Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Lithium only makes sense for portable gear and vehicles.
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One of the real benefits of LiFePO4 is that they will accept whatever charge you throw at them. Lead-acid are happy to take a lot of current initially but will gradually slow down in accepting a charge. If you have a gray morning but then a sunny afternoon, the LiFePO4 will fully exploit the capacity of the solar system and fully charge while the lead-acid will slow down and end up not fully charged.
I'm using lead-acid now that are about five years old. I will replace them eventually with LiFePO4, but there is enough capacity so that I can put it off. The little orange dots (peaking at 12:45, local noon) show you the solar capacity. That the red line drops off sharply after 11:30 shows you that the lead-acid batteries are losing their appetite. They still want to soak up more electrons for another 6-8 hours, but if it clouds up, they lose. Yeah, we had some intermittent clouds yesterday.