The specs of each powerstation state a rated number of cycles for the battery, under the condition that it’s only charged up to 80%. The manuals also state to recharge the powerstation to 80% every few months.
Yet it’ll charge to 100% when plugged in. Monitoring the charge indicator and unplugging it just in time is cumbersome, and even impossible when using the powerstation as UPS.
Can you thus introduce an option that allows setting a 80% charge limit? It’d of course be even better if this was freely configurable and be remembered after the device was powered off.
A configurable charge limit has also been requested in other topics.
Hi @Chromix , Are you referring to the 80% value in the following sentence? LiFePO4 Battery with 2,500+ Life Cycles to 80%
If so, the 80% refers to the capacity of the battery, not the power of the battery.
Allow me to give you an example: EB3A has a capacity of 268WH, after using 2500 charge/discharge cycles, his battery capacity will only be 214WH, and no longer 268WH when it is brand new and unused.
We recommend that you charge and discharge every few months, discharging to 0% and then charging to 100% to calibrate the SOC.
Ah ok, I would’ve written it as “LiFePO4 battery with 80% capacity retained after 2500+ full charge cycles” to be less ambiguous.
Still, there is research that states that such a battery will reach the same degradation that 600 20%-80% result in with just 75 0%-100% cycles, which is aligned with others stating that keeping it at 100% charge also degrades capacity.
Current research suggests though that this kind of shallow charging leads to a temporary capacity degradation - which can be reversed by a few 0%-100% cycles. It probably still shouldn’t be left at 100% afterwards.
That’s the main reason why I’ve asked for a selectable charge limit. I just started my initial post with the incorrect assumption that this was already factored into the expected cycle number stated in the manual.
I think this is a good idea. My Samsung Ultra 21 Plus phone has this option built in as a setting so that the lithium battery will last longer. The setting stops the battery from charging once it hits 85% I am not sure if the same is true of LiFePO batteries. There is some literature that if you are storing your LiFePo battery for an extended period it should only be charged to 50%. But that is not practical as a UPS.
I agree that 50% is not practical for general UPS usage, unless the usage scenario are short outages or just brownouts.
My EB3A arrived charged at exactly 60%. Maybe that’s slightly better for a LiFePO4 than keeping it at 80%. Yet 80% is way better for the battery lifetime than keeping it at 100% which it charges to by default. That’s why a user-definable charge-limit would be great - everyone could just perfectly adapt the battery life vs. available charge to their current usage scenarios.
I was considering a EB3A as a UPS, but the lack of this charge limit discourages me significantly.
I’m looking for just minutes to tens of minutes of runtime and I’ll take longevity over 5 minutes of extra capacity. This seems like a fairly straightforward feature to introduce and your competition has it.
I saw that the last comment was more than a year ago, but as a new customer, I am really surprised, that there is no option for limited charging (would be great for UPS usage). Please make it happen
