I want to get a battery backup for my PC (one of those inverter trolleys) but it’s quite expensive and I thought “hey why not do it yourself?” So now I’m just wondering if you guys know where to get LifePo4 cells in South Africa. Looking for 3.2V 100Ah or somewhere around there. Also I can’t seem to find copper bus bars to connect the batteries in series. 

Hi Odii

Lbsa used to supply cells, but no longer, unfortunately. 

I can help you with the bus bars...just get copper water pipe and hammer it flat, then drill out the holes. Can be done with hand tools, and a bit of effort. 

What I used for my 3 diy builds - it's handy that you can size them to any number of cells if paralleling.

Cheers

Ian

 

 

 

 

ACDC Direct and no doubt other retailers sell copper busbar in various sizes.  I bought 1.2m x 20mm x 5mm ones from them for my old 12V parallel battery bank.  They have pre-drilled and tapped M6 holes every 10cm or so.

 

Paul

On 2022/12/08 at 9:08 AM, Ian said:

Hi Odii

Lbsa used to supply cells, but no longer, unfortunately. 

Cheers

Ian

 

 

 

 

I also used them previously,they're now selling to reseller who assemble battery, I wonder why they stopped as there is a clear demand for DYI market.

 

Anyway, there's a new kid on the block, lithium-cells.co.za, I just placed my order with them. 

1 hour ago, Tim003 said:

Anyway, there's a new kid on the block, lithium-cells.co.za, I just placed my order with them.

Please let us know how this goes, the pictures show cells without any barcodes. Also no business address and only taking EFT, and the website does not even use TLS.  They only have 34 cells in stock which makes them seem more legit.

When I bough my cells LBSA had 3500 second life cells in stock, when I bough mine they were down to 1800 cells. The whole batch sold out in under 3 months. Eskom is creating the perfect storm

3 hours ago, iiznh said:

Please let us know how this goes, the pictures show cells without any barcodes. Also no business address and only taking EFT, and the website does not even use TLS.  They only have 34 cells in stock which makes them seem more legit.

When I bough my cells LBSA had 3500 second life cells in stock, when I bough mine they were down to 1800 cells. The whole batch sold out in under 3 months. Eskom is creating the perfect storm

A reputable member from a 4x4 forum bought 16x 230ah cells from them. He traveled from KZN to their premises (can't remember if it was Benoni or Boksburg) to ensure he's dealing with legitimate business and he shared his built journey with us and he is happy so far. Currently they are out of stock of 230Ah cells (stock expected in January) and limited cells of 120Ah. It seems like the company is run by two young brothers, I've chatted to one of them before placing my order today, friendly and knowledgeable. 

 

Disclaimer: I have no affiliations to this company, it remains the responsibility of each potential buyer to do their own due diligence before buying.

 

That being said, I think we should give them a chance just like we did with LBSA. 

4 hours ago, Tim003 said:

A reputable member from a 4x4 forum bought 16x 230ah cells from them. He traveled from KZN to their premises (can't remember if it was Benoni or Boksburg) to ensure he's dealing with legitimate business and he shared his built journey with us and he is happy so far. Currently they are out of stock of 230Ah cells (stock expected in January) and limited cells of 120Ah. It seems like the company is run by two young brothers, I've chatted to one of them before placing my order today, friendly and knowledgeable. 

 

Disclaimer: I have no affiliations to this company, it remains the responsibility of each potential buyer to do their own due diligence before buying.

 

That being said, I think we should give them a chance just like we did with LBSA. 

This may be off topic but you don't give random companies "a chance".

They prove they are legitimate and worth your consideration.

With EFT, you'll have a heck of a time getting any of that money back. Thats why not offering credit card purchases is a massive red flag

I bought some EVE 280Ah (LF280K) cells in 2022 for DIY build. It took around 60 days to arrive but was very happy with the packaging and quality.
I am in the process of looking at ordering some cells again.
PM me if you are interested. Maybe I can piggy back some extra cells.

Edited December 15, 20223 yr by DeonBez

On 2022/12/13 at 7:01 PM, Tim003 said:

A reputable member from a 4x4 forum bought 16x 230ah cells from them. He traveled from KZN to their premises (can't remember if it was Benoni or Boksburg) to ensure he's dealing with legitimate business and he shared his built journey with us and he is happy so far. Currently they are out of stock of 230Ah cells (stock expected in January) and limited cells of 120Ah. It seems like the company is run by two young brothers, I've chatted to one of them before placing my order today, friendly and knowledgeable. 

 

Disclaimer: I have no affiliations to this company, it remains the responsibility of each potential buyer to do their own due diligence before buying.

 

That being said, I think we should give them a chance just like we did with LBSA. 

Let's make it Brakpan AFAIR. 

3 hours ago, Scorp007 said:

Let's make it Brakpan AFAIR. 

Thanks for the correction. 

I just received my cells today, made bus bars and ready to top balance them when Eskom is back. 

Edited December 16, 20223 yr by Tim003

15 hours ago, Tim003 said:

Thanks for the correction. 

I just received my cells today, made bus bars and ready to top balance them when Eskom is back. 

Don't connect the bus bars that way you must maximise contact, no angled contacts, bar to cell 1, cell 3 and over them on cell 2, 4.

The cells come at around 30% soc - so now you have a 3.2 V 1840 Ah battery - so you need to charge it with around 1288 AH. So if you have a 10 A charger it will take around 5 days  with no BMS protection so you have to be there all the time . BEst to wire it up as an 8S battery , charge it with BMS . Moderns BMS's now have high balancing current so usually no need to parallel up , let BMS do the balancing - starts at say 3.4 V/cell , then 3.45V - 3.50V . No need to go over 3.5 

 

On 2022/12/13 at 3:02 PM, iiznh said:

Please let us know how this goes, the pictures show cells without any barcodes. Also no business address and only taking EFT, and the website does not even use TLS.  They only have 34 cells in stock which makes them seem more legit.

When I bough my cells LBSA had 3500 second life cells in stock, when I bough mine they were down to 1800 cells. The whole batch sold out in under 3 months. Eskom is creating the perfect storm

I have just had a in-depth look at thei web-site and note they accept payment through PayPal - I suggest that if you have any concern re the ethecacy of teh company or their services or the delivery of goods you pay them through teh PayPal option, I have previously ordered on overseas websites and on two occasions not received my goods and abeit a long and tedious process which I had to be continually on top of, eventually recieved full refunds of my monies, I hope this helps.

Bought my 3.2 volt 100 Ahr cells from a company called Cinch-IT in the Cape. New cells, not 2nd life. Bought the BMS on a special from BidorBuy

Also bought some 2nd life 50 Ahr cells from Electromann in JHB as I had a spare BMS. Looked a bit dodgy at first but currently working fine.

Used aluminium flat bar for the links.

2 hours ago, Delphinus said:

Don't connect the bus bars that way you must maximise contact, no angled contacts, bar to cell 1, cell 3 and over them on cell 2, 4.

Thanks, I made these bus bars in hurry chasing loadshedding but I'll correct them before final assembly. 

2 hours ago, NoordSolar said:

The cells come at around 30% soc - so now you have a 3.2 V 1840 Ah battery - so you need to charge it with around 1288 AH. So if you have a 10 A charger it will take around 5 days  with no BMS protection so you have to be there all the time . BEst to wire it up as an 8S battery , charge it with BMS . Moderns BMS's now have high balancing current so usually no need to parallel up , let BMS do the balancing - starts at say 3.4 V/cell , then 3.45V - 3.50V . No need to go over 3.5 

 

 

2 hours ago, NoordSolar said:

The cells come at around 30% soc - so now you have a 3.2 V 1840 Ah battery - so you need to charge it with around 1288 AH. So if you have a 10 A charger it will take around 5 days  with no BMS protection so you have to be there all the time . BEst to wire it up as an 8S battery , charge it with BMS . Moderns BMS's now have high balancing current so usually no need to parallel up , let BMS do the balancing - starts at say 3.4 V/cell , then 3.45V - 3.50V . No need to go over 3.5 

 

My cells are 120Ah, so should be around 960Ah not 1840Ah? I currently don't have the inverter with me so using bench power supply. 

If this battery are new then try to charge them in parallel (5 days ...) with a modern power supply and limit the voltege to 3.45V. This will do a slow charge but all the battery will have the same SOC. Connect them in revers corner e.g + on left and - on right and after 2 days connect in oposite corrner. Depend on the bms, the balancer can be a resitive one  with mA or with active balancer A(1~4A). But this is not true !!!! The active works perfet aafter 99% of SOC, and because LifePo4 is linear aprox linera the active balancer is doing a small job. and 4A can not be reatch with 10mA voltage deviation. 

Concusion: fist try to charge in parallel to get the same SOC and the the balancer will do the job. 

I have 2x 5kW pack and for both i did the same, parallel charging. 

On normla oprtation the  SOC is form 95% to 20% ~3.4V (for 95% and 3.1V for 20%).

Further to my earlier post which was released in error......

A few months ago I bought 4 x 3.2 volt 100 Ahr cells (new) from a company called Cinch-IT in the Cape. 12 volt BMS (excluding temperature sensor) was bought on a special from a supplier advertising on BidorBuy.

I also purchased 4 x 3.2 volt 50 Ahr cells (2nd life) from Electromann as I had already purchased a 12 volt 55 Ahr BMS (with temperature sensor) from them a year or so earlier. Must say that these cells looked the worse for wear but so far have behaved faultlessly. 

Aluminium flat bar were used for the links/busbars. A2 stainless steel hardware was used throughout. Purchased a battery box ex. Electromann for the 100 Ahr pack and used an off-the-shelf ABS electrical box which I modified to suit the 55 Ahr pack.

Various blogs stated that all the cells should be brought up to the same state of charge using numerous methods. I chose to charge up each cell separately (bit laborious) with a dedicated single cell charger (bought cheap ex. Battery Experts) prior to coupling everything up.

Was it worth it? Depends primarily on the price and quality of the cells. Also, good quality BMS's are not cheap. In addition, don't expect much in the way of component guarantees if it is a DIY project. If you make a stuff-up you could be left with an expensive paperweight at best - or potentially cause real harm to oneself. Safety first! 

All in all I saved around R3000 on the 100 Ahr build and close to R2000 on the 50 Ahr build (excluding my time) when comparing them to middle of the range batteries. Obviously not talking Blue Nova prices here!      

       

On 2022/12/17 at 2:11 PM, Tim003 said:

Thanks, I made these bus bars in hurry chasing loadshedding but I'll correct them before final assembly. 

For my 32 LF105 I top balance them this way, because the number of bus bar need to connect all in parallel is bigger than the number I had for series I put all I could in parallel and start to charge.

My lab power supply has only 10A so I set to 3.55V, for a low cost one probably is better to do it at 3.45 or 3.50V while they were charging I charge one with an ISDT Air8 it's not expensive and do 20A with a 12V 8A  DC transformer or a 24V 4A you can fully charge one in 4h, so I manage to charge 5 in the first day, when I had no more singles I removed one at the time from the parallel and top it, if not mistaken it took 4-5 days.

Sorry don't know how to delete message that was in wrong place

 

Edited December 18, 20223 yr by Delphinus
wrong place

On 2022/12/16 at 10:02 PM, Tim003 said:

Thanks for the correction. 

I just received my cells today, made bus bars and ready to top balance them when Eskom is back. 

So I've been charging cells in parallel, initially set the current to 8A and 3.4V. The current was steady around 4A. Then I changed the settings to 3.6V and 10A to speed up the the process, power supply went to CV mode. The current has been dropping until about 2A but now it has gone up and power supply is in CC mode. These are the measurements:

Power supply display: 3.65V
Power supply terminals: 3.396V
Cells: 3.351V

When I disconnect the cells, voltage on the power supply jumps to 5V! This scared me because I set it to 3.6V not 5V. Should I be worried? 

 

 

 

This is the problem with charging with el cheapo power supplies that do not have sense voltage capability . As I said before it will takes days if not weeks to get the AH into those cells at when all in parallel Now that you have done some charging in parallel those cells will be out of balance ( as the current each took up is not guaranteed to be the same ) . Charge in the series untill they get to 3.4 v / cell and then parallel them if your BMS has less than 0.25  A balancing current capability

 

33 minutes ago, NoordSolar said:

 Charge in the series untill they get to 3.4 v / cell and then parallel them if your BMS has less than 0.25  A balancing current capability

 

I only have 10A power supply at the moment. Wouldn't charging via BMS yield the same results as parallel charging provided the current is the same? 

@Tim003 - when charging the cells in parallel did you put the one power supply lead on the one side and the other power supply on the other side of the cells? Doing this with them all in parallel and keeping them on at say 3.5V (make sure your PSU voltage reading is correct - mine is not!) per cell, they will eventually be balanced. 

Another alternative is to buy an active battery balancer - one that will discharge the cells with the higher voltage. The active balancers have a higher discharge current than the  BMSs that have balance capability and eventually will also balance the cells in the pack. Obviously if you have a bad cell then no amount of balancing is going to fix that !

 Something like this would work. Perhaps a group buy for people who are interested ? 

Wholesale 1.2A 2S 17S High Current Equalizer Module Li Ion Lifepo4 Lithium Battery Active Balancer Energy Transfer Bms|Battery Accessories| - AliExpress

Edited December 20, 20223 yr by GreenMan

@Tim003 this might be helpful to read:

https://diysolarforum.com/ewr-carta/topbalancelfp/

https://diysolarforum.com/ewr-carta/bms/

https://www.diysolarforum.com/index.php?threads/battery-faq.200/

https://diysolarforum.com/resources/top-balancing-lifepo4-cells-using-a-low-cost-benchtop-power-supply.65/

Edited December 20, 20223 yr by DeonBez