in this video we upgrade our lithium
iron phosphate battery bank from eight
cells to twenty lithium cells for a
combined capacity of 11.5 kilowatt hours
welcome back everyone as you might be
able to tell from the farm equipment
we're back in the prairies of
Saskatchewan camped out here next to our
shipping container that has the last
door stuff in it and we're here to do
some upgrades and visit with family and
friends of course but mostly upgrades
first things first let's upgrade our
batteries so if you've seen our other
videos you'll know that I blew up our
solar controller by not first switching
off the solar inputs so be sure to
switch off the solar before powering
down the system and lastly I'm going to
cut the power to all the internals in
here so to power everything temporarily
while I've got the batteries all out
I've got this battery bank actually
built out of old laptop cells and so
that's 18 650 cells I used to build this
pack and that is just jumper cable up to
our power distribution block and I have
a battery monitor on there just to keep
the fridges and lights going while we're
doing this
so under here these are eight original
lithium iron phosphate cells and this
space here is where I want to put all
twenty so the nice thing about these
cells is they can be mounted in any
orientation and because they're
individual cells they're modular so I
could put you know another row down here
another row up here stacked up like this
and put them all out this way but then I
need to find a fancy way to strap them
all down and that doesn't have the same
visual
as if they were all together in one
block unfortunately back here to the
front if I put them all in one block
they wouldn't be fit they stick out too
far this way and if I turn them the
other way they wouldn't fit so the only
way though they'll fit in here is on
their sides stacked up like this from
front to back like this which you'll see
in a moment but it's so tight there's
not even a room for a box you see our
original one here I made a box with a
Plexiglas cover for the terminals and
there won't even be room for that so I'm
going to put them in here and then build
a box around the rest of it okay so when
dealing with big batteries you certainly
wouldn't want to be swinging around a
wrench like this which would have the
possibility of shorting out to the next
sill so I'm using a socket and I've even
put some
pakhi tape over the shaft just to keep
anything from touching and I'm taking
off these bus bars as I do so there's no
chance of something moving around it
shorting don't watch loosen them all and
weave them flopping around okay so a
word on why we're doing this upgrade
this is five kilowatts of lithium this
would be more than enough for a weekend
warrior or going out camping a week at a
time if you knew you were going to have
good sunny weather the solar has no
problem keeping this charged and keeping
us alive but when you live full-time in
a rig like this you're not always
guaranteed to have a good forecast and
and have good son and we found some
situations where we would be charged by
10:00 a.m. and then the solar panels
just switch off and then the next week
we had 10 days of rain and you know five
days in dense forests where we got
essentially no solar and then every day
we'd be down 10% more than the day
before so we could found this deal on
these lithium batteries on eBay for a
hundred and fifty dollars per cell and
it was just too good to pass up so I
maxed out the space in here with as many
cells as we can hopefully fit and and
that will give us eleven point five
kilowatts total which would last us for
10 to 15 days maybe of no sign at all
so that'll just give us a little bit of
comfort that we can go into
a densely wooded campground and not have
to worry about running out of power and
needing to go into the Sun to recharge
again
okay so to understand how to wire a
bunch of individual cells like this you
need to understand series in parallel
and very simply if we look at the back
of our Max Air remote controller you'll
see two triple A batteries and those are
wired in series so the 1.5 volts each
but they're wired positives negative so
that you get a total of 3 volts now take
that knowledge and come here I have for
3.2 volt lithium cells and if you look
at the voltmeter up here you can see
there are 3.4 3 bolts and I should check
each cell 3.4 3.4 3.4 no surprise so
they're each three point four volts
now most RV equipment is going to be
twelve volts so if you connect the
positive one to negative of the other
just like in the remote control they're
positive to negative positive is
negative now when we measure the sum of
all of these it's thirteen point five
volts which is correct so that's how you
get a 13 or 12 volt battery out of four
individual cells so if I put these all
in series of course that would be way
too high of a voltage so then what you
do is wire them in parallel
so this is what will we do we have 20
cells in total but I'm going to have
five wired in parallel like this so then
if I measure the voltage of this you can
see that cell 3 point 4 volts so this
doesn't increase the voltage but it
increases the capacity so instead of 180
amp hours per cell
I'll have 900 amp hours at 3 volts so
basically what I'm doing here I'm gonna
make four packs of five cells in
parallel and then those four super cells
will be wired in series to make the 12
volts at 900 amp hours or 11.5 to
kilowatts of power now it's very
important that the voltages be the same
of each cell so these batteries I'm
using right now are all our original
batteries that are about two years old
and had a couple hundred cycles on them
and the new batteries that we just
received are also used and there have
proximately the same age and you need to
be very sure the voltage is exactly the
same now I achieved that by setting our
surge controller top voltage to four
point there rather three point four
volts so that yesterday we discharged
and then when we were charging today the
charge controller stopped charging them
at three point four volts which is the
voltage of all of the cells that I
received another point for the safety
police is I will be putting two of our
original cells in each of the four super
cells that way there the load has been
distributed between old cells and new
cells in parallel and there should be no
risk of anything
in that way
there's just so many batteries
you
okay guys got it all in
as you can see 20 cells fits in here
super tight if I had put this in a box I
just the box wouldn't have fit I have
about a half inch left to spare here but
you might be able to see is just enough
room to squeak through these little
wires here which comes up through the
floor so I will now box this in a little
better and wedge it and and they are all
stuck in here but they need to be
fastened much better of course and I'll
get to that boring stuff maybe even
off-camera okay guys got them all busbar
it up here as you can see these five
here are one super cell and down here
these five are second then third and
fourth five parallel cells in a super
cell and then as you can glean they run
positive negative this way
and I ran out of the copper busbars the
used ones that I bought only came with
one cell per battery so I grabbed a
scrap of aluminum bar there and made
busbars for those and as I'm sure you
can tell the balance leads here are all
tapped on each of the cells whoops okay
guys today is tomorrow it's a windy one
out there but do what I can the inverter
was installed temporarily last night
just so we could get by and then this
morning I got to gauge welding cable and
ran two leads for positive two for
negative in parallel and everything has
been zapped tied down all the other
cables are zapped tight in place and the
batteries are super firm so that's what
I've done here on the inside now going
outside
got this sheet two inch acrylic and I've
cut that into shape here over top of the
batteries to protect all these terminals
and as you can see I've got some classy
red LEDs up in there to make it extra
classy for when we're giving tours okay
I'm pretty sure this is a bad idea
and that it will not work but if you're
seeing this then it worked flawlessly so
everybody said I was going to do I've
put a white kitchen bag over the
batteries here over top of the wires and
everything I want to form it too and
I've kind of taped it in place in the
corners and I'm going to use great stuff
big gap filler expanding foam which you
probably know is activated by humidity
so I'm going to use a spray bottle and
mist some water in there
and hope this works this kind of
squirrely all right guys I don't have
time to make a proper clip for this I've
got to get rolling but you can see the
wait kitchen garbage bag there the foam
is filled up and just almost perfectly
filled that space it's pretty firm so I
imagine that's putting some nice
clamping force on the batteries filling
in the top and molding around those big
cables keeping them everything nice and
secure in there so I think that's a good
solution
yeah would've been more fun if it had
all blown out the side and made a big
mess but so I'm gonna get this Plexiglas
installed and then roll some b-roll here
and get some glamour shots for that
thank you all for watching hope that was
informative kind of a rush video but
good really good
so thanks so much for watching I'll see
you next time
you