Awning Update: Free Soldier Tarp Long Term Review

You know that

when this happens, your awning has been up for too long!

About two years ago I bought this $40 tarp because I was (still am!) too cheap to spend $1200 on a proper van-awning.

About a year ago I published this post about how I am using it, but not how much I am using it.

Because I use The Van as an extra room, a man-cave if you will, when at home, (Where we live in a single 380 sq. ft. room in a corner of the barn) unlike the typical RV awning which gets deployed a handful of times per year, my awning is up most days (and nights) of the year.




And that is a lot of abuse here under the Central Texas sun!

Here I've got a corner of the tarp turned up so you can compare what is close to the original green color on the bottom side of the tarp to the decidedly greyish color of the top-side of the tarp well faded after 2 years of solar exposure. And lately, after all this UV abuse, I'm pretty sure that when the tarp is billowing in the wind it sounds more brittle, more crinkly, than when it was newer.





And this area is showing the abuse of the top rear corner of The Van's side door when I fully open it. (For the photo I pulled the door partially closed.)

But so far the rip-stop construction of the tarp has kept the destruction localized.





Here's another example of blatant abuse. In this case, when I didn't bother taking the awning down in the face of some feisty weather, which - you know - I should do but don't always get around to, the wind ripped one of the corner stakes out of the ground and, still connected to the guy-rope, flipped it up over the tarp where the tip of the steel stake made a surgical incision right over where I sit while doing my daily Spanish lessons.

It's virtually impossible to see in the photo, but when this happened I took the awning down, laid it on a clean wood surface and burnished a length of clear packing tape to the bottom-side, "stitching" the slice together and waterproofing it again.

So far so good. The awning has been up every day since and the tape looks as good now as when I first put it on.




In fact, the manufacturer sealed up the center seam the same way, except with a narrower version of the tape, which has started to separate now just under one of the tie-points that is sewn onto the topside.

Being right in the center of the awning this drips on me during hard rains, and also acts as a drip-initiation point on those dew-laden mornings when the underside of the awning is carrying a good coating of condensation.

I keep threatening to reseal the entire center seam with my own tape, but what the hell. Contrary to what some may think, a little water isn't going to melt me into a gooey green puddle like the Wicked Witch of the West, so I'll get to it - - eventually - - maybe - -




If we have serious winds in the forecast I might - once in a while - if I remember - take the awning down, but to be honest, as you've already seen, I'm pretty slack about doing that, and as anyone that's lived with tents or awnings long enough knows, tremendous strains can be put on them by the wind.

But despite the abuse the construction of the Free Soldier tarp has proven to be very robust




and I am impressed by how well it is holding up.

I've had this $40 tarp for about 2 years now and it has been up as my awning for - let's say 500 days out of those 2 years. That works out to - crap! where's my calculator? - to about 8 cents per day. It may not be pretty, but it's thrifty, and I think I can live with that!

Especially since, in order to get down to anywhere close to that daily cost, a $1200 awning would have to last 15000 exposure days, or about 30 years the way I'm using my tarp. - - - Yeah, can't see that happening - - -

Of course I know I'm pushing my luck and this tarp is not going to last forever, so I'm thinking about ordering a replacement so I have it in hand when this one does finally give up on me.




Maybe this time I'll try the grey version, although that could be a crap-shoot since my current tarp, which I think you'll agree has a decidedly green cast to it where it is protected from the sun, is called brown by the manufacture, so who knows what color "grey" really is.

Since the tan, or brown if you will, para-cord I use for some of the guys on my awning are showing quite a bit of sunburn after two years while the black para-cord I use for the rest of the guys is showing no sign of sunburn, maybe that means the grey tarp will hold up to the UV better than my "brown" one?

Getting Ready for Spring!

 OK, contrary to what you may be thinking, this has nothing to do with seasonal camping, or optimism about seasonal camping. In fact I'm making no spring camping plans this year until we get closer to that time and see what's going on.

This particular spring planning is all about giving the wildflowers a little extra help by shredding down the summer's growth so that the plants that produce our spring wildflowers, all of which do the majority of their growing close to the ground where it warms up earlier in the season, a better chance at thriving, and therefor producing an abundance of flowers for our springtime enjoyment. (Wild-flower season around here starts in March and peaks in April, though some varieties will last for several more months.)

The timing of this can be a little tricky. The idea is to shred late enough that there is limited growth afterwards, but early enough that the residue can get a good start on breaking down into flower-growing nutrients before the real cold sets in. (Yeah, yeah, we are pretty far south, but cold is relative.)

Rather than trust my own instincts for this timing I cheat and use someone else's lifetime of local experience and expertise by keeping an eye on the rancher to the south of us. When he does his final haying of the season, in other words, when he doesn't expect a lot more growth for the season, I figure that's as good a time as any for me to shred.

This year, even though the afternoons are still hitting the high 80's some days, (second week of Oct) with a forecast high of 99 once this latest hurricane goes by, when he hayed last week I took that as my queue anyway.

But first a little pre-work on the long-neglected brush-hog. (This is a once a year deal. The rest of the time the brush-hog sits out behind the tractor barn growing rust.)

As always, photos tend to flatten out hills, but here the tractor is nose-down on a pretty decent slope at the edge of the driveway. This helps get the brush-hog a little higher when I cinch up tight on the top-link then raise the hog as high as I can with the 3-point.

Throw a couple jack-stands under it to make sure it stays up, drag out the grinder, have the hose ready in case things heat up too much,

and I'm all set to crawl under there and freshen up the edges on the blades.

This too is a balancing act.

I want them sharp enough to hack through the growth out there without leaving too much standing, but dull enough to shatter the stumps on any yupon that has started to creep its way out into the field. (A clean-cut stump grows right back, a shattered stump not so much.)

Once I finished the prep-work I was ready to take the field between the barn and the pond, you know, the one we look at most, from this

to this.

But - well we all know that once in a while things don't go quite as smooth as you would hope.

You see that tractor sitting over there in front of the tractor-barn rather than backed inside where it belongs?

Well that is one hard-working little piece of machinery.

The near-bank of the pond, left-center in the photo, (The far bank is reddish in this light) varies from a 35 to a 45 degree slope about 8 feet high, but if I don't shred right over the edge it spoils the nice clean winter view.

Put this tractor in 4-wheel drive and 1st gear-low, engage the PTO to get the brush-hog spinning, set the throttle to 2200 rpm, cinch the seat-belt tight, lift the loader bucket high up out of the way, ease out the clutch, and I swear that little 3 cylinder, 22 HP diesel engine could walk it right up a wall! (At its max of 2200 RPM in 1st-low the tractor moves just barely faster than a slow walker with a walker.)

Not that I've actually tried it on a wall though. Going up (forward) and down (backwards) that bank makes me scream, whine, and whimper enough as it is! (I remove the top-link when shredding which lets the brush-hog float over the ground no matter now steep the approach/departure angle is.)

Well today, when I was down there on the edge of the water shifting from reverse to forward for another pass up the bank, she, that trusty old machine, suddenly quit moving.

Engine's still running so it's not that. PTO is still spinning so it's not the clutch - at least not the first stage of the two-stage clutch - . I get the same no-go results in any of the three main gearbox speeds so I didn't wreck first gear. Shifting the gearbox between low and high ranges didn't gain me anything. The only thing left is the shuttle-shift. (There's no reverse in the gear-box, instead it uses a shuttle-shifter to spin the gear-box input shaft in one direction or the other, with access to all three speeds, plus high or low range, when going in either direction.) But I kinda already guessed this since the shuttle-shift lever was pretty much just flapping in the breeze.

Thinking the worst, like maybe I was going to have to crack open the case and repair something inside the gearbox right here on the edge of the pond, I got down there in that most inconvenient spot, far from the barn, and my tools, and started trying to figure out what happened.

It may not have the bells and whistles, or drink holders and fancy sprung-seat of one of those better-known green or red, or even blue, tractors you might buy off the lot nowadays, and it might weep fluids from all sorts of spots no matter what you do to stop it, but the great thing about owning a tractor based on a 1950's design and built in a 1970's era factory is that with a handful of tools and a basic machine-shop you can fix anything on it except maybe the fuel-injector and hydraulic pumps, and both those are bolt-on replacements.

Of course, being more of a wood-worker kinda guy, I have a very small handful of mechanic's tools and no machine shop, but I had to start somewhere because leaving the tractor down here to wait for the spring rains to submerge her was not an option, both from an asset management as well as a pond pollution standpoint.

As it turned out, it actually took longer to figure out what was wrong than it did to fix it. But in my defense, my main diagnostic support came from this drawing in the parts manual, which you may notice, as I certainly did, doesn't include the shuttle-shift linkage at all.

Up near the top of that drawing is the shuttle-shift shaft and fork, part 85. A little farther up the page is the bell-crank, part 92, that goes on the end of the shaft. My, very simple once I found it, problem was that part 83, a 5X25 roll-pin that connects the crank to the shaft, had sheered.

Of course it's in a tough spot to see let alone reach, jammed up there under the foot-board and sandwiched between the complicated throttle linkage (there is both a foot throttle as well as a set-and-forget lever up by the steering wheel) and the brake pedal arms (the tractor has two separate brake pedals, one for each of the rear hubs to help with making sharp turns, and as you can imagine, they are big and heavy to withstand all that lift-your-butt-up-out-of-the-seat-because-there-ain't-no-fancy-hydraulic-brakes-on-this-thing stomping.) but, laying on my back out there on the edge of the pond and working in the shadows by the light of a headlamp while tractor gunk and field debris fell into my eyes and up my nose, and water seeped out of the ground below as if the earth was trying to suck me back in before my time, I finally managed to track down the issue.

Now that I knew what the problem was I was able to make a temporary fix by working a 2.5mm allen wrench (After tramping all the way up to the barn and back, for the dozenith time, to get it.) through the hole in the center of the busted bits of the roll-pin and keep it there, for the moment anyway, with a small spring clamp, while I jumped back in the seat, stomped hard on the very-heavily sprung clutch, and gingerly shifted the shuttle into forward with an extremely satisfying clunk.

At this point, since I had sooo much confidence in my temporary fix, I wrapped the green-neon elastic from my headlamp around the shuttle-shift lever to remind myself NOT to touch it again, and finished with the rest of the shredding.

And you know - it kinda sucks having to do all that shredding on that bank and in and around trees and the well-house, without being able to go in reverse!!

The next morning I moved the tractor, going forward only, up next to the main barn where I could lay on the uncomfortable gravel drive rather than the uncomfortable wet vegetation down by the pond.

With easy access to my tools I was able to quickly remove the bell-crank and, following the advice of my expert brother, drive the broken bits of the old roll-pin out of both the bell-crank and the fork-shaft with a small bolt because I don't have a proper roll-pin punch,

and, as also suggested by my expert brother, in lieu of the proper roll-pin, which I also didn't have, I manged to line things back up under there in that tight space and work a 10-28 bolt through the bell-crank and shaft to pin them back together.

It was also suggested that I could use some lock-tight on a nut to make sure my bolt-turned-pin would stay in place. Well after almost 20 years there's not a lick of rust on this tractor, and that's mainly because the whole damn thing is constantly coated with a thin fresh sheen of one petroleum product or another that seeps out of countless gaskets, so lock-tight didn't have a chance in hell of getting a grip under here where gear-oil very slowly, but constantly, oozes out around the fork-shaft. I jammed two nuts together instead.

Slip the linkage back through the other end of the bell-crank, secure with a fresh cotter pin, of which I have plenty, pull the chocks out from under the tires, and I was ready to drive (backwards part of the way just because I could) back down to the tractor-barn and put her away where she belongs.

Parked on top of a couple oil-absorbing pads, because the trusty old girl can always be counted on to drip a little, with a 5W solar panel hooked up to the battery which might just be a little, OK, a lot, beyond it's use-by-date. (The bendix engages every time, but it may take a half dozen key-bumps before she'll actually turn over, and that's when the battery is well topped up!)

Oh, and not to dispute my expert brother, but it seems to me that if I sheered a proper steel roll-pin, (Granted it took nearly 20 years of rather abusive use to do it.) that soft 10-28 bolt may not stand up to the job forever, so I have a package of 30 pins (the smallest package I could find) and a cheap set of assorted roll-pin punches on the way.

 

Installation and Review of the Victron Energy SmartSolar Charge Controller

OK, all this battery stuff, these last three posts of buying the LiFePO4 lithium-ion batteries,  getting them set up and my backup charging methods, and finally this post on my primary charging method, really happened six months ago now, but I don't ever want to be that guy that writes a review saying "I just got it and haven't used it yet, but it shipped on time and looks good!".

Don't you just want to just reach through the screen and slap that guy silly for wasting your time with his useless keyboard-diarrhea? I know I do. But I felt like I'd had enough real-world experience with the batteries by now that I might have something useful to say.

So here's the wrap-up of my new battery saga.

Now I have my new, and expensive, LiFePO4 lithium-ion house batteries installed and I'm practically bouncing in my seat with excitement (At least until the credit-card bill shows up. . .) but; My primary charging method is via a solar system, a 10 year old solar system.

Y'all know that I'm a strong believer in solar charging for my style of camping, but being 10 years old  means my Solar Boost 2000E charge controller is old enough that it doesn't have the faintest idea what a lithium-ion battery is.

Now you might think charging a battery is charging a battery so why is that important?




(Originally I got pretty technical from here on out, but then had second thoughts about the readability for all but Electrical Engineering geeks - not to mention the impressive length of the resulting post - so I have attempted to simplify - - as much as I know how anyway - -)

(OK, OK, this is now the second try at simplifying this section - -Y'all are just going to have to live with this one.)

The image above is the charge-voltage profiles for the various 12V lead-acid batteries out there, and the profile of a LiFePO4 is actually very similar.

Other than what might look like minor differences in voltage levels (In the battery world 0.1 volts is actually a big deal.) the major difference between lead-acid and lithium-ion is in the timing of the various stages of charge.

For a lead-acid battery the Bulk Phase, where most of the actual charging occurs for any type of battery, ends when the battery is at about 80% full. (Go any farther than that and the electrolyte starts boiling away at a battery-damaging rate whether you have flooded, sealed, or AGM's.) At that point the charger (a decent charger anyway) holds the voltage steady at a pre-set level and starts the Acceptance, or Absorption Phase, during which the charge current will continue to fall as the battery gets closer to being fully charged (which takes many hours with lead-acids) because the voltage difference is decreasing. Once the charge-current drops to a pre-set level or the charger has been in Absorption Phase for a pre-set maximum time, the charger finally drops the voltage down to the Float level and holds it there to keep the battery topped up.

The LiFePO4 is so efficient at charging that the fast-charging bulk phase doesn't have to end until the battery is over 95% full. It then goes through the absorption phase pretty quickly (either one hour for my 200 amp-hours of battery or until the charge-current drops to less than 1 amp, whichever comes first) before reaching the float phase. But this quick-charging, extended bulk phase/shortened absorption phase only happens if the charger knows it's a lithium-ion and not a lead-acid battery hanging off it.




Even with those limitations, technically I could still use my ignorant, but existing and already paid for, Solar Boost 2000E as long as I promised to NEVER push the equalize button. (the high voltage of equalize is not good for lithium-ions!) With that in mind I opened up the back-side of the Solar Boost to tweak the float voltage from its existing 13.8 (Which is honestly too high for wet-call batteries but is a compromise between battery longevity and speed of daily charging) down to a lithium-friendly 13.55 using the adjustment pot.

And I tried to live with it.

I really did.

But after watching things closely for several charge cycles it was clear that not only was I giving up a significant part of the rapid-charge capability of my LiFePO4's, but also, because of the way the charge profile works on the Solar Boost, it would switch right from bulk to float without pausing at absorption. And that's significant because the absorption phase is where the Battleborn's on-board BMS does it's magic cell-balancing act.



So, as if I wasn't in the financial hole deep enough already, I broke down and spent another $160 for one of these.

There are many solar charge controllers out there that understand lithium-ion batteries. I picked this one because at a 20 amp rating it leaves me enough room to add a portable 100W solar panel to my fixed 180W panel if I decide I want to in the future, and mostly because it is featured as one of the chargers that Battleborn has tested, recommend, and sell themselves. (Because of the shipping issue with Battleborn I bought mine on Amazon)




Of course the new charger does diddly-squat for me until I actually install it, so I ripped out the Solar Boost, and while I was at it, the superfluous panel below it that used to be for the charger/inverter that died years ago finally came out too.

This left me with a couple pretty ugly holes. (Which is why I left that inverter panel in there for so long.) Since the Victron charger is a surface-mount, even if it had been exactly the same size as the Solar Boost, which it isn't, I still couldn't use the hole left behind by the flush-mount Solar Boost,

so I resolved that problem by cannibalizing an old-fashioned document holder. (For you youngsters out there, this is what we used to use back in the dark ages when transcribing paper documents, often hand-written paper documents, to computer or - gasp! - typewritten sheets.) I found this one laying in the metal recycling pile out behind the tractor barn. (Around the homestead it's not junk, it's building supplies and spare parts!)

By cutting out a section of the holder, drilling some holes in the proper places, and painting it, I created the recommended non-flammable surface to mount the Victron on, and sized properly to cover up the Solar Boost hole.

I then modified and painted the faceplate for the old charger/inverter to not only cover up that other ugly hole, but to also act as a cable-way/strain relief



and mounted everything back up.

I'm not sure it's any less ugly than the holes were, but it's functional and mostly dwells behind a closed cabinet door, so I can live with it.






Compared to my 25 amp Solar Boost which uses the faceplate as a heatsink, the heatsink on this 20 amp Victron is delightfully robust, but one thing I'm not a real fan of is the wire-connection system it uses.

For one thing, getting a 12 gauge stranded wire into the tiny connector is not a problem if done very carefully to avoid stray "whiskers", but trying to stuff a more robust 10 gauge wire in there, especially with the connectors spaced so close together, is quite a challenge. At the rated output of 20 amps any more than 8 feet of 12 gauge would result in a greater than 2% voltage drop, something I'd rather avoid. (Since I usually see a maximum of 10 amps running through the wire between the Victron and the batteries I can live with the 7 feet of 12 gauge wire that's already installed in behind The Van's walls.)

But the other thing about this type of connector is that they have what I think of as a "soft" connection. That little screw up there on top that is used to pull the wire-clamp closed is - well - little, which makes it difficult to get a good torque on it, and without a good torque the connection is adequate but not what I would call robust.




This is especially true if all you have that's small enough to fit in that tiny hole and reach the slotted clamp-screw is a skinny little jeweler's screwdriver.

So it was a no brainer to sacrifice a "spare" screwdriver to the grinder





and create something small enough to to just barely fit into the hole and big enough that I can at least put a decent torque onto the screw with it.

Because I feel like this kind of connector is vulnerable to vibration as well as expansion/contraction, the modified screwdriver has been permanently added to The Van's tool kit so I can periodically check that the connections stay tight. (Edit June 20: Today is the equinox which means battery checking day and I got an additional quarter-turn out of each of these connections when I tested them.)




OK, the sharp-eyed out there may have noticed that in addition to the solar in and battery out connectors, this model of Victron also has a load out set of connectors.

I could supply The Van's 12V load (Up to a 20 amp max) right from the Victron through these connectors and then, through the VictronConnect app which I'll get to next, I could see the real-time current draw/input on my batteries.

If I didn't already have access to this information, along with much more, through my LinkPRO battery monitor, this feature would be useful, but would require rewiring The Van's 12V system, so no thanks. . .




Unlike the Solar Boost, there are no old-school configuration switches nor a display-panel on the Victron charger, so in the place of those old standbys I had to download the VictronConnect app.  (I'm being drug into the future bit by bit!)

The connection between the Victron and the VectronConnect app lurking there on my phone is via bluetooth. The initial configuration of this was no big deal but connecting up each time I want to check the status of the system is a bit of a pain.

First, since I'm a bit of a freak about security and never leave bluetooth active unless I'm actually using it, I have to turn the phone's bluetooth on then close its connection-request screen before launching VictronConnect. Then, for some unfathomable reason, (after all bluetooth is a short-range device) VictronConnect will not actually see the Victron SmartSolar unless my phone's location feature is also on, which, of course, I always have turned off. So that's one more step (Which I usually forget until I get the error message and have to close the app down and start all over) to making the connection.

 
After getting my phone to talk to the Victron I was then able to go into the setup menu in the VictronConnect and follow the programming instructions posted by Battleborn to configure this charger for my batteries using the "user-defined" slot in the Victron's battery library.

The Victron comes pre-loaded with different charge profiles for different battery types in its library, and this includes one for LiFePO4 batteries, but the values there differ slightly from the ones recommended by Battleborn and after spending all that money on their batteries I'm sticking with the Battleborn recommendations!

Here I am verifying that the battery voltage displayed by the Victron, which is 7 feet of 12 gauge wire away, matches readings taken right at the batteries with my trusty meter.

OK, I guess I have to concede that there just might be some advantages to dragging myself, kicking and screaming, into the technical world by adding yet another app to my phone.

By moving a switch on the front-panel on the original Solar Boost I could see the battery voltage, (Which actually read 0.15V lower than readings taken directly from the battery) the solar panel input current, or the output charging current. (But only one at a time.)

Through the virtual front panel of the VictronConnect on my phone, in the status tab I can see those things as well as the wattage being delivered by the panel, (I took this photo less than an hour after sunrise on a cloudy day so I thought 23 watts was pretty good!) the amount of current being delivered, and the charge state. (Though I can also see the charge state on the LED's on the Victron itself.)

Here I'm in landscape mode of the history tab and can see the last 30 days of history at once.

But there's also more.

Such as here on the history tab where I can see the charging history for the last 30 days. Up through June 5th I had the empty fridge running just to put a load on the system while The Van was in forced coronatine. Then I turned the fridge off and the rest of the history shows the system dealing with just the parasitic loads lurking in The Van, including the just under 0.1 amp-hour that the Victron sucks down to keep itself operating even when there is no solar input.

Here I'm in portrait mode of the history tab and have to swipe side to side to see more than a few days of history at at time, but the trade-off is that in this mode I can also see more data for each day

 By tapping on one of those daily graph-bars, in either portrait or landscape mode, I can expand it for more detail.

Note that the vertical axis of the history graph is watt-hours and not time. This means that comparing the heights of the bars from day-to-day is looking at watt-hour performance and has nothing to do with time, which can only be ascertained by expanding each day and reading the text in the bar. This was a little confusing at first and it would have been nice if I could toggle between watt-hours and time.

 The data below the graph (In portrait mode) gives me even more information about my system.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my 10 year old 180W solar panel, which is mounted flat to The Van's roof and not tilted for optimum performance, is capable, in the right circumstances, of producing a peak of 200 watts of power. I've heard of people over-sizing their solar systems by as much as 30% to compensate for the expected drop in output as the panels age, so I would say I'm doing pretty good here!

I took this screen-shot during float-stage so there's not really much happening here.

The trends tab lets me watch two values of my own choosing (Solar volts, current, or watts, as well as Battery volts or current, and if I was using the load output, the load current.) on a realtime graph.

The default is Battery Current on the left and Battery Voltage on the right. This can be changed for each side with the pull-down menu. Unfortunately the app doesn't remember your choices and you have to reset them back to what you want every time you open VictronConnect.

And speaking of opening VictronConnect, there is no buffering of any of these "trend" values in the Victron so I can only see as far back in time as the app has been connected for this particular session. Interesting information but I'm not sure how valuable that really is since I have to stand within blue-tooth range with the app open and displaying for the graph to update. As soon as I step out of range, switch to a different app, time-out the display, or close the display to set the phone down for a minute, the session is gone and I have to start all over again.

To be honest this makes the trends tab seem a little gimmicky. It would be more useful if the data for all the potential values was buffered up inside the Victron SmartSolar and I could reach back at least 24 hours to see just what's been going on.

Oh, and remember somewhere way back in this long-winded post when I said the Victron has front-panel LED's?

These let me know what stage the charge controller is in without the hassle of connecting up the app, which is handy because face it, once the novelty wears off, dragging the phone out of my pocket, logging in, turning on blue-tooth, turning on location, opening the app, and finally tapping on the connection, gets old fast.

But, handy or not, see where the Bulk indicator is a blue LED? You know, the worst color ever for natural sleep?

Well when there is no sun - you know, like at night when I'm trying to sleep - and the Victron is not in any charging mode at all, this LED blinks - constantly - as the controller searches for those solar amps.

And I'm here to tell you that in the dark, in the tight spaces of The Van, that damn LED is BRIGHT! That's right, capital bright.

So I have resorted to a little chunk of black electrical tape, though with the LED bulging out from the case like that it doesn't fit all that well, and when I get over being lazy I'll have to look for some more permanent solution that isn't really permanent, since those LED's are also where I read any error codes so I need to be able to see them.

But, despite all the bells and whistles, the important thing with a charger is does it charge the battery? Does the Victron Energy SmartSolar Charge Controller do the job while treating my very expensive LiFeP04 batteries well?

Oh yeah. It does.

The first day I got the new charger hooked up it was already about 1600, well past prime solar hours, and though it was bright, there were high thin clouds filtering the sun to the point of no cast shadows. Even with those limitations, before the sun set the Victron had managed to pull 240Wh's out of the sky and stuff it into my highly efficient LI batteries, during which I saw the charge current hovering between 6 and 8 amps between the hours of 1600 and 1700, which are the kind of numbers I got out of the Solar Boost with cloudless sky - middle of the day conditions when it was hooked up to the lead-acids.

I think I'm going to be happy with this new battery and charger setup, if The Van ever gets out of coronatine that is.

(Now what do I do with a perfectly serviceable Solar Boost 2000E that has no home?)

Update October 20:

Since installing my new batteries and solar charger, in addition to "driveway simulations", I have managed to sneak in a couple of multi-day socially distanced excursions, including one in triple-digit heat which taxed the hell out of the batteries as they tried to keep up with the constantly-running fridge. 

Spending the money for this lithium-ion system hurt, but like child-birth (or so I've been told any way) the pain soon fades into the distant corners of memory and so far I've been happy with the performance of my new system and have no regrets making the LI plunge.

Setup and Charging of My New LiFePO4 Batteries.

Once my new "drop-in" lithium-ion batteries were dropped in, hooked up,



and buttoned down, there was still some work to do before I could call this project finished. - More work than I thought as it turned out.




Of course, the new LiFeP04 batteries have a different profile, electrical and performance wise, than the lead-acids I had in there before, so the next step in the installation of them was to go into my Xantrex LinkPRO battery monitor and re-program it with the new profile.





This involved changing some of both the Battery and System Properties as well as a number of alarm set points to reflect the characteristics of the new batteries.

Three of these settings, the float voltage, float current, and auto-sync time, work together to perform an auto-sync on the monitoring system. This is just a fancy way of saying that when all three of those parameters are met the monitor resets itself to 100% full and 0-Ah drained. This helps offset internal losses and inaccuracies of the sensors in recording the drain and charge of the batteries.

In reality this only worked about 10% of the time with my lead-acid batteries, but that was way more than the 0% of the time that I'm getting out of it with the LiFeP04 batteries. I've spent way too much time trying to manipulate these three settings to trick it into auto-syncing, but with no luck.

With these new batteries I find that the LinkPRO is off by about 1.5 to 2 amp hours every charge/discharge cycle, and always on the discharge side, so after about a week a full charge on the batteries shows as being about 10 to 15 amp-hours low.  Fortunately I can easily perform a manual sync on the meter, so if it gets far enough out of sync to bother me I just wait until later in the day when the batteries have charged up and gone to float and then perform the manual sync.

The final step here in the LinkPRO was to perform a Battery Status Reset which zeros out the history so I can start tracking the performance of the new batteries long term.

Despite how it looks, that's Marine Vinyl flooring and not carpet.

I have three separate ways of charging my house batteries. (Redundancy is King!)

In addition to the primary charging method, the solar system which I will address in it's own separate post, I have two other ways to charge my batteries, even though I rarely use them.

One is my little 15 amp Iota that I can use when plugged into shore power - if I also plug in the Iota to The Van's 120V system as well that is.

The IOTA is equipped with the internal IQ/4 smart-charge module for lead-acids that makes it a four-stage charger. The four stages are bulk (14.8 which is fine), absorption (14.2 which is a little low), float (13.6 which is spot on), and equalize (15.5 No Way!).

Iota does have 9 different plug-and-play smart-charge modules that change the charging profile of their units, including one for LiFePO4 batteries. Unfortunately they are external modules only and are not compatible with my internal IQ/4 equipped charger.

But as long as I don't screw up and let this charger sit in float for 7 uninterrupted days, which is what it takes to trigger the equalize function, it will treat my lithium's just fine for occasional use.

Since I very rarely plug The Van into shore power, and even more rarely also plug the IOTA in and use it, and never leave it plugged in for more than a day, I see no need to pay the money to swap it out for a LiFePO4 savey, charger at this point.




My third charging method is through a 300 amp disconnect switch (This $10 switch takes the place of the $100 automatic isolator that failed 5 years ago.) By inserting the "key" and twisting it I can connect The Van's alternator directly to the house batteries. (Or the house batteries to the chassis battery if I need to self-jump, like when this happened.)  No muss, no fuss.

Supposedly, with only 200 Ah of lithium battery installed I don't really need one of those fancy automatic isolators that alternates 15 minutes of connect time with 20 minutes of disconnect time to prevent overheating the alternator because of how efficient the LiFeP04s are at accepting charge-current. But to be honest, until I actually see it work (On someone else's rig!) I'm not completely convinced that my 200 Ah's of battery won't overwhelm The Van's alternator.

I certainly don't want to risk damaging my alternator, but because of the cost and hassle of installing one of those fancy isolators, plus a second, dedicated, manual disconnect because I also certainly don't want that automatic isolator operating all the time because engine alternators are great for running your headlights and charging starting batteries, but, beyond giving them a good healthy bulk charge, pretty much suck when it comes to charging deep-cycle batteries. For now, if and when I need it, I'll set the timer on my phone and manually control the duty-cycle with the key, which I can reach while driving, until I see how things work out.

If, and that's a capital If in my case, I was contemplating using the engine alternator as a primary charging source for my LiFePO4's I would use something like this DC to DC charger rather than relying on an alternator's internal regulator. (But don't just run out and buy this on my say-so. I have done absolutely no research on it!) This is a typical 3-stage charger just like my little Iota, the only difference being that instead of 115V input power this uses 12V input power off the alternator to produce a managed three-stage charge on the output side.

Next post: Solar charging and an unanticipated adjustment to my system.

Making the LiFePO4 Plunge

Though The Van's house batteries are still serviceable, and I say that with air-quotes, lately the voltage drops off quickly once the sun goes down so if I don't have sun every day I am getting close to having a power shortage because as voltage drops amps climb to compensate which makes the voltage drop faster which - - well, you get the idea.

The drop-off in power isn't surprising since this set of batteries is 3 years old, about the life expectancy of flooded wet-cell lead-acid deep-cycle batteries that, according to my Xantrex battery monitor, I've drawn about 11,000 Ah out of during their lifetime.

For about $300 I could replace them with a new set of the same battery. When new this gives me about 100 Ah of usable power between charges  (Draw any more than 100 Ah out of the 200 Ah of lead-acid battery and I greatly reduce their life.) which has proven to be sufficient, if not plentiful - most of the time anyway. 

But like most boondockers there are times when I could use more, like when parked in the almost perfect campsite. Almost perfect because it lacks some decent hours of direct sun for recharging those batteries. So I have been eyeing the more expensive Lithium Ion technology for a while now, and this time, without overthinking it too much, I closed my eyes, held my nose, 

and jumped in with both feet.

Well, not quite.  There was a lot of research and hemming and hawing and backing and forthing involved before I spent $1898 dollars on a pair of replacement batteries, because I don't care how you crunch the numbers, $1900 verses $300 is a damn big plunge! (And now my dream of an electric bike will just have to remain a dream a while longer!)

But here's the basic pro-con number-crunching I did:

The old standard lead-acids cost about $1 per lifetime usable Ah per year ($300/100 usable Ah/3 years usable life)

The lithium ion batteries cost about $0.95 per lifetime usable Ah per year ($1900/200 usable Ah/10 years usable life)

So purely on a cost - performance basis the price is, for all practical purposes, a wash. It's just a matter of spreading the payment out over time or eating it all at once.

But several other factors tipped the scales towards lithium for me.

• With my fridge running (By far, my largest power load) and keeping GPS, camera, laptop, phone, and DVD player charged, along with a little bit of LED lighting, 100 Ah means that I have about three sunless days of battery capacity before I need to find some way to charge them back up. Batteries using the LiFePO4 chemistry (Lithium iron phosphate) can be drawn down to nearly 0% (Less than 11 volts) without damaging them or shortening their life (As long as they are charged right back up. Leave them discharged for too long - weeks or months - and they are toast.) so a pair of drop-in replacements at a combined 200 Ah would extend my deep-in-the-shadows-of-the-trees "hang time" in Forest Service and National Park campgrounds to 5 or 6 days without having to charge.

• And when it is time to charge them lithium ion's charge fast! In fact, because less-than-fully-charged lithium ion's will suck every amp available out of an alternator, for those with more than 200 Ah of battery it is recommended that they install a special battery isolator that will let the alternator current through for 15 minutes then block it for 20 minutes before starting the cycle over again. This gives the alternator time to cool down in between bouts of full-bore output.

• Because of the chemistry I could theoretically charge 200 Ah of lithium battery at a rate of 100 amps, as opposed to a max of 50 amps for the same capacity of lead acid. On top of that, and far more relevant for my setup, lithium ions will take that full charge rate right up to nearly fully charged while the charge rate for lead-acids drops off sharply above a charge of 80%, making them take a lonnng time to get through that gap between 80% and fully charged, during which they are just throwing away potential charging current from the solar panel. This means that lithium ions are much more efficient at taking advantage of every little bit of power coming off the solar panel, and since, even in the shadow of trees, I can get a couple-three amps out of the panel for a few hours the lithium ions have the potential to extend my shaded-campsite hang-time significantly better than the lead-acids.

• Oh, and I also can't discount the coolness factor!

Of lessor interest, but still note-worthy:

• The wet-cell lead-acid batteries require me to check the water level every quarter. This is not a huge task, taking maybe a half-hour and a pint or so of distilled water, but the lithium ion's have no water to lose and are virtually maintenance-free. (I'll still be opening up the battery boxes on the solstices to check the cable-to-terminal connections for cleanliness and tightness.)

• The lead-acid batteries weigh in at a combined 108 lbs, or about a pound per usable amp-hour. The lithium ions weigh in at a combined 60 pounds, or about a third of a pound per usable amp-hour. Which means, not only have I doubled my usable amp-hours but now I can also carry 40 lbs of emergency potatoes (or maybe chocolate, or Poptarts, or - - -) without impacting my fuel mileage!

So why did I go with Battle Born batteries other than them having the right chemistry? (Not all lithium batteries are created equal so the particular chemistry is important.)  Well the free Ground Shipping didn't hurt, (more on that saga in a moment) but that wasn't all. Not that other companies don't produce a good product, but the Battle Born batteries checked a lot of boxes for me.

• Right chemistry. Lithium-Iron-Phosphate batteries are more environmentally friendly, or at least less environmentally impactive, than other lithium chemistry's. They are safer in that getting the active components of the cells to burn or explode is pretty much impossible. (As with all batteries, the case and ancillary electronics might be combustible under the right circumstances) Best power density and environmental tolerance of all current lithium chemistry's. 

• They are drop-in replacements. Lithium ion batteries don't need ventilation, don't need to be mounted upright, and can be packaged into non-standard shapes, but I didn't want to mess around with changing out the existing battery boxes, re-engineering hold-downs, and re-routing wiring, so why not just take advantage of the drop-ins?

• They have full on-board BMS (Battery Management System). Which means, not only does each battery have internal protection against high/low voltage (>14.7/<11), high/low temps (>135/<25 [can take current out below the low temp but no charging]), high current (>100 for more than 30 seconds, >200 for more than 5 seconds [Withdrawing up to 100 amps right through to full dis-charge is allowed] ), but it also has on-board cell balancing that kicks in during the final stage of charging to ensure each cell is topped up to full potential. Some batteries have none of this and rely on external systems and some have the protection only without the cell balancing, which should technically be called BPS (Battery Protection System) but marketing departments are often fast-n-loose with their terms and sometimes label this a BMS as well. (Check the specs carefully!)

• Battle Born has a reputation for good support (more personal experience on that during the shipping saga below)

• Their batteries are manufactured in the US.

• They offer free ground shipping!

So I pushed through the temporary panic of spending that kind of money, and made my purchase.

Which triggered the shipping saga. . . 

The one unfortunate thing about this deal was that Battle Born ship their product via FedEx Ground. 

UPS will deliver to our property with no problem, but FedEx is married to the USPS and since the USPS will not deliver here to our property, FedEx can't figure out how to either.

None of the in-store FedEx shipping locations around us would accept the shipment, (Did I mention that despite the safe chemistry the batteries are still classified as hazardous materials?) so I did what I thought was the logical thing

by getting on the official FedEx Shipping Center Locator web site and putting in my location. Originally there was a ton of places listed around me, but then I pulled down the "more" menu and clicked on Dangerous Goods Shipping.

That cleared out the map considerably, eliminating all but actual FedEx locations, and I selected the closest of the remaining sites (by the way, I didn't use our real location to set up this screen-grab) and plugged that address into the Ship To info on my order, cringed when my wallet squealed as I clicked that final "submit order" button, then sat back and waited.

Within moments I had an e-mail from Battle Born confirming my order, and an hour later another one confirming acceptance of my payment. The next day, sooner than I expected actually, I got a Battle Born message saying my order had shipped and giving me the tracking number.

For the next 4 days I hovered over the laptop watching my batteries make their way by truck across the country and when they arrived at the shipping center (At least that's what the tracking said.) we drove 65 miles one way to go pick them up.

Only they weren't there.

If you look back there at the official FedEx Shipping Center Locator page, nowhere on there does it say anything about Express or Ground, just FedEx. Well it turns out that all the Shipping Centers showing on that map are in fact FedEx Express and though if you walk in the door with a box of grenades in your hand they will accept your hazardous shipment from you and then send it on its way via FedEx Ground, they will not accept incoming shipments of any kind from FedEx Ground.

Well that kinda sucked!

With directions from the clerk at the shipping center we drove across town to the actual, and unlisted, FedEx Ground facility to see if we could sort this out, but it is gated off and closed to the public. Sitting in the employee parking lot and looking at a locked security gate I got on the FedEx phone system and tried to redirect the shipment to another address. After a couple tries I managed to negotiate that labyrinth (Which at one point had me shouting "REPRESENTATIVE" repeatedly into my phone, and I hate shouting.) all the way to the desk that could redirect my batteries, only to find out that only the shipper could do the redirect. As the lowly recipient I'm not allowed.

So I called Battle Born, was answered right away by a real person even though it was not quite office hours in Reno Nevada yet, and, rather than going through the hassle of working through the FedEx system to redirect the shipment, the woman at Battle Born told me she would just let those original batteries be returned to them, which is the default action when a FedEx Shipping Center refuses a FedEx Ground delivery, and, if I would give her a different address, she would send out a couple more batteries today. No fuss, no muss. (Although FedEx managed to rip the bar-code off one of the returning batteries as they were passing through their North Salt Lake City location and there was a few moments of confusion when one of the errant batteries arrived back at Battle Born a few hours before the other.)

This time I had given my 78 year old neighbor's address and within hours had a new tracking number to watch.

When I saw that the second set of batteries had reached the final FedEx location and went "out for delivery" at 0739 I set my timer (It takes a minimum of two hours to get to our place from that FedEx location, and that's without any stops.) and at 0930 parked The Van out in front of the neighbor's gate and settled in.

Oh, and I mean literally settled in. It had started raining around 0230. Not hard but it hadn't let up since. It's a dang good thing I have aggressive tires on the rear of The Van because I left a couple new ruts alongside the road up by his gate! When I got back down the hill to our place later I had mud from tread to lug-nuts. (I left the mud there for nearly two weeks before washing The Van because - well, you know - it's manly - - -)

Around 1330 a Budget Rent-a-Van with two guys wearing FedEx shirts coasted by on our narrow county road, turned around at the bottom of the hill, eased back on up, and I finally had my batteries in hand.

This was actually earlier than I expected so that was nice. (We once had a UPS shipment go "out for delivery" at 0600 one morning and the truck didn't actually show up until 0200 the next morning.)

The batteries were very well packed. It would take some massively severe damage to the packaging to get through and damage the battery inside.

The double-walled boxes went into our cardboard recycling and there are disposal/recycling instructions printed on the custom-molded foam inserts. As instructed, I stripped the plastic off and it will be recycled with our other thin plastic. The foam innards are apparently biodegradable, over time, and and in the meantime will compress to 18% of their original volume. Yeah, right! Maybe if I had a hydraulic crusher on the property! I'm afraid those went, at full volume, to the solid waste transfer site.

You would think for something that costs this much the graphics might be a little more eye-catching, or at least have a few more colors beyond grey and blue, but I paid for function not looks. Lipstick on a pig and all that.

At 30 lbs apiece these batteries are much lighter than their lead-acid counterparts so I can understand not incorporating a lift-handle onto them, (If you really want to you can buy a lift-strap from Battle Born that uses the terminal bolt-holes.) but 30 lbs is still half a feed-sack so I fashioned a temporary lift handle out of 1100 para-cord (I ran out of 550) using the strap-hangers molded into the battery case to lower them into the battery boxes.

A little smear of my GB Ox-Guard to ensure a good connection and cut down on oxidation at the connection points, and I bolted the original cables onto the new batteries.

 

Now I was ready to bolt the box-lids back on.

Well, almost ready.

More on setting up my equipment for, and charging the new lithium batteries coming up.