest Im sure.
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I learned a valuable obvious lesson recently. We are doing bucket gardening, and I use drip emitters on a timer to water the buckets. Our plants weren’t looking so good but I noticed that the water was running out the bottom of the buckets each morning. My wife began to sprinkle water from the hose all over the plants and dirt in the buckets and the plants began to thrive. It seems that the drip emitters were only wetting the soil directly under them, maybe a quarter inch diameter column of soil. The water ran straight out the bottom of the bucket and did not spread to any of the other soil. Hope this helps someone. - WJ