Power Sonic RV Lithium Battery - LiFePO4 - Bluetooth - Group 27 - 12V - 125 Amp Hour

Video Transcript for Power Sonic RV Lithium Batteries Review

Hi there, RVs. Today, we're going to be taking a look at Power Sonic's Bluetooth Smart Battery Series. Here we've got the app opened up, which it's free to download, so you can just download it. And we've got two batteries that are connected together in parallel. You'll see our powers are together and our grounds are together. And we also see here on devices that two batteries showed up.

All I did was open the app and it was able to recognize these devices. There was no code you got to put in like some other Bluetooth devices. It just sees them.Here we have the opening summary where it gives you your battery's state of charge and we're at about 57%. And that's actually kind of where we want to be right now because it's pretty cold now. We are coming into springtime here soon, but this trailer is still just undergoing some maintenance and it's still winterized and not ready for the season yet.

When storing your lithium batteries, you don't want to be at a full charge or completely discharged. Ideally, you'll be between a 30 and 70% charge. We're currently at 57%. So we're good to store our batteries for the winter.You do see here at the bottom on the first page, it does give you just a brief overview of health, which we're perfect because these are brand new batteries. And there is a status here, which is kind of nice too to know whether we're discharging or charging.

That's going to be really useful for you guys out there with a solar setup to be able to see if you're using more than you're charging, or if you're charging more than you're using. If we go over to the next screen, we can get a little bit more information on that. We've got our voltage again, but this is the current that is going in or out of our battery.Currently, we are reading zero because I've got the battery disconnect switch on the trailer here turned off. But if we we're running some things on our trailer, we would get a negative amperage reading there, indicating that amps are being removed from our battery, we're losing our amp hours, our storage capacity. But if we we're charging it, we would see it the other way.

If you wanted to, you could hook up your refrigerator, maybe turn on your TV and the few things that you feel like you're going to be using when you're out, maybe off the grid. And you can get an idea of how long you can stay off grid before you need to go to a charging station or how long you might be able to last if you have a solar system set up on a cloudy day where you're not really getting any charge.We also have temperature information on here, as well as the cycles that our batteries have been through. There are a number of discharge and recharge cycles. And I really like that they included temperature down here at the bottom. Because batteries tend to work worse when they get really hot. They don't hold their capacity as long when they get hot. In extreme cold temperatures, the same can be true as well. They don't quite work as well in extreme cold. The big thing with lithium batteries is that you don't want to charge them when you're below zero degrees Fahrenheit. So, that's just another great feature of the Bluetooth capability here being able to see the temperature inside and being able to use and charge your batteries appropriately for those conditions.If we go over to the third page here, we have our events tabs. Ours is currently empty because these are new batteries, we haven't had any issues. But if you we're to have an undercharge or an overcharge event, any issues, they would be logged inside of here and that would be saved so you could always check that and be able to look back and see what happens so you can correct that issue so they don't occur again. On our last page, we just have the support here with information from Power Sonic. So if you need some further assistance, you can always refer to that and you have it with you on the app.Here you can see our new batteries installed. And one of the first things you're going to notice, it looks a little bit different is that they don't have your typical studs on top that you put a wing nut on or your posts that you would put a post around. It actually has bolts that run down and on top to connect them. But the other thing that you can't notice by looking at it is that these are lithium batteries, which gives you a lot of benefits over your traditional lead acid batteries.This battery here weighs considerably less than your traditional lead acid batteries. I can easily lift it up. I mean, you could even do it with just one finger. I would say it's at least half the weight of your traditional lead acid battery of a similar size. And we're going to have more capacity in a battery this size with lithium than we would with our traditional lead acid. Now you might be wondering, "Well, why do I want lithium batteries over my traditional lead acid though" Because I do know the cost of our lithiums. They are going to be considerably higher than your traditional lead acid. But again, beyond the weight and form factor being smaller with a higher capacity, lithium batteries also have significantly more life cycles than your traditional lead acids would.We're going to get up to 5,000 life cycles here on this one or a traditional lead acid battery wouldn't likely get but 25% of that. One of the big differences between lithium and lead acid is the way the cells inside work. We have less cells inside of our lithium, but the cells inside of the lithium have higher voltage output than your traditional lead acid. And these cells, they operate different, the chemistry's different inside of them. With lithium, the big difference is going to be the voltage drop that occurs on the battery. As capacity is removed from our lithium battery here, the voltage is going to drop down some, but we're only going to drop maybe a volt or a volt and a half throughout the entire charge of our lithium battery here versus our lead acid battery is going to drop down until it just doesn't have enough voltage to really operate anything.And what that means for you is you're going to have a more consistent and powerful power source. I'll give you an example of some things you might notice with your traditional lead acid. You've got slide outs on your trailer and let's say that your batteries are starting to get pretty close to being discharged, and you're going to pull your slide out back in. Well, when you had fully charged batteries, when you put the slide out out, it probably went out at a fairly decent rate. But now that our batteries are discharged and it's sucking it back in, it's coming to come in very slow and it's going to feel kind of weak.With lithium, since our voltage stays high throughout the full length of its capacity charge, when our batteries are getting close to being fully discharged we're still going to have a high enough voltage where we're going to be able to bring that slide out in. And we're not even going to really notice a difference in its operation. It's not going to seem like it's bogged down or slow because we're almost out of juice. It's going to seem like pretty much like we got a full charge battery throughout its entire capacity that it has available.Power Sonic has made these batteries work as a direct replacement for just about any of your RV batteries, whether it be your AGM or your regular lead acid, because there is actually a controller made inside the battery that monitors the individual cells and regulates the charge that goes to those cells. The big thing about having the controller in here that's nice though is that with lithium batteries, you don't want to discharge the voltage to a certain point. The capacity charge is actually gone while we still have probably around 11 volts in our battery.So what will happen is this controller here knows that to prevent damaging itself it needs to shut it off once that voltage gets low enough and that's the end of our charge. Our full amp powers will have been depleted in that amount and then it disconnects our battery. That protects our battery from being undercharged. And when you are charging it, it also protects it from being overcharged. The internal battery monitoring system will allow you to charge these batteries with just your traditional lead acid battery charger. If you are using just a regular lead acid battery charger though, there's a couple of things you want to keep in mind.Your charger should not have a desulfating setting. The desulfating process helps prevent them from sulfating and keeps it topped up to that 100%. With our lithium batteries here, we don't want to store these at 100%. We want them between 30 and 70% charge when storing them. That desulfating process could potentially damage our lithium batteries. Now, if you want to get the most out of these batteries and ensure that there's no issues with the charging, then I would recommend using a charger that is specifically designed for lithium. Now it's not required because we have that battery monitoring system inside, but having an appropriate charger is just going to further increase the life of our batteries, because it's going to be working with the battery monitoring system in here to ensure that it's charging it properly, but it also can potentially charge the batteries faster.And that's one of the benefits of having lithium batteries over your regular lead acid is that they can charge significantly faster. Now, if you are looking for a specific battery charger that is designed for your lithium batteries, I would recommend NOCO's Genius. We have that available here at etrailer.com and it has charge profiles for your regular lead acid, your AGM, your lithiums. It can charge just about everything.Now for you solar power travelers out there, you can use a solar controller to charge the lithium batteries. Again, it's got that battery monitoring system inside. So it could charge just like a regular lead acid battery. But with the solar chargers, that is a little bit more important that you have a solar controller that is specifically designed for lithium. Because with your solar controllers and your solar panels, every time it's sunny out, it's going to be trying to charge that battery and top it up to 100%.And we talked about those conditions. If it's the low freezing, how we may not want to charge it, or if you are going to be letting it sit for a while, and maybe it sits outside where the solar panels are going to be topping those batteries up. Well, we don't want this to be at a 100% state of charge to store the lithium batteries. Having a solar controller that works with lithium batteries will ensure it is charging properly when it's in extreme cold weather or while storing the batteries.Here at etrailer.com, we have a few different solar controllers available that do support lithium batteries. I would highly recommend Go Power's MPPT Solar Controller. With an MPPT controller, it tries to squeeze every last bit of sunlight power that it can and get it into these batteries. And it has the specific profile inside of it that it uses. So at dusk and dawn where your typical controllers are going to shut off because the sunlight's starting to fade, the MPPTs are going to be able to get the most out of that last little bit of daylight while it's available.And that completes our look at Power Sonic's Bluetooth Smart Battery Series.