The 18 foot is equipped with powerful maintenance-free lithium-ion batteries to store large amounts of power reliably and efficiently. The 16 batteries are split up into two 24V parallel battery banks consisting of 8 batteries each, totalling an aggregate battery capacity of 800 Ah/more than 20 kWh. The parallel set-up enables the switching off of one of the battery banks in case of unexpected failure.

Battery Management System
To ensure the batteries’ reliability and durability, a high tech Battery Management System (BMS) comes as standard, 1 BMS per battery bank. Under- and overvoltage protection is in place to prevent deep discharging. Firstly an alarm will sound, when no action is taken the battery bank will switch off automaticly. Just as important, the BMS makes sure the voltage of the cells is equalised, prolonging the life span of the battery bank as a whole.

The BMS can be easily configured by connecting the BMS control unit to your laptop or computer. The BMS is also capable of displaying the real time status of the independent cells and historical data including power consumption, cell voltage and cell temperature on your tablet using Bluetooth.

Advantages of Lithium Ion batteries
The unique characteristics of the lithium-ion batteries allow them to be discharged up to 85% versus 30-50% for conventional lead acid batteries. Where lead acid batteries last from 500 till 1000 cycles you may expect to see up to 2000 cycles from a well-cared for Lithium-ion battery bank. Another advantage is that when charging almost no energy is lost, whereas when charging lead acid batteries around 15% of the energy gets lost.

Lithium-ion batteries show a flat discharge curve. This means they can deliver their full rate capacity even at high currents whereas lead acid can see as much as a 40% loss of capacity at high loads. Another advantage of lithium-ion batteries is that they have hardly any loss of charge when stored and switched off.

Lithium-ion vs Lead Acid