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Reply To: lifepo4 solar system

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#17407
neilh20
Participant

    @davem great topic.  I was at a SSU Eng Presentation yesterday by Enphase   a leading solar equipment provider and they use LiPo4 in their battery 3.3Kwh/10Kwh systems.  All about safety.  LiPo4 slightly less power density — but that isn’t a problem with stationary systems.  No temperature stability. Fire issues are a big deal. A recent newspaper report on a local house fire referenced a device that had been left on charge and caught fire.

    I’ve got some largish PO4 tube batteries designed for electric bikes.  However the challenge is as you point out is different charging regime and management.  At the present my guess it can be a system block at 5V or 12V.  However it would be nice for SBC (single board computers) like the Mayfly to have the LiPO4 interface.   I seemdd to remember Rocket used to with SAMD21 LoRa + LiPO4

    There was also a rPi powering system that used LiP04 – I think this is,

    https://hackaday.io/project/13260-lifepo4weredsolar1

    One way of minimizing power consumption with fast sampling is to queue the reading,  and then upload every 4-12hours, which is what I do, but is a lot of software work. When I have some time I plan to post it for the Mayfly, but haven’t heard a lot of people asking for it.

    Also to minimize cellular power, use a cloud host that can encode the data and suck the data up fast. However subscriptions are quite costly. So great topic 🙂