Because I have the residential refrigerator, a 2000 watt pure sine wave inverter and a slew of entertainment electronics in this rig, I really wanted a large lithium battery so I can boondock and not have any anxiety about running out of power. It's a far cry from the 4 lead acids 6v batteries the Tiffin came with. Those yielded 200 Ah of usable capacity - not much when your fridge can suck down up to 22 amps!
While I was working on the rig, I had installed 4 Stark Power 125 AH batteries, that had a total of 500 Ah. They worked really well, but I didn't like the cluttered installation with wires running all over the battery compartment. Each battery had it's own rudimentary BMS system. These batteries are now destined to be used in my tugboat as house batteries. That will be plenty to run my refrigerator, inverter and other systems on the boat and reduce generator run time.
A couple of the features of this Lithionics battery I found quite compelling. First that it's one large block with single positive and negative poles. It greatly simplifies the installation and eliminates a lot of the clutter in the battery bay. Second, the BMS system is far more robust that what you'll find on the drop-in type batteries like the Starks. With it all one block, the BMS should be far more effective. Third, the NeverDie BMS has a low end cut-off. It's set at 10% SOC. The thinking is, that it will shut itself off before it can be completely discharged and leave you stranded. You have a switch on the top so that you can "restart" the battery and get it plugged in to a charging source. Lastly, this same switch is also a manual cutoff you can use at the battery to shut it off if you need to - ideal for long term storage situations, or if you want to work on the wiring.
It's a big battery!
To give some perspective, here it is in the back of my Jeep. Moving it around was a chore - it's 155 lbs! Since it's equivalent to 12 6v lead acids, they would weigh 864 lbs!
Here it is installed. It was tight getting it in the compartment, but there is still plenty of room around it. I did have to remove the baggage door latch (2 screws) to get it in.
Lithionics sent me a performance curve from the tests they ran on my battery before shipment. Total capacity 605 amp hours.
One other thing I had left to do was cover the hole in the galley cabinet where the Outback Mase remote display was mounted. I found this nice multi-sensor weather station to place there. It came with three sensors so I can monitor temperatures in the battery compartment and the wet bay.
Hi there, great blog. I'm interest in doing the same. Were you concerned with issues with storing the Lithium battery outside of the coach? No concerns on hi temp degradation of below freezing charging?
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