SO HOW MUCH BATTERY STORAGE SHOULD YOU HAVE?
Well, this depends on your power requirements. In most cases where you are powering LED lights, a TV and recharging laptops and low power devices and your fridge is a 3 way unit able to run on gas, a single 100AH lithium battery will suffice. With 300 watts or so of solar on your roof, you’ll be able to top up your batteries daily and even with several cloudy days when there is little solar charge coming back in, you’ll still have ample battery storage available. For those of you who spend a fair amount of time away and running heavier load items such as a 2 way 12V fridge, inverter, lighting, TV etc, we would suggest a single 150AH or 200AH lithium battery or 2 x single 100AH lithium batteries connected in parallel. This is a huge amount of storage that will get you through those cloudy days until the sun comes back out and recharges your batteries via your solar panels.
WHAT IS A BATTERY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (BMS?)
All Solarking lithium batteries feature heavy duty BMS circuitry inside the battery casing. The BMS looks after the battery by monitoring the incoming charge voltage and the discharge voltage as well as temperature cut off in the unlikely event that the pack runs too hot. The BMS will also protect your Solarking battery by switching off the voltage output if the capacity reduces to 20% or less. This prevents cell damage and can be reset and charged back up to an acceptable state of charge. There is much debate about whether a standard lead acid charger can be used with drop in lithium LiFePo4 batteries with a built in BMS. From our research, we suggest that any charger can be used providing charge rates do not exceed 14.8V (absolute max 15.0V) bulk/absorb charge and float turned off or set to 13.3V ~ 13.6V. In general, if your charger is set to AGM then this will be fine as AGM charges at around 14.4V The benefit however of having a lithium specific charger is that the battery will be returned to a full state of charge faster and more efficiently.
3 YEAR WARRANTY
The Solarking range of lithium LiFePo4 batteries are covered by an Australian 3 year warranty against defects and failure. This is a return to base warranty and if found to be faulty, will be repaired or replaced during this period.