My solution for overpriced lithium batteries | How to choose the right battery for your budget!

[Music]

thank you hey guys welcome back to the live stream tonight so this one is uh my solution

for overpriced lithium batteries so it took me a while to kind of figure out how to put this together because

um the way that I figured out how to get a cheaper battery

was difficult for me because I want quality and the vans that I build but at

the same time I want to take into account the budget of the customer that I'm working with because there's other

stuff in the van that might be more important to them than just the battery system but I know

from experience that having a good battery system sometimes a little

oversized is going to help them for the long run but if you're building a if you're doing

a DIY build right now and you're looking for a battery system

the prices are all over the place they're I mean they can range anywhere from five hundred dollars per battery to

a thousand per battery yet all of the um

features on the battery kind of look the same so so how do you know

where's the road map to kind of go through and compare Contra and contrast

uh the batteries out there so just like I said in the last frame I'm only going to talk about stuff that

I know and have used in the van um I'm gonna put some notes Here on stuff that I understand as far as how I uh

ways that I figured out how to size batteries properly on my van build

journey and then I'll talk about um the vendors and stuff like that that I've found online again no affiliation

with these guys just getting you guys some good content to help you with your your van build process

but let's go ahead and get into our slide for the night so we're going to come back to this thing a lot and we're

going to make sure that I go through each one of these things and you guys can kind of use this as a

cheat sheet going forward when you are putting together your um

your your van you know use it as kind of like your budget sheet and notes type of thing

all right so why is it so hard to choose a lithium

battery well for me it had to do with price to

Performance um and I'm gonna keep bringing up uh

Thomas's van because we just did so many technical things on it that we got to put I mean the coolest lights the an

awesome awning an awesome fridge and a power system for him to recharge like a

lot of components so because we had a lot of technical items

on the van that's just a fancy word for saying saying expensive items

um we we wanted to allocate that budget out you know we wanted the uh the Baja

design lights and we wanted all of them we didn't just want like the ones in the front we you know the light bar stuff

like that so we needed to be really careful on with the budget I mean really really

getting down to the dollars and cents on what we could put into the build as and

then also um you know what had to what didn't make the cut

so what I did is this it was kind of my thought process

so I'm going to start this off with um what I think the problem is with

choosing lithium batteries in four camper van builds I think what's

the hardest thing is what I said in the beginning

all the features look the same on paper but the prices are all over the place

so we'll get to this section over here but let's start out with a couple

reasons that um it might be hard to choose a lithium

battery so the first thing is you know

uh I would ask yourself are you price sensitive are you brand sensitive because that's the first

question I would ask because if you are brand sensitive like you know you know you know what Windows versus

the Mac you know that you're a Mac guy or girl and you're going to pick up that

laptop because that is it's just Apple um but there's another school of thought

to where you know maybe a little bit more frugal or you're on a budget and you want to get something that uh is in

your budget so that would be the first place I start oops let me go back here we go

if it's brand then it's pretty easy if you're into

battleborn batteries go for it you know if you know that's what you want and you have the budget to do it

that's pretty easy you just go on their website and then you go and find out the capacity of battery that you want

um give me one second I'm gonna turn this AC off

there we go [Music] all right so

price or brand Brand's easy um

so for example you know if you do go by the brand then you got

the Apple tax so it's gonna it's gonna cost you um

if we look at these prices over here I want to get this later but this is you know right where I'm talking

at the moment um like victron energy now this is for a 100 amp hour system

not a system battery we're just looking at a single 100 amp hour battery purchase

so it looks like ventrac victron energy it's a thousand bucks for one of their batteries with a built-in BMS very

expensive or we've got 570 for the sok

so uh then 874 for the battleborn so if if you're kind of brand loyal

it's pretty easy which one you're going to go with battleborn or victron sok is kind of this new kid on the Block and I

was very interested in it um so

we're going to talk about why this is the one I chose so I'm kind of going to

the end and I'll rewind here so the first thing you know do you buy

because the price or brand that would be the easiest question once you answer that question you're on your way these

other questions don't really matter as much because all those features that you're looking for probably already baked into the name brand battery

the next one is um are you buying it for because of

capacity so some of the name brands like battleborn for example they have the

game changer battery and instead of buying one battery that has it's 100 amp

hours and you're getting four or six of them you

know with the game changer batteries they're like um don't quote me but it's like 275 amp

hours for One battery so you could get just three of those

instead of having to purchase you know six or eight of uh like a normal brand in a 100 amp hour

format um the next thing has to do with the

built-in battery protection system or the battery management system which is the BMS

and if I'm losing you guys here just a little bit um you know ask me questions in the chat

love to hear your questions so BMS if you don't know what a BMS is

we're just going to go uh oh goodness come on Wikipedia

uh BMS it's essentially A system that protects

the battery um from operating outside of its safe area

so you can kind of think of it like it's kind of like uh it's like a mini

computer inside and it's always looking to see the state of charge

what individual uh pack or cell voltage is it helps it

with um you know over charging uh one thing

that's incredibly important is to make sure that it does not charge at a low temperature or a

temperature that's too low it's essentially freezing but some of these new lithium batteries can go below

freezing so like negative instead of zero they can go down to negative 20 safely

um but you want to have that that disconnect protection so these are just some that were off the

top of my head low temp disconnect which is really important

um and if you're not familiar with again these batteries would all put in

the uh the chat box I'll answer this but low temperature disconnect

a lithium battery so specifically lithium iron

phosphate so not the same that's in your cell

phone like a different um different chemistry so lithium iron phosphate

can discharge at a very low temperature but if it gets down too low freezing

negative 20 that type of range if you try to charge it you'll permanently bold

so say that heater can't keep up because you're in the Yukon or something like that

what will happen is the batteries will disconnect essentially turn off there's another way

to think about it and the solar can't provide a charge to them and it won't

damage it so they're safe and then typically what happens is when

the battery gets back up to temperature the BMS will reset and allow it to continue charging so it's almost like

nothing happened some other things are high temperature

charging so cars like uh

Teslas and stuff like that the battery Bank actually has um

like a cooling circuit almost like a liquid AIO on a computer if you guys are into

building computers um so it'll have like a

a grid and it'll pump coolant through the battery system to absorb the heat

when the batteries are being charged at a high current so

if your batteries in your van so say that you have your

van it's outside and you're going hiking and it's 95 degrees or in Arizona it's

like 100 and something like that it's probably like a hundred and 20 30 in your van sometimes depending on the

specifications of the battery it'll be too hot to charge so it needs to

disconnect in that situation the other one is over current

so imagine you have a charging system for your bat battery it could be solar charge

controller it could be a DC to DC from your engine battery and say one of those systems runs away

and what I mean by that is they the whatever circuitry limited them from

giving you a certain voltage charge voltage uh just say it started going to like 15 16 17 volts like whatever was

outside the spec of the battery that could damage it so over current is also

built into the BMS then you have simple things like short circuit protection

circuit breakers stuff like that built in and then another one uh is a sense cable

for the battery to Auto balance the cells and again this is all going over

your head um we could definitely explain this when we get into more like electronic electrical videos

above and circuits because we can talk about that in depth but essentially there's cables within the

packs inside the battery the lithium iron phosphate battery and there's sense

cables and what those cables do is um certain batteries have groups of cells

that are combined together and if one of those packs is charged in a

faster rate or slower rate the BMS can modulate the charge rate to

those different packs so that you kind of you get an even charge

um now rule of thumb is you want to uh fully charge all your batteries uh in

your battery Bank individually so take so say you have 400 amp hour batteries you want to take them

all out put on the charger individually get them topped up all the way and make sure that

each one of them reads out the same voltage before you wire them together

in series to uh to run your system and then

uh the next thing would be talking about series you know can these 12 volt batteries be wired into a 24 or 48 volt

orientation

all right okay

is our string back [Music]

my OBS said it was a disconnected the stream for a second and reconnected so yeah let me know if you guys can uh

still hear me at the current moment um

all right sounds like you guys can hear me so we might have

um okay let's go back here so what I'm talking about see what time do you guys join here what

time was this

yes Daniel I will talk about the batteries that I'm installing um

now this is cool if you guys are late that's all good I'll do a really quick summary about what I'm talking about

so it seems like it's very hard to choose a lithium battery because the prices are

all over the place and the specs and features they look the same uh that was my experience

so what I did is I put a little cheat sheet here for you guys so that you can go through and you can have a process to

look at uh not to be Cordy but like be a smart

Shopper I don't know anything better to say um you know know what you're kind of

talking about before you spend a lot of money because these batteries they're really really expensive

um for example this is okay like I was saying earlier it's 570 bucks battleborn is 8.74.

and then victron energy is like a thousand but these batteries are all 100

amp hour they all have bms's built into them they roughly have the same cycles

and uh what's kind of funny is the warranties are very close victron

actually makes you they say 10 years but it's because that you they give you the option to purchase

an additional five years after you purchase the battery so

I did some research for you guys it's it when you look at the fine print it's it's pretty funny

um so I'll tell you what I went with the sok

and so we'll talk about why I went with SLK as we get to the end of this

so I'll quickly go over this little problem section um

if you're buying price or brand it's pretty easy if that's your only two things so if you have the money to buy

the brand you want and you're you're an Apple guy you know or you know Windows

person and you're going to do that anyway don't really worry about the budget but if you

are on a budget and don't think about a budget being negative because

say that you could be do a better job on the battery budget and that gets you a better fridge for example

um you know you're just kind of moving the money around in your budget you're not really losing anything I mean if

anything you're gaining something by being more on budget and kind of get

your best bang for the buck uh then moving through here we talked

about really quickly about the BMS that's the battery measurement system that is

what is like it's like a little mini computer that is looking at all the systems of the battery the cell voltages

if they're high low you know if you're charging at too high of a temperature uh

if it's too cold outside to protect it so we kind of talked about that and then we're getting right back up to real time

here we talked about Kennedy wired in 24 or 48 volt series

and that has to do with your power system those higher voltages allow for lower

current which means your wire size can be less and you don't have to get such a

thick chunky wire that's more expensive um most people do this if

they want to run their run a 24 or 48 volt AC unit like a real

high efficiency one um and I would say that people in this

camp are not really a budget they can have a bigger budget

so they go for the kind of higher efficiency option

but that doesn't mean 12 volt systems are bad at all I stick with the

12 volt system because if you can imagine if I build your van

and something breaks regardless if it's a manufacturer defect or what if you if

it's if you can't go on Amazon and quickly get that part or go to a manufacturer and it's on the Shelf it's probably going to mess up your trip

so if you decide to go with a 24 or 48 volt system those items are not readily

available on the Shelf uh there's not too many of them on Amazon so if you're

in a pinch it's hard to quickly get a replacement

so 12 volt stuff is much more um

it's just readily available it's cheaper you know it's more volume when they you

know people that produce it um and then the last thing on my little

kind of getting you prepped is the warranty so kind of mapping out the warranty of different

uh manufacturers and they're pretty much all competing in

the same market so they should be very close to one another

uh it's funny to me that victron is less than sok

um which is interesting because I mean it's okay you know overseas Brim

so all right let me tell you how to fix this problem how do you how do you make

it easier to choose a lithium battery so let's make sure there's not a

question here that I might can answer quick sides

so yeah so Daniel I will get after I talk about the uh the lithium batteries I'll go into a little q a and we'll talk

about like lead acid old school or like AGM and stuff like that because all of

this information will apply to it there's just a little twist about uh

lead acid AGM batteries that I'll tell you about

it's it's really simple but let's save that for the end so I I got got your question right here

[Music] so how do you fix a problem well the first thing is it's a little candy

phrase I just made up but it's no the nomenclature the nomenclature and nomenclature if you

guys are gotta let me tell you what this is it's pretty

much the words that are used in a particular field so when I was uh where we go so when I was an engineer

uh wait did I even go to that slide there you go know the nomenclature

so when I was an engineer and I was green and even though you know they teach all this stuff in college

there's still all these different uh specific words and stuff that explain

like gear boxes and hydraulic systems and you just kind of got to know what

you're talking about you got to learn those words so that when I went to go and talk to like a vendor or a machine

shop I can communicate and I don't sound like I'm you know straight out of college right

so you learn those words of the industry so the words that I'm going to teach you

guys and you may know this you may not this is this video is for everyone

but you need to know what battery voltage you're working with so 12 volts to stay simple

100 amp hours so 100 amp hours

is uh I'm trying to give you guys a real

simple explanation so don't get technical with it don't

turn it into watt hours and all this stuff like that just uh

use it as that's how all the companies are describing the same

amount of energy stored in the battery it's a 100 amp hour battery

okay stay simple don't go down the wormhole next the BMS

so the BMS battery Jeep battery management system

they should all by default have one built in now uh victron energy does have a system

where when you get to the bigger systems like the 200 amp hour systems or even the 100 amp hour with multiple batteries

they have a central BMS so there's a central BMS and the uh

all the batteries plug into the central BMS to communicate

um and that's just kind of a victron energy thing uh let's see here

the three Dakotas yeah Dakotas um

I don't know much about them other than their lithium battery just like everyone else but I don't know the specifics if

they have you know built-in BMS and to me the number one

uh safety item on a battery is a low temperature disconnect

if you guys know uh let's see here if we go

this guy will prowse I think everybody that's watching if you

don't know who will prouse is you should go check him out uh he's kind of the guru of

you know 12 volt systems and explaining in detail

you know kind of the the nitty-gritty behind everything so I'm gonna kind of go over here to this

YouTube channel so this is his YouTube channel will prowse off-grid solar power Channel

and he's got amazing videos so videos on battery reviews and this so his channel

is how I found out about uh sok batteries because I've never heard of them before

but this will actually show you once you watch this battery

once you watch this battery man it's late right once you've watched

this channel just a little bit on the sok and how he Compares it to uh like the battleborn's Heat

he takes a multi-tool and cuts through all these batteries rips them open and tests them so you really get just

the best uh view of how a battery is designed and

made and there's really no way for the manufacturer to hide behind fancy branding sticker labels stuff like

that he cuts the batteries open he tells you if that low temperature disconnect wire is there or it's it's not there so

the marketing material could tell you that that low temperature disconnect sensor is on the battery but he's going to cut

it open and take the camera and show you that it's there or not there

um so the next part uh

would be size like weight and dimensions

and okay let's go here so don't mess this up it's an expensive

mistake and you don't want to mess up

uh by buying the wrong battery and if any of you guys have already bought a

battery and you're just using this to kind of learn about the battery you bought you're probably fine with the better you

bought so I'm not saying that's you messed up but uh

the first this is kind of the order of importance to me it's just my opinion

so you need to know your capacity

so you need to know the capacity of the system You're Building

for a couple reasons one you it's not that you want to overbuild all

the time but you can do the math and you can

um you can find out you know what you need you know are you running an induction

stove are you running an inverter what type of inverter are you running are you running

um you know a thousand watt inverter two thousand three thousand four

thousand uh they kind of rule of thumb or this is my rule of thumb is if you have a

thousand watt inverter you probably have one battery if you have a 2000 watt inverter you

probably have 200 amp hours worth or two 100 amp hour batteries and then like if you have 4 000 you can

safely run a 3000 watt inverter why is that important because it is the

amount of current the on-demand current that you need to uh pull

across the battery Bank because uh yeah Daniel yeah yeah Will is

it's awesome I've watched I I don't know how probably 100 videos

um yeah I got to him about three years ago and you know they were really he

just has really good information but as far as the uh the capacity goes

you um you need to also find out now we'll talk about this over here

this compare and contrast so I have the specification sheets pulled up for each battery

and I'm going to teach you how to read the spec sheets

um so the next thing would be dimensions and weight

the dimensions is that's quite obvious where do you want to put the battery in your van do you have room

what's nice is uh nine times out of ten these batteries are going to be in the same form factor because they kind of

they uh they're kind of mimicking the car battery format

um I forgot what that format the name was but they're kind of mimicking that

format uh so they're usually all about the same size so for example like if you went to

the uh the sok then you know this is your typical

your your battery format you know

oh man look at those millimeters out of the way

um and then the next thing is uh once you once you know what size

you know the capacity of the battery you know the dimensions you need to put it to place it where you want to place it

in your van um consider the weight but all lithium iron phosphate batteries they're pretty

much the same weight I think they're like you know 34 pounds 27 pounds stuff stuff like that

the next thing is features you know are you buying do you have a BMS like

the victron Energy System where it's a separate system that plugs into the specific batteries or you have internal

BMS does it have that low temperature disconnect um you know one thing that

it's a cool feature I don't think it's important but does it have Bluetooth connectability can you individually

connect via Bluetooth to each of your batteries um that's kind of a cool feature but

I I don't I don't think it's necessary if it's included in the price that's cool

um and then speaking of price budget so budget is the last uh item

and the reason I say that is it's more important to know the capacity first

and size out your system and then take a deep breath and then go

look at how much the batteries cost because you can't get away with your capacity because

I'm telling you guys write down everything that you're going

to want to do when you go on that trip you know you want to recharge your computers uh do you

um you know how long are you going to stay out there

uh what are you going to run um when you're out there you know induction stove microwave you know you're gonna be

cooking a lot is it going to be you know in the winter time there's not that much

light outside and your solar is not going to kind of get you that Optimum power

during the day all kinds of stuff like that or do you want to forego solar and

just do it off the engine and have a bigger battery bank so that you know you're not always worrying about how

much power you have so you know can I overdo it

um so let's get into the next part uh the actual batteries themselves

so we kind of know the nomenclature about what we're all sizing here

and the next thing we're going to do is we're going to talk about the life cycle

warranty and cost uh and let's see here

we need to let's edit that we'll put a little comma there we go

so lifecycle warranty cost and so check out these three examples

they're pretty much spot on the same there's a couple different uh differences as far as specifications

but they're really really close so sok

this battery is uh so this guy

let's see here so this guy's made overseas

it comes in a metal housing and I like it because the price but the

feet the specs the specs are really really good so let's start going through these specs

um how do I want to set this up for you guys let's go over this and then we'll we'll

dive into the specs so sok has a four to eight thousand

cycle like a charge cycle that's uh charge and discharge

so that's how many you can expect to get out of it and it also you know depends on

how you use the battery if you've fully discharge it or you you

know halfway discharge it that sort of thing uh they give you a seven year

manufacturer's warranty for uh you know workmanship build quality that

type of type of thing pretty standard and it's 570 dollars for

this one battery that's 100 amp hours so next up we have battleborn battleborn

everyone knows battleborn they're kind of uh

you know they go to if you didn't know anything about batteries

um they're a good battery but check this out three to five thousand Cycles so

uh that's interesting that they advertise that they have a 10-year warranty though so

that's that's nice a little bit more than sok but if you look at this

you know we're like 300 more pretty pretty close of the same specs

again we'll go with over specs in just a second and then we have victron energy

I could not find the Cycles in any of their data sheets so they don't have like a cycle count maybe if you guys know that

um you can let me know but I couldn't find it anywhere

in this five years it was hard to find that too when I found it it said five years with the option to

purchase an additional five years to make it a 10-year warranty so after you spend

after you spent a thousand twenty six dollars on the battery you're allowed to buy more

uh warranty oh so nice

um but I really can hate battleborn and victron great batteries

that's okay you can't beat uh you can't beat the

cost on this it's it's and uh we've been using these batteries uh

let's see how many months March April May June July August September October December probably 10

months uh cycling on and off and there's only one time that they got

so dead that they actually had to disconnect and that had to do with you know no sun weather uh

Thomas wasn't driving um enough to fully recharge and at the same time the fridge was running a

hundred percent full out and but that's a cool thing it's cool that the whole system is robust to where

it all works everything kind of self-healed sun came back he drove it for a couple trips everything came back

on within uh fully charged within uh two or three days

so it worked it got down to its low State and did all its thing all the things that it said it would do

um okay so there is that's what we're doing so next we're going to get into comparing and contrasting and then I'm

going to teach you how to uh read these uh spec sheets so you kind of understand

what they're talking about I'm going to pause on this uh

I'll pause really quick let's see here and just catch up on these

on the chat

um say Daniel single burner induction stove

ecoflow 75 liter dual fridge freezer combo and all the YouTube

good good there you go yeah if it's all running if it's if it's all running that it's good

um let's see

renergy good yeah yeah running is good so everything in my personal van is

renergy um the battery's not renergy the battery

trying to think it's been a couple years what battery am I using

the top of my head I have to go check it out I will go check it really quick

um but I just have a single 100 amp hour battery

let's see let me let me go check real quick we got YouTube

yeah keep the questions coming I'm gonna go up here I need to search for something while you guys are thinking of

questions we will get to the spec sheet here in just a second

see here

yeah I'm looking up I got this video that shows the uh the company that I used for my

my van let's see here it is right here

Ames power yep Ames power so I have a 100 amp hour

um so this one right here

when it comes up so this is what I have so Ames power

100 amp hour um this is back in the day when I was first

building my van so definitely on a budget with that van and uh I got this off Facebook Marketplace

um the person I bought it from uh didn't know how to charge the battery they kept trying to use a

like a lead acid AGM battery charger and they said man yeah there's something that's just wrong with the battery and I

was like yeah I think I can figure it out so I got a good I got a really good deal

on that um but Renegy uh

yeah so renergy is what this band is going to have so I already have three of

their batteries I'll show you one I have it right here

so this so this is a renegie 100 amp hour this battery in particular is the

fancy one so this has a built-in built-in heating function so this will

allow this to charge in extremely cold temperatures

um so it's got built-in built-in heater in here this is our smart lithium this one

is not the Bluetooth version and uh actually is this where is it let's see

here no at the time I bought this this was on

this was a way better deal than the Bluetooth but now I think they by default have the Bluetooth in there

anyway these batteries are cool because there's they're a smart battery and they have a they have an Uplink in the top

and they come with a little power switch and you can turn these into sleep mode

or shelf storage mode so they go to like an ultra low power State inside

so there's you know features like that so I've got three of these and I'm gonna actually buy three more I'll tell you

why in a second

So the plan is to put a Dometic RTX 2000 AC unit in that van

and you'll you need a minimum of about 600 amp hours to get a good night or two

of AC usage and what I mean by that is a knight of AC and then enough battery

left over to run the components in your van while you charge up and drive

so yeah short answer renergie batteries are good um all the solar panels I use are Renegy

uh I even use the DC DC charger

and uh see while we're talking about it let me just pull this

um

so renergy came up with this product about a year or so ago and it's the 50 amp DC to DC on board

uh battery charger with mppt and what's really cool about this is

it charges via alternator it has integrated mppt so it's a DC to

DC charger it's a mppt solar charge controller

and it has a function to where if it senses that your engine battery is uh too low of a

voltage it will reverse safely and top off your engine battery

of your car it does a lot of stuff so this is this is a pretty cool unit

I'll show you what it looks like and then I'll I'll get back to the stream here

this is a this is what the unit looks like so it's big I mean this is my hand

so this thing is is big but it has um

if you look at the back it gets pretty warm look at that look at those heat fins so you definitely need to make sure you

offset it from wherever you're charging but what's cool is these caps come off

and then you just put the wires through here so it's a nice clean setup and it's kind of a one and done system

uh so yeah since we're talking about renergy

foreign

yeah people use renergy for off-grid cabins um I think renergie's just a uh

I have to call it a budget brand because that's that's where their pricing's at but they're they're really good budget

brand um I've had uh I had a couple things that I was using on my

personal van like the pwm solar charge controller you know I called up their

customer service to get some help on something and I mean they're really on top of it I mean it took them a while because

you know is during the last two years with everything going on and uh but they you know they got help tickets they're

really organized with kind of getting back to you and doing doing a follow-up with whatever problem like return

requestion like that yeah but for off-grid cabins uh I like

Renegade they have um here so before we get into batteries we'll

get back to battery specs I think this is good just to talk about this during the Stream

uh but if we go to brennergy so this is what I like about renergie

when you're a builder you you want to have quick answers or

just say you're an engineer too you know I wanna I wanna look at the specs of things

quickly so if I just click on the solar panel I know I can scroll down

really quick down here to the bottom and I can look at the specifications

they're right here um and then if I need more information I

can click here and their their spec sheets are just great I mean look at

this all this information size of the solar panel um

it's just very helpful helpful for me when I'm

you know putting putting a build together because I can do all the math first

before my customer purchases the the items I'm not I'm not using my customer

as the kind of guinea pig to figure out if something's going to work or not I can I can do the math first

you know put it on paper build it and then keep going

let's see here um the blue Eddie yep those are good

uh see what was this

so Goal Zero was also good um

if you guys are if anybody is uh looking for other types of Power Systems

so we'll probably talk about this a little bit more at the end of the stream I want to get through the spec sheets and teaching you guys that and then keep

the questions going um because I think the end of this stream we'll talk about different

options like Daniel was talking about different battery options

uh that you can choose from other well these are lithium but

because Daniel I think you were talking about like lead acid AGM sizing

all right so let's talk about see

here so let's talk about the spec sheets

I'm going to show you why these batteries are pretty much in line with each other so if we go to

the sok and I'm just going to pull out specific things I'm not I'm only going to show you guys the important stuff

um that stands out to me and it makes a difference between these two

so the uh so the nominal voltage debt that's important too

because that is uh has to do with kind of like the like uh

the voltage that your batteries are are typically going to be at

um because when you charge your lithium iron phosphate battery it's going to get pretty high you like

you know 14.6 uh and then it doesn't stay there forever it kind of kind of

starts drifting down but really the most important is 100 amp

hour so your capacity 100 amp hour

um then you want to move down this stuff right here it's not that important

uh the next most important thing is your maximum charge current

so there's going to be a recommended the reason I bring up maximum charge current

how long do you want to drive to recharge the batteries and then how long do you want the sun to recharge your

batteries I mean you're going to want to push it to select that renergy device that I had

that's why they make a 50 amp version um the other reason that

50 amp is another usually a Max is because

your engine alternator can usually safely provide that much

amperage to another source of charging without burning up

and then also specifically for the smart alternators so a smaller gosh I can't

talk tonight a smart alternator is a newer alternator in cars trucks

and it's important that when you get a DC to

DC charger that's the charger come from your engine's battery to

connect to like your lithium battery to charge it it's important that it's smart

alternator approved so what that means is instead of uh it can sense

the voltage that so when you have a smart alternator when

you crank your engine up it's usually at a lower voltage so it's not charging your battery system

um and then when it discovers a load it'll kick up so I could be wrong in

this but the DC DC Chargers that are for small smart alternators

create that circumstance in which the smart alternator will wake up and increase the voltage

I mean the current output to begin charging that was a long-winded way to explain

that

um yeah so maximum charge current wait let's go back maximum charge current that's what you

want to look for the recommended charge voltage when you buy a DC to DC charger

and uh you know let me know if you guys don't know what a DC to DC charger is it's completely fine

but when you buy a DC to DC charger you're going to have a couple options on there it's going to say is this a lead

acid an AGM or lithium iron phosphate chemistry that it's going to ask you for

the battery chemistry based on the battery chemistry there's a set there's set values for

charge cycles and so the example of the Facebook Marketplace

Guy where I bought the battery from he couldn't get the battery that's in my van uh the reason he sold it to him is he

couldn't get it to charge is because he wasn't using he didn't have enough juice going to the battery to charge it so the

battery was always just it was always dying because it never got topped off it never got fully charged there wasn't

enough voltage um to charge it so

that is what the recommended charge voltage uh info is about

this one is very important maximum batteries in series so that's how many

batteries you can connect at one time uh so that might be a deal breaker for you

for example if I need to do six batteries like I do in this van

which uh energy can do

this one recommends only doing four so that's why we have 400 amp hours in

Thomas's van now it's okay check it out they have

uh different products so in that case maybe you go up to a

206 amp hour battery so this guy let's just see if this

let's just see if this one can okay so see how the maximum batteries in your series is four

so since we go up to 200 that's how we can get more batteries it's the same number here but we've

doubled our amp hours all right stay with me

[Music] let's get rid of all this

current is 100 amps Peak discharge discharge current is 200

amps this is really important right here so say that you are running an induction

stove and you have 200 amp hours of batteries

that's your battery Bank yeah two 100 amp hour batteries um

uh and you have it in so you have an inverter

you need to make sure that your Peak discharge current is enough

to support the inverter that you choose to buy so

if you have two 100 amp hour batteries wouldn't be wise to have a 4000 watt

inverter because your Peak discharge current may not

provide enough current to the inverter

and it's not going to work or it's not going to work properly your BMS discharge cutoff current

so this would be the protection for your amperage

discharge cutoff current yeah I guess that's an over an over current situation that's when it cuts

off um and then your low voltage disconnect this is important too so this will save

your battery if you leave something on too long so if you leave something on too long that's the low voltage

disconnect number um

and then the BMS okay so the recommended low voltage disconnect

what that means is at 11.2 if you have a system so like a victron system or maybe

you have a renergy system where you can dial in where you want it to cut off uh

like if you have a if you have a way to dial in the cutoff

voltage for the system so this is not the BMS of the battery cutting itself off this is the system disconnecting

itself if you can do that this manufacturer recommends you do it at 11.2

but if you don't have that the BMS is going to cut itself off at 10.4 so it'll

let you drain the batteries out just a little bit longer and then the reconnect voltage when it's

when it is allowed to be charged back up to 11.6 the system will cut back on

let's see and then over here we just got Dimensions we got the weight

metal case they do have a waterproof option so if

we go back to sok and we go back to products

we have a marine grade so this is a fully sealed battery

and it is what is it hold on a second

yeah it's hilariously hilariously a dollar or more

I bet that's an inventory thing um but you got

uh plastic sealed milk marine grade so if you know if you want

to buy this like a boat or something like that or you didn't want to you know you probably get this one

but the nice thing is this this one it used to not be able to be opened but I

see that they have these uh I see that there's these screws so you

can't open it so down here battery is serviceable that

is that's probably the big bonus that everybody likes about that's okay is you

can actually open it up and if you needed to replace a damaged cell you could do that you could go online and buy a new cell so you could rebuild your

batteries um

so let's go back to the specs which

we have yeah the weight um they even give you the terminal torque

that's nice all right so here's the next important

part oh wait I'm not even showing you the screen there we go so

discharge temperatures it'll discharge down to negative four and up to 140

degrees Fahrenheit it'll charge in a range of 32 degrees to

113 degrees this is storage BMS high temp cut off is

at 149 degrees the reconnect is at 131

uh but will press did test it in this 32 right here that is the low temperature disconnect

so that's why it does not operate below that

here's some dimensions all right so next up we're going to have

battleborn battleborn is also dragonfly energies if you see those

um around and let's come on down here and let's

start picking away at this so this one is 31 Pounds

um so the sok was 28 pounds so you know pretty similar

um it goes this one actually goes down to negative four degrees Fahrenheit so a little bit below freezing for operating

temperature uh it's water resistance

water resistant but they should be submerged

it's got a built-in BMS

so here we got 14.2 to 14.6 the sok

14.6 I mean these are pretty much all going to be the same

um so charge rate is 50 of the battery Bank

capacity so 50 of the battery would be 50 amps

uh charge temperature above freezing discharge can go a little bit below that

um well I mean that's quite a bit but these higher numbers are about the same just for the chemistry

and then this right here is explaining how you can take the one hem the 12 volt 200 amp hour Bank

so this is this is the same example I was giving you guys um how you can continuously run

200 amps for 30 second or a situation where you could do

400 amps for 30 seconds so when we were talking about

the peak discharge current this 200 amps typically it's going to be twice the

amount of the amp hours for a short burst so say you're turning

on your inverter there's going to be a surge of current to kind of kick on that inverter

so these the search did not last longer than you know a couple seconds so they

give you three and then if you need to pull a full 200 amps

um this one says three seconds sometimes it can be it can be more

so for example this one it can do a little bit better it can do a surge for 30 seconds so twice the

amp hours for 30 seconds so if that makes sense

uh moving on down

so this is the BMS and it's pretty much the same uh the same things that sok is going to

have so right here we've got over charging sorts short circuit low temperature

disconnect and then the options here high voltage low voltage High volt high temperature

low temperature um balancing of cells so they're all going to be pretty much

the same right there and then they actually give you a little

chart on how to size the cables properly so these are the cables that are

connecting the each battery to themselves and so

if you have 100 amp hour battery connected to 100 amp hour battery you have the potential of 200 amp hours

to be or 200 amps to be pulled through that battery so if you look at this chart

you've got you know 150 to 200 amps being pulled through you're looking at a two odd gauge wire

and so that's what we used on Thomas's van you can see it the longer you go the bigger the wire

um you need actually I think we use four ought

I have to check my notes and then at the bottom here they just

have some stuff on how to maintain your battery the return policy

and then here we go we've got our um so this is their

kind of warranty 10 years this many cycles

uh Daniel this might show you what maybe you were asking this question about the difference between Lithium and the lead

acid options essentially lead acid it can provide pretty much the same

you know power but the depth of discharge is is why people like lithium

so much you can use more of the battery whereas a lead acid you can't

discharge it past 50 or it'll damage the battery the life of the battery significantly

plus the cycle counts much lower and besides the depth of discharge most

people like that you know it's almost a quarter of the weight

uh you know warranty's longer not existent that's funny

um yeah so this is actually a pretty good chart for anybody that's uh that doesn't know the difference between a lithium

iron phosphate and a lead acid chemistry as far as battery life

warranty stuff like that um then they give you some stuff about

accessories uh that's pretty much it all right and then finally we have

victron so this is our most expensive battery

um so victron their stuff is a little bit more challenging to to read and understand

uh it does have integrated BMS um I had to go with the lithium super

Pacs as the example for you guys tonight because most of their batteries are

they don't include a BMS in them and they're relying on you to have uh

an external BMS which is if you look at the really big builds like the

the 24 volt systems and 48 volt systems that some people have

just a little bit more technical with their their stuff but if we go to the 100 amp hour right

here you can see that you've got 100 amp hour

they have 2500 Cycles which seems really low

um so the max continuous discharge

so this is where you gotta be careful one of their batteries has only 50 amps

of discharge so that's not good if you have

200 amp hours of a battery Bank and you're trying to power a 2000 watt

inverter which should be fine so actually if you go on renergie's site let me see if I can pull this up

I hope they have this chart on here still let's see

so if you go to renergie's site if you look up the minimum 12 volt battery Bank

sizing I like this chart it's very simple straightforward so if you have a 700 watt inverter you

need at least 150 amp hour battery or at least 100 amp hour battery or their 170

model if even a thousand watt inverter you need at least two 50

1 100 if you have a 2000 watt inverter look at this you need let's just stick on 100

amp hours you need two because you need 200 amps potential

to to serve the 2000 Watts of current and then if you have a 3000

watt inverter you need at least three 100 amp hour batteries so check this out

the victron if you don't buy the high current model

so so you actually bought this one if you don't buy the high current model you're limited only 50 amps

so if you buy two of these you're only going to get a hundred amp hours discharged

so it's like you're powering a thousand watt inverter when you're really trying to do a 2000

so those are this little nitpicky things that you got to watch out for

is this right here now you can it'll let you do it for 10

seconds but that defeats the whole purpose

um these are the same Max continuous charge current so look at

this you get 50 amps for this one and you get 100 amps for

this High current so that would be a bonus of the high current model because that you could have two 50 amp

Chargers charging that quicker but guess what you're going to pay for it

actually that one that I just showed you this uh again no affiliation with Van

life Outfitters I'm just using their website to show the product um this is not the high current version

let's see how much the high current version is um

so I don't I don't even see the high current here let's see let's see if I can find it

real quick

yeah this stuff oh here we go high current what's this

nope still 50. all right we'll come back

so pay attention to that come down parallel yes Unlimited

so that'd be going like uh

see discharge down to

okay storage so pretty close and then so that's

pretty much it so they're they're data sheet is pretty simple so there is a benefit because you can charge the

high current version very aggressively at 100 amps

I don't know why this is so low because on their warranty sheet I found this number oh wait never mind maybe

that's our answer 2500 so uh

yep so let's look at these prices one more time and then I'm going to come back

check out the comments and then that might be our stream tonight so if you get a question

hop in here put your question in so final thoughts the sok

it's got a good warranty it's got good charging Cycles pretty much in line with the battleborn

victron energy if I were to buy four of the soks it's

going to cost me two thousand two hundred eighty dollars so this is the example I'm giving you

for Thomas's van the sok 2 280 for those four batteries

if we had about battleborn it's 3496 dollars

and then if we bought the victron batteries that's four thousand one hundred and four dollars

so almost double so we could uh if you went with an sok

system you could double your W system so it was a pretty wild

um yeah so let's uh check out the chat here

so it looks like we don't have any questions um yeah guys I hope you enjoyed this live

stream this is uh that sheet you guys can pause the video maybe take a screenshot of it

if you wanted to have some notes from that um oh so red Arc does not have a

I don't think they have batteries

so red Arc is a is a as a power system there they're like a power control

system um actually I'm gonna take that back

they have it looks like they have bad I don't know I don't know about the the Victor uh the

red Arc batteries um so they actually have lithium deep cycle

batteries here that's pretty interesting and see they have that chart so they show you

oh this is actually pretty cool so they've got a chart

if you don't know about red Arc red Arc is an Australian company they make uh kind of overlanding power system setups

that's what we use for Thomas's van because we wanted to have the uh the

wireless Bluetooth connection to a system so we could run all the circuits off of his phone so that was a perk of

red art um and it looks like they got a really nice chart here to show you you know are you

doing an air compressor laptop two slice toaster [Laughter]

such a random category uh coffee machine um that's definitely an Australian thing

uh hair dryer straightener microwave electric kettle and then it shows you the different

inverters and then how many batteries you would need to uh to power that and this all looks pretty

adequate so you see one battery for 1500 watts

two batteries for 2001 inverter good thing to point out

um and then get like a little video here their management system so they do have batteries interesting

um so let's see here there's deep cycle so here's a lithium

I'm not sure why they're combining deep cycle with lithium that's interesting

so that is wow man that's really expensive

if they're set they're selling that battery for two thousand no no no no

so that battery's even more than victron

man that is so much for a 100 amp hour battery

let's look at the specifications while we've learned what to look for

okay that's normal that's normal this is not normal so this is a pro

right here the maximum discharge is 170 well no that's 30 amps less

than the battleborn the peak discharge okay maybe so if this

is true I don't know how that's possible I'm not sure how 400 amps is possible

of the 100 amp hour

see the other these two things to me don't make sense this doesn't make sense

uh because if you can do this and this this should be like a hundred this should be like the victron energy

um

three year warranty um yeah I love redarc but I

do think that they kind of maybe white label Rebrand some stuff like that not

sure if I should say that on the stream but I just want to be honest with you guys that that's

um there's probably another a bunch of brands that are using this uh because that's that's a that is

expensive

they make really really good stuff so it it might be possible that this this can do something that at the current moment

I don't know that I can do anyway um

Daniel 28 24 volt and 48 volt yeah let's talk about that

so there is a

um there's a there's a math equation uh

that I'm going to show you a picture and it's going to explain the relationship between voltage

current say uh yeah voltage current and amperage I mean

uh what else let me just pull it up uh

Ohm's law that's what I'm talking about

oh what were you talking about

440 volts

so ask me that question one more time I'm going to show you um so if you guys remember back in

school there's something called Ohm's law and it's what you use to calculate the

relationship between voltage current resistance and you have this little triangle

so what's interesting is another way that you can look at the relationships

between uh I wish I had a better picture

I don't know why they're doing ier um

let me find another picture here

oh the exchange rate oh yeah well maybe that thing maybe didn't

calculate the uh

measure of that I mean if that's a good deal I mean they make real rhetoric makes really good I

mean really good components so I can imagine if they're selling a battery regardless if it's rebranded for their

systems it's probably legit um

all right so we're going to talk about we're going

to get a little nerdy here just for a second because this is going to show you uh

I'm trying to find a good example

so essentially you have this relationships between what amps and volts

and if if you think of your your household power so

um uh I used to DJ and when I set up my sound system

um I knew from my experience with you know Ohm's law and all this stuff in a

uh different sense I applied it to DJing anyway long

story short if you don't have enough power to power your speakers the Ohm's law is always an effect you

can't you can't change this law so if you have a power system like your

batteries if anything in the Triangle gets messed up it has to go somewhere because you

can't you can't uh or is that you can't create or destroy

energy you know and it just moves from into one different form

so for example if you have uh

uh like 100 amp hour battery and it's at 12 volts

then you're going to have a certain value for your wattage and so you can multiply

I'm not sure how long I'm going to go down this Rabbit Hole I'm trying to prove a point here in just a second

so if you have um like 100 amp hours and you times it at 12 volts you're

going to have 1200 watts so let me use my pad over here

foreign

let me pull up this notepad really quick

Come on load up

this is important this will make you be able to understand the relationship between the

batteries your your inverter and the stuff that you're using

oh you see 24 and 48 I thought it was the Australian battery but there's a

company down south in USA that makes the lithium battery system hmm okay

foreign

trying to figure one of my notes and my notes are not opening up there we go there we go

okay to the drawing board

so hopefully you guys can still hear me foreign

we've got our triangle where we got Watts amps

and we got volts so if we have

if we have a 100 amp hour battery that so

at the current moment think 100 amp hours is 100 amps that is what it is but

the amp hours um are something on its own as well but we're just going to stick to a 100 amp

that of current that the battery can provide times 12 volts

this will change it could be you know 14.6 at a maximum you could

have a lower voltage all the way down to like 11.6 so this range is going to change this number

but just for the example purposes we're just going to stick with with the patrol bolts

so you have amps times voltage

is going to give you so you got 1200

this is going to give you your Watts so the reason

you need so say you have uh

200 amps times 12.

man we got two thousand four hundred this is why

you need this is why you need two

100 amp hour batteries this way you need two of two 100

amp hours so I need two 100 amp hour batteries to

run a 2 000 watt inverter

so that's why they make that designation and that's why you need at least one 100

amp hour battery to provide the

the Thousand Watts for a thousand watt

inverter okay does that make sense

now this is how you troubleshoot problems so take this example

right here and since it's math we if we if anything changes within it it affects everything

else so for example if

your current uh say you're

um what's the best way to do this

so we've got so like say that we had uh

our voltage dropped then our current would increase if that

makes sense yeah

um so we're going to go down a we've already been streaming for quite a bit we're going to go down a wormhole if

I start teaching you that I think that would be perfect for another video because

uh that would be good in a like a van safety video because if you're having

wires in your van that are heating up you don't know why it's probably because there's there's some type of resistance

that you're not accounting for that can be a power draw that's too much on the

system that you didn't calculate for in the beginning that could be a system that's trying to charge your system and

it's not doing it properly and it's causing a lot of heat because either you didn't the size the wires appropriately

coming from the battery charger like the DC DC charger two uh

your lithium batteries so you can use this formula right here when you go to

layout all the components of your van if you didn't do it right there

it's going to show up down the road in your van build um

let's see here I'm gonna do about one or two more minutes if you guys have any more questions pop them in

and we'll answer them

foreign

so don't see any more questions coming through so we're gonna go ahead and end the live stream tonight thank you guys

so much for watching thank you for the questions and comments and uh yeah this definitely helps us for more content in

the future so we'll break this out into some other things based on these as well

as uh this thing that we talked about because I think this will really help you

um when you're laying out or and or troubleshooting the van later on to

you know find out why wires are hot and that sort of thing kind of what I just talked about but uh yeah thank you guys so much for

watching and we'll see you in the next live stream [Music]