A Test Of My 30 Ah Bioenno LiFePo4 Battery

I had bought a 50 Ah Bioenno LiFePo4 battery for my FWC camper for this year’s (2018) travels.  I figured I would want more than 30 Ah Bioenno LiFePo4 battery I used as my house battery in the Prius.  The reason for the larger battery was that the camper had vent fans, more lighting, and more things to charge.  

The 50 Ah was great this year and even with heavy cloudy conditions I got .5 amps charging from my 170 watt solar.  I guess that I could have used the 30 Ah battery but decided to have it as a backup.  In the end I didn't use the 30 Ah at all.

I decided to conduct a test of the 30 Ah battery (before returning it to the Prius as the house battery) and a 900 watt inverter to make iced tea in my iced tea maker that uses 750 watts. (Setup in picture below)

For the technical inclined the 900 watt MSW inverter is set up with 4 gauge wire 24” long.



The Bioenno manual for the battery states 30 amps continuous with max 90 amps for 2 seconds only.

My test with the 750 watt draw used 64.8 amps continuous for the full brewing cycle.  This is about 10 minutes.



The voltage dropped to 11.47 volts during the 64.8 amp draw.

When the brewing cycle was done the battery rested at 13.17 volts. (It started at 13.3 volts). 

Since I was using 64.8 Ah from the battery it would have been fully depleted in about 20 minutes.  So my test used about 1/2 of the battery’s capacity or 15 Ah.

If charging with the 10 amp charger from Bioenno, or 10 amps from my 170 watt solar panel, it would fully charge in a bit over 1.5 hours.

I contacted Bioenno and asked if it was ok for the battery to be subject to this high of a current draw considering the specs stating 30 amps continuous.  Bioenno said it was ok for me to draw this higher amperage the way I did.

Bioenno makes great LiFePo4 batteries and their technical support is very responsive.  Remember that once the  battery is depleted it automatically shuts off to protect itself.

The purpose of this high current test is to confirm that the Bioenno LiFePo4 batteries can run a 600 microwave like the one below from Amazon and be recharged with solar or other charger.

Although I may not run a small microwave.  The battery has the technical ability to do it.

Brent

macaloney@hotmail.com