Lithium vs AGM again but different.

Submitted: Sunday, Oct 06, 2019 at 17:56
ThreadID: 139159 Views:16088 Replies:12 FollowUps:15
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I have seen a lot on forums like this about the benefits of Lithium batteries, and the capacity to weight ratio is a big benefit.

I read time and time again that another benefit is that they can be discharged to 80, 90 or even 100%. So compared to 50% discharge capacity of an AGM, you get extra capacity for the same size.

E.g. a 100AH in an AGM will give 50AH of usable capacity if you respect the battery life. And you will get 80AH out of a similarly sized Lithium.

But this seems to ignore the fact that lithium batteries have much lower life cycles at deep a discharge too. People quote 2000 to 3000 cycles using lithium, but this figure is generally at........50% discharge.

Specs I looked at (which are hard to find on many manufacturers websites) show life cycles of one tenth or one fifth of the quoted cycle rate when discharged to 80% DOD - that's 200 to 600 cycles. Same as a lead acid.

So the figures that you can get 80% DOD AND 5 times the battery life seem false to me.

So it seems to me that if you need to save weight or get a higher capacity from a restricted size, then Lithiums are great. At a price of 3 times the cost.

But if you think they will pay for themselves over time then thats not right unless you limit them to 50% DOD.

Am I missing something?
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