I’m curious what the temperature resiliency is for sodium-ion batteries. I had a power outage recently where I was relying on a lithium-ion battery. As the temperature in the house plunged, it because so inefficient that charging a single phone overnight drained a quarter of the battery.
It was slightly above freezing in the house, so definitely not operating at peak efficiency. From a brief search, it looks like sodium-ion does have a similar temperature sensitivity, though it may be to a different degree.
That’s the thing, it wasn’t. It’s an Ecoflow Delta Power Station, We tested boiling 1.5 liters of water off it and it used 15% of the capacity. Meanwhile, charging the phone overnight drained 30%.
You would think, but we went directly to bed with as many blankets and coats as we could find. Just plug it in and let it charge. The phone has a maximum power draw of maybe 20W when speed charging. Not exactly boiling water.
I need to do some more formal testing, but I’ve found the discharge rate of my ecoflow to be baffling compared to my Jackery or a big Bluetti I have. My experience has been similar to yours.
Which has surprised me because in general I’ve only heard good things about them.
I’ve got some 20-ish kWh LiFePo in the basement. The internal temperature barely reacts to a forgotten window in a cold winter night. The whole thing is just many kilograms of thermal mass. Are you sure the battery temp was your problem?
If I’m not mistaken, those portable power stations with AC inverters consume power even when not in use. You probably should use the DC output wherever possible.
It has outputs through USB-A, USB-C, AC, and DC-vehicle (whatever it’s called). I think the AC inverter was off, though I had been using it earlier. I was definitely charging fully through the USB-C output. Good point, though.
If I’m not mistaken sodium ion is better with temperature and durability. The biggest problem is energy density, so they can’t compete in any applications where size and weight matter. This leads to their 2nd biggest problem, which is that there’s so much production infrastructure for lithium that no one wants to invest in new assemblies for other battery chemistries
They’re meant to survive an order of magnitude more cycles than Li-ion. But I’m containing my enthusiasm until we see them lasting a long time in real life use.
Yep. But also you need to run lead acid in a smaller charge window so you need more of them and when running out of space more panels might not be feasible - many variables in the whole thing, I don’t think there’s a universal answer, one can’t really get around setting up a small spreadsheet.
Time until full charge isnt really a relevant metric for utility storage, you want larger storage, which would increase full charge time. Rate of charge is what matters.
The C rating is generally what battery charging (and discharging) is measured in. C being the capacity of the pack. So if the pack is 10 Ah and it takes 10 hours to charge it’s 1c, if it takes 1 hour to charge then it’s 10c.
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