Building a big Battery for 12V in the Shack and the Lab.

After buying 28 LiFePO4 100Ah cells I started building batteries.

In the shack:

The intention is getting a battery build for powering the majority of my radio station, especially the monitor equipment, using mainly solar power for charging.

This has two aspects:

1.

Reducing the power needed for radios that should be on at all times, and the ones that are powered a lot of the times. This means that the older radios drawing 1-2A during stand-by are out of the question for 24/7 use.

Fortunately I do have some radios that can be used with low power consumption, more about this later.

The other radios with higher power consumption can then be switched on whenever I want to operate.

More about this in other posts.

2. 

Improving the power supply situation, so most of the monitoring can be run on solar power only.

This will be in stages. Right now I have 2 solar panels with a peak power of about 130W, feeding a charge controller. The batteries consists of 2x 12V - 100Ah LiFePO4 batteries, with a total of 200Ah available when the batteries are fully charged. This is just not quite enough for my use, so some of the cells will be used to create a 12V - 400Ah battery for the 12V supply in the radio shack. At the moment I have prepared 8 cells, running a "12V balancing" process right now. The test battery looks like this:

Yes, this needs to be protected against short circuits, but this is the preliminary setup.

What I need is finishing another 8 cells and make some more bus bars (connection between the batteries), getting the other 8 cells completely ready. Getting them balanced and fully charged, then connected together in a 12V configuration with 4 cells, then the second set of 4 cells connected as the second battery.

All this is done upstairs in my lab, and then I will have to use a cupboard for the 12V system with the 2x 12V batteries in parallel, plus heavy switches and fuses for the charging and power supply. 

I should then have a solid 12V power supply system in the shack, with a capacity of close to 200Ah.

As I expect to have some power amplifier using 24-28V, and some laptop power supply, plus a 24V soldering iron I expect to add a 24V battery in the shack for this purpose. This could be a 50Ah battery, as it will be in use infrequently, or a set of 8 cells with BMS (100Ah).

If I want to use the radios with high power, (>500W) output I expect to use the mains for powering those, as the batteries and a corresponding inverter is not practical for this purpose.

In the Lab (upstairs):

The two 12V batteries in use at the shack right now will then be free to use in the lan upstairs, creating a 12V - 200Ah. As I expect the lab to be less in use than the shack, I think this will work nicely.

In the lab I have a few pieces of test equipment running on 220-230VAC, and I suspect that using a (pure sine wave) inverter is quite capable of providing power for those, as they will be used infrequently.

I do want to have 24V available in the lab. This could be done in 2 ways:

Either creating a true 24V system for the lab, or adding a 12V battery system in series with the existing 12V system.

Winter is coming:

For both systems, but especially for the shack system I suspect that there will be a energy deficit in the deep of winter, especially Dec/Jan, and probably also Nov/Feb.

If that happens, and the battery voltage drops below a certain value, I intend to get some power into the system from the mains power system, preferably in "low tariff" periods.

Solar panels:

This expansion means that I will have to mount more solar panels outside.

I have some, alrerady, now I need to make some solid supports for them. There will be some experimentation with amall panel arrays first, then I will go larger.

I am afraid I have been bitten by the solar power bug ;)