January 31, 20233 yr With current load shedding between stage 4 to 6 and stints of 4 to 4.5 hours is LFP batteries going to last! Current load shedding cycles for 2023 so far 3 stages of 2 to 2.5 hours per day. 3 x 365 days = 1095 charge/ discharge cycles per year. 4 Years i need to buy new batteries. The most expensive component of solar installation is the batteries. Is it going to be worth the investment at the end. Edited January 31, 20233 yr by TaliaB
January 31, 20233 yr You're counting partial charges and discharges as a full cycle, and that's not exactly how it works. I've had my backup installed since December 2021 and my battery BMS has only registered 81 cycles to-date.
January 31, 20233 yr 14 minutes ago, TaliaB said: 4 Years i need to buy new batteries. not quite, after the manufacturer specified cycle count (not partial cycles either, I would think) you should still have 60 to 80% of the batteries capacity available, ideally none of us should sail so close to the Eskom rolling blackout that the battery get totally drained... as for partial cycles, if the spec is 80% DOD (20% remaining) and you have 2 cycles where the DOD is only 40% (60% remaining) and you recharge the battery after these two 40% cycles, that should/would add up to one actual cycle, although some software/BMS' count those as two cycles, but in reality that isn't true, I reckon...
January 31, 20233 yr Depends maybe on if you have solar power as well, and how heavily you depend on draining the batteries during loadshedding. Three stints per day, 8 hours apart, you should mostly have 1, and sometimes 2 slots during daytime. Those can be supported by solar. Whenever you have loadshedding in the middle of the night, that's usually/often low-powered baseload. You don't have to recharge immediately surely (asking, not saying), maybe let it stand over to the morning's stint and discharge deeper? Beyond that, several battery brands advertise 6000 cycles or more. Maybe it's worth buying more batteries, sticking to 0.5C charge and discharge rates, and baby them a bit more to make them last longer. Thumbsucking then that you can do effectively 2 full discharges per day instead of 3, and opt for greater cycle life, 8 years is seeming possible. Else get the Hubble AM-5 that offers unlimited cycles in 10 years.
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