My bluetti elite 200 v2 is currently somewhere around 50%. Is it better to drop it down to 0% to charge it or is it okay to charge it around 60% or even 30 40 or 50%?
or does it even matter?
If you have a brand new unit, do a full discharge cycle twice in its first use, then after that repeat full discharge cycle (100-0-100%) every 6 months. In between that you can do whatever. This should help to calibrate the battery. For long term storage of longer than 3 months, store at 60-70%.
It’s not a brand new unit. Okay then, I will go ahead and charge it even though it is at 50% roughly.
I actually don’t think it is calibrated correctly, because I use it to power my vehicle’s dashcam system, so that constant 7 watt 12 volt draw with the 12 volt inverter on, probably throws off it’s calculations somehow, cause it has basically gotten down to 20 or 30 percent quite often recently and then just goes dark, aka goes to 0% and shuts off.
The inverter is only on the AC side, so if your source is DC and your dashcam is using a simple USB cable or type C, it will not drain the battery at the rate the inverter would (around 15W), it would only drain about a third of that rate. To perform a proper calibration make sure the battery is fully discharged (aka the AC or DC lights don’t turn on) then recharge it from grid power at a constant rate. If you want to calibrate it for a proper discharge, put it under a constant AC load until the battery dies, then recharge it again (only from the grid). If you recharge from solar, its unstable and the BMS may not calibrate properly so make sure when you do recharge it you DONT do it from solar. That’s the key.
1 Like
I don’t even own a solar panel yet, so that is not a problem lol.
" If you want to calibrate it for a proper discharge, put it under a constant AC load until the battery dies, then recharge it again (only from the grid)."
Yes, I have thought of doing that. A constand AC load.
Bluetti has been commuicating with me on these forums and they said that it’s probably cause i am constantly using the dc port on the power station itself for constant 24/7 power of my dashcam system. They said they will deploy a firmware update.
I don’t even own a solar panel yet, so that is not a problem lol.
Well there’s your NON-PROBLEM! lol
using the dc port on the power station itself for constant 24/7 power of my dashcam system
How do you keep the Bluetti cool? If you do not keep it below 104F for discharge it can act erratically. It won’t operate above a certain temp or just shutdown. At higher temps I believe the cells act more erratic. If you want to power a dashcam 24/7, likely it is better to use a 3 Lead Hardwire Kit . In other words have it wired to your vehicle with some voltage cutoff present.
a good idea. I’ll have to look into it. AFAIK so far I have not had the bluetti elite 200 v2 shut down for getting too hot [despite being in a vehicle] so far at all
This sounds very plausible though keep in mind every individual person’s use case varies. Generally DC is always left on to power a 12V fridge, the only difference being they go through duty cycles (i.e. turn on for so long then turn off). Based on what you said earlier about the dashcam only using 7 watts, its likely that the battery has become mis-calibrated not due to the discharge curve, but the very low voltage load (i.e. 7 watts) causing an accumulative loss over time. So in other words your battery can be mis-calibrated if you only stay at the top end of the SOC, but it can also become mis-calibrated if you always subject it to a low load it can slowly drift over time and become inaccurate.
One thing for certain is you should still easily be able to perform a manual recalibration test by bringing it inside your house, topping it off until SOC reads 100%, then subjecting it to a constant AC load until it dies, then recharge it from constant wall power until it reaches 100%. It is very uncommon but you may have to repeat this test twice if the battery is severely mis-calibrated. If you repeat this process a third time and it still doesn’t work, you will likely want to consult Bluetti for service. Happened to my EB70S. I could not recalibrate it. My AC180 was also mis-calibrated but the test in this case worked. Generally it works, but I have had one power station that failed to recalibrate and likely there is a dead cell inside the battery which affected calibration. So you can never rule that out as well. Generally your battery will have a charge efficiency of about 90%. This means it will take 1.11X the capacity of the battery (1/0.9=1.1̅1) So assume you recharged at standard mode using 1,000 watts constant. 2073/1000X1.1 = 2.30 hours or 2 hours and 18 minutes. It should take ATLEAST this amount of time to top off the battery. If you come back and in only 1 hour its at 100%, something is off. I used to work in Cybersecurity (no longer due to stress) but we would have Azure flag suspicious sign ins if it detected somebody logged in from two IPs very far away in a short time. For example if you logged in from an IP from Japan at 8AM then in Kansas at 9AM. There’s no way you traveled in a plane that fast! It’s impossible travel. Either you used a VPN/anonymizer on your personal device, or your account was hacked. So likewise, if it takes at least X amount of time to recharge you will know something is up. Likewise with discharge. I should expect X back, even factoring in efficiency loss.
1 Like