a cost benefit comparison of lifepo4 and lipo for newbs | Page 3

I charge on the road with power supplies.

They come in many flavors, but I always just charge at the limit a standard 15amp wall outlet breaker can sustain, which is around 11-12amps, which is roughly -w charging.

Tiny. Compact. Light. Cheap. And unlike little toy chargers that come with an off-the-shelf pack, these actually charge at a power level that let's you add meaningful watt-hours back into the pack in a little 30min break for a snack or drink.

Man.... all things being equal a 1kw charger or a 1kw PS isn't going to be tiny, compact, light, and cheap. Bms battery has 900w chargers for $100 shipped. A w meanwell is what? $200-$300(i just checked ebay)? And the meanwell isn't cc/cv. What you do you think about that? Am I too far off? And the meanwell requires some sort of baby sitting right?

$300 is mind blowingly cheap for 36v 15ah lifepo4. You should have bought a carton and resold them for a profit!!!

Not really... that's what bmsbattery has their headway packs.... dlg quoted me $350 for a 48v10ah pack with charger and bms made from their 15c cells. Once my lawn care business gets going I'm going to order some for testing, so hopefully we'll have some better lifepo4 options soon.

LOL

(assuming you're being sarcastic)

Lfp, I'm amazed by how often you can get away with being intentionally misleading and rude to forum members. Not only that, but you have business or other wise personal relationships with hobby king. Did they give you a tour of the factory because you got enough people here to buy their lipo packs?

OTOH, I do feel I was a bit unfair to lipo with regards to modularity, upgradibility, and volumetric density problems with lifepo4. I'm going to rewrite those sections as well as update the cycle life information with more detailed info.
You do seem to know the most here about of hobby king lipo, what do you know about any relevant life cycle testing of them or similar batteries?

$300 is mind blowingly cheap for 36v 15ah lifepo4. You should have bought a carton and resold them for a profit!!!

auraslip said: Not really... that's what bmsbattery has their headway packs.... dlg quoted me $350 for a 48v10ah pack with charger and bms made from their 15c cells. Once my lawn care business gets going I'm going to order some for testing, so hopefully we'll have some better lifepo4 options soon.

Interesting but i'd like to see them in action. I've heard that the BMSes from BMSbattery are basically junk. Read some threads on here. Their shipping cost is also artificially inflated pretty bad. This is why i've never bought anything from them. Not even bare hub motors.

It would be nice to see your report though if you order them.
I'd like some smaller lifepo4 pack i could recommend to newbies. The low discharge rating of the ping doesn't cut the mustard and we need something that can handle power levels above what you get with ebikekit, etc. Headway cells would seem to be ideal. But prismatic lipo will always be king for stuffing the most capacity into a limited amount of space.

P.S. you can opportunity charge with lipo; i've seen 5A bricks that charge to lipo voltages ( IE 4.2v or 4.15v per cell ) on alibaba many times. As long as you make sure your lipo isn't terribly out of balance, that kind of charging works real well. There is also a bit of sway room in the lipo spec as most lipo cells are rated for 4.25v per cell. So there's good headroom.

In fact my girlfriend's "ecobike elegance" has li-mn, which charges at 4.2v per cell. Already got a lipo opportunity charger I wanted to tell you guys why I am suddenly so against lipo. My number one goal when writing the original post was to help the ebike revolution along. Hobby king has made it so a few of us can build very powerful bikes for fairly cheap, but I believe it's doing more harm than good. It's devaluing ready made lifepo4 packs, and it's making it harder for the price to come down.

When you have people here saying stuff like "ping doesn't cut it", bmsbattery has unreliable bms, and calling headways "deadways" it makes people that would otherwise be perfectly happy with one of those options unreasonably wary of them. Combine that with everyone talking about how great lipo is, and suddenly it seems to be the only real option. Yet when a beginner starts on their quest to build a lipo ebike, they quickly get confused, discouraged, and caught up in analysis paralysis. This isn't conducive of getting a newbie to ride an ebike!

Secondly, by taking away business from people like Ping, Cell_man, and ebikes.ca it makes their economies of scale smaller and they need to charge more. I understand that until recently high quality lifepo4 packs were expensive or non-existent, but now days there are plenty of decent options for lifepo4 out there like a123, DLG, PSI, and the 8c headways that are fairly inexpensive and reliable. Instead we give our money to a company that has no interest in ebikes, and probably never will; if hobbyking could make a profit selling 10,000mah packs to ebikers, they would be. Why not give our money to companies that actually want our business? By trash talking all the good options for beginners, you're not helping any one; You're hurting everyone. Got it - do we get to hold an election or anything or are you just asserting enforcement of your beliefs?

auraslip said: I wanted to tell you guys why I am suddenly so against lipo. My number one goal when writing the original post was to help the ebike revolution along. Hobby king has made it so a few of us can build very powerful bikes for fairly cheap, but I believe it's doing more harm than good. It's devaluing ready made lifepo4 packs, and it's making it harder for the price to come down.

When you have people here saying stuff like "ping doesn't cut it", bmsbattery has unreliable bms, and calling headways "deadways" it makes people that would otherwise be perfectly happy with one of those options unreasonably wary of them. Combine that with everyone talking about how great lipo is, and suddenly it seems to be the only real option. Yet when a beginner starts on their quest to build a lipo ebike, they quickly get confused, discouraged, and caught up in analysis paralysis. This isn't conducive of getting a newbie to ride an ebike!

Secondly, by taking away business from people like Ping, Cell_man, and ebikes.ca it makes their economies of scale smaller and they need to charge more. I understand that until recently high quality lifepo4 packs were expensive or non-existent, but now days there are plenty of decent options for lifepo4 out there like a123, DLG, PSI, and the 8c headways that are fairly inexpensive and reliable. Instead we give our money to a company that has no interest in ebikes, and probably never will; if hobbyking could make a profit selling 10,000mah packs to ebikers, they would be. Why not give our money to companies that actually want our business? By trash talking all the good options for beginners, you're not helping any one; You're hurting everyone.

auraslip said: I wanted to tell you guys why I am suddenly so against lipo. My number one goal when writing the original post was to help the ebike revolution along. Hobby king has made it so a few of us can build very powerful bikes for fairly cheap, but I believe it's doing more harm than good. It's devaluing ready made lifepo4 packs, and it's making it harder for the price to come down.

Are you kidding me? The market will drive the feasibility. Don't blame the low cost of lipo for inflated lifepo4 prices.

auraslip said: When you have people here saying stuff like "ping doesn't cut it", bmsbattery has unreliable bms, and calling headways "deadways" it makes people that would otherwise be perfectly happy with one of those options unreasonably wary of them. Combine that with everyone talking about how great lipo is, and suddenly it seems to be the only real option. Yet when a beginner starts on their quest to build a lipo ebike, they quickly get confused, discouraged, and caught up in analysis paralysis. This isn't conducive of getting a newbie to ride an ebike!

So people that have problems with a product should just keep their mouth shut so other suckers will still buy the product. Are you nuts? As for Lipo, I don't have a problem with it at all. The problem is the fear spread about it. I'm both a noob at ebikes and lipo. Only had my motor a couple of months and switched to lipo a couple of weeks ago. As long as it last a few hundred full cycles, I'll be happy. But I'm thinking it will last many times that. I've been charging the 14s pack without balancing for a few days now. No problems.

auraslip said: Secondly, by taking away business from people like Ping, Cell_man, and ebikes.ca it makes their economies of scale smaller and they need to charge more. I understand that until recently high quality lifepo4 packs were expensive or non-existent, but now days there are plenty of decent options for lifepo4 out there like a123, DLG, PSI, and the 8c headways that are fairly inexpensive and reliable. Instead we give our money to a company that has no interest in ebikes, and probably never will; if hobbyking could make a profit selling 10,000mah packs to ebikers, they would be. Why not give our money to companies that actually want our business? By trash talking all the good options for beginners, you're not helping any one; You're hurting everyone.

Look, it's all about money. I couldn't care less about ping, cell-man's, hobby kings, are anybody else's bottom line. I care about mine. If they go out of business because they can't compete, then they better find a new business, or find a better marketing strategy. It's that simple. And I couldn't care less if they promote ebikes or hookers. If they want my money, they better have a competitive product for my needs. They simply don't at this time.

auraslip said:

I charge on the road with power supplies.

They come in many flavors, but I always just charge at the limit a standard 15amp wall outlet breaker can sustain, which is around 11-12amps, which is roughly -w charging.

Tiny. Compact. Light. Cheap. And unlike little toy chargers that come with an off-the-shelf pack, these actually charge at a power level that let's you add meaningful watt-hours back into the pack in a little 30min break for a snack or drink.

Man.... all things being equal a 1kw charger or a 1kw PS isn't going to be tiny, compact, light, and cheap. Bms battery has 900w chargers for $100 shipped. A w meanwell is what? $200-$300(i just checked ebay)? And the meanwell isn't cc/cv. What you do you think about that? Am I too far off? And the meanwell requires some sort of baby sitting right?

I don't bother with meanwell's any longer.
$30 each. 48v @ 12amps, isolated. My around-town charger is a pair of them. It's about 3lbs for both, about 10"x4"x1.5" for the pair.
http://www.serversupply.com/products/part_search/pid_lookup.asp?pid=

My at home chargers are a pair of these 3kw chargers in series.
http://www.serversupply.com/POWER%20SUPPLY/SERVER%20POWER%20SUPPLY/WATT%20REDUNDANT/HP-COMPAQ/-001.htm

Run on AC or DC from 80-90VDC or VAC up to 280VDC or VAC. Like most modern switchers, it runs more efficiently on DC than AC, but only by a fraction of a percent (cap ripple losses).

To use, I just plug in the deans connector, and plug the other end into the wall. It can NOT over charge (if everything is adjusted and setup correctly obviously), it's got about a billion times better regulation on voltage than ANY battery charger on earth.
Does this not satisfy being cheap, small, light, compact, and simple??
This is how Methods, myself, and a handful of others have been charging now for the last year.
The only thing I use an RC charger for is my RC hobbies, or cycling/testing packs before building them.

auraslip said:

LOL

(assuming you're being sarcastic)

Lfp, I'm amazed by how often you can get away with being intentionally misleading and rude to forum members. Not only that, but you have business or other wise personal relationships with hobby king. Did they give you a tour of the factory because you got enough people here to buy their lipo packs?

OTOH, I do feel I was a bit unfair to lipo with regards to modularity, upgradibility, and volumetric density problems with lifepo4. I'm going to rewrite those sections as well as update the cycle life information with more detailed info.
You do seem to know the most here about of hobby king lipo, what do you know about any relevant life cycle testing of them or similar batteries?

#1. All ebike LiPo sales for the last few years all combined wouldn't be enough to make HobbyKing even notice. Hobbyking had no idea who I was, what ES was, or that ebikes were using LiPo packs. (I let them know though of course, but our volumes are too low to matter).

#2. I quit my job and Microsoft, knowingly taking a pay-cut, to help advance the electric revolution, and currently am working as a battery system engineer.

#3. Hobbyking's battery factory makes and sells approximately 300,000 LiFePO4 ebike batteries a year, which are for the Chinese ebike/escooter market. More than ALL the USA vendors for lithium electric bike batteries by more than an order of magnitude.

#4. To say LiPo has XXX cycles or xxx safety is f*cking retarded. FIrst off, LiPo comes in all different flavors, PingPacks are LiPo, the Chevy Volt and Nissan LEAF packs are LiPo, the A123 pouch cells are LiPo, etc etc. The longest lasting chemistries (<40,000cycles) I've ever seen have been LiPo, and the shortest lifecycle (<20cycles) chemistries have been LiPo. They come in flavors from extremely dangerous (like first generation LiCoO2 lipo), and fairly safe like LiFePO4, and extremely safe chemistries like LiMNO2 variants. When it comes to RC LiPo, there are cells that handle wicked overcharge and do nothing, you can stab and crush and smash them and they just sit there or maybe get warm. There are LiFePO4 round cells that explode into flames when you do similar things, it doesn't mean LiFePO4 or round cells are dangerous, it means some are made with safety-fixated design criteria, and some are not. The new 100C-200C LiFePO4 A123 cells (used by F1 KERS, Kilacycle, and military energy weapons) can explode like a mini-grenade if you drop them on something hard enough to make the case deform in the wrong way. Some RC LiPo packs get smashed into pieces and have no fire or heat, some get overcharged to 5-6v/cell and just sit there, etc etc. The early stuff was VERY unstable, it could just explode if you pricked through the foil it or overcharged it to 4.4v. It created a reputation that has lasted, dispite modern RC LiPo behaving completely differently than the early stuff. As far as hobbyking's LiPo goes, some of the 20c stuff is made from the cheapest formulas/ingredients etc, it's designed entirely around making a functional LiPo battery for an RC toy at the least cost. Treat them right ( low DOD's, no overcharge or over discharge ooops), and you may get 500- 70%-80% DOD cycles, or even 5,000 light 50% DOD cycles. Treat them badly and make some big charging/discharging errors, you may get <100cycles. Get a bad batch, you might just be screwed, it's the risk you take when you buy the cheapest. If you buy something using all cutting edge chemistry and engineering, premium materials and manufacturing with elaborate testing and quality control like a Nano-Tech, and you don't do stupid things to damage it (over-charge, over-discharge), you're going to see 4, and possibly 5 digit cycle life (in a case with very shallow DOD). Here is a post I added a little while ago..
THIS is the particular reason why I have NO need to go lipo..
Here is my short story...

Ok, alot of things happened over the past month..

I have hit the 2 and a half year mark on one of my batteries and one of my motors..

Here are the results....

Mileage: finally reached 20,000 miles

Front 36v (250w) motor: (Same Tire and Tube from day one. (not one flat!)

Battery: 36v 15ah From eBay vendor "Vpower" (1C rated continuous, 2C max discharging)
Over cycles, half of them using 12-15 out of 15Ah, the other half being between 2 and 12ah.  
Usable AH? (as of last month-march 1st): 
13.6ah to 95% DOD. (prolly could push it to 14..  But that's close enough for me!)

Controller amp usage: 
MAX - 25a (start from dead stop) 
Typical - 8-12a (cruising speed of 18-20mph)

My BMS finally died last month from rain/water "damage"...

Been charging with my Vpower charger (set at 43.8 CC/CV) to "full" for the past month (no BMS))...
Used (via watt meter) up to a max of 12-13ah per  since last month...
Just took charger off and for the first time in a month checked each cell group, results?: 
EVERY CELL between 3.58v and 3.6v after 20 mins off charger..

I tried to ask earlier about a (HK) LiPo setup that would give me the same results AND be able to be plugged in ANYWHERE there is a 120v outlet and walk away from it for as long as I want and have it FULLY charged when I get back to it. (I don't want to just plug a small charger in and have it "somewhat" full)

A UTV is a utility task vehicle, which is a type of small, off-road vehicle that is designed for a variety of tasks. UTVs are typically smaller than traditional off-road vehicles like ATVs (all-terrain vehicles), but they are larger and more versatile than golf carts. UTVs are often used on farms and ranches for tasks like hauling equipment and supplies, and they are also popular for recreational use on trails and other off-road environments. Some common features of UTVs include a cargo bed for hauling materials, a bench seat for multiple passengers, and off-road tires for improved traction on rough terrain.

Please visit our website for more information on this topic.

What is UTV Lithium Battery?

A UTV lithium battery is a type of battery that is used in some utility task vehicles (UTVs). Lithium batteries are different from traditional lead-acid batteries in that they are lighter, more compact, and have a higher energy density, which means they can store more energy in a smaller space. This makes them an attractive option for use in UTVs, as they can save weight and space while providing a reliable source of power. However, they are also more expensive and have a shorter lifespan than lead-acid batteries, so they are not as commonly used in UTVs.

Why Choose Lithium Battery For UTV?

There are several reasons why someone might choose a lithium battery for their UTV. One of the main advantages of lithium batteries is that they are lighter and more compact than traditional lead-acid batteries, so they can save weight and space in a vehicle. This can be beneficial for UTVs, which are designed for off-road use and often need to carry a lot of cargo or multiple passengers. Lithium batteries also have a higher energy density, which means they can store more energy in a smaller space. This can be useful for vehicles that need to run for long periods of time without being recharged. Additionally, lithium batteries have a faster charging time and a longer lifespan than lead-acid batteries, so they may be a good choice for those who need to use their UTV frequently.

DNK Power is one of China’s main player of UTV rechargeable battery pack products. Our main products is lithium ion polymer battery, lithium battery, Rechargeable battery and lifepo4 rechargeable batteries. The company, established in , has extensive experiences of manufacturing UTV lithium battery products.

SINC Product Page

Our existing customized rechargeable lithium battery products are widely used in UTVs of different specifications.

Our company will unswerving uphold the business principle of “Zero Torence on Quality problems, and 8 hours fast response for any problems customer meets”. With our whole-hearted commitment to provide the most competitive customized charging battery solutions to customers worldwidely,we are seeking global customers and partners to walk to the green future hand in hand.

Our existing customized rechargeable battery products are widely used in consumer electronics,communications, military, medical, financial, security and other fields.

Contact us to discuss your requirements of 3.6v 15ah Lithium Battery. Our experienced sales team can help you identify the options that best suit your needs.