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Comment by Baeocystin | Hacker News Reader

If you don't discharge below ~60% of system capacity, use flooded cells, and keep up with balancing charges, etc, you should be able to squeeze ~1,000 cycles out of a deep cycle/marine lead acid battery. A partial discharge only counts as a partial cycle, so you're within the expected range by your description.

https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/archive/advancements_in_...

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For comparison: A Tesla Powerwall v1 has a warranty for 5000 cycles.

At well above the cost of lead acid batteries. And the Tesla battery pack is very difficult to recycle. Recycle companies will pay for old lead acid batteries. They are of value even when dead.

I disagree with the 1000 cycles concept. Modern battery controllers are very good at preserving oldschool batteries. I don't see every off-grid house replacing their batteries every few years, just as I don't see automotive or marine batteries die so quickly.

Lead acid batteries also recycle in to reloaded bullets. You can use subsonic loads with just cast lead or swag the bullets into casings and get into higher performance hunting loads.

Assuming off grid prepper mentality is being used.

I fully expect to get another 5 years out of this set. As long as we get back to float the next day, capacity diminishing doesn't really matter for a house. That's more a function of sizing the input and output to the system than battery capacity.

Out of curiosity, technical question: do you use catalytic caps on the cells to recover water from the hydrogen outgassing?

>the Tesla battery pack is very difficult to recycle.

Are you sure about this? Lead-acid batteries are highly recyclable, but lithium cells are straightforward to recycle, too. I know that Tesla has a recycling center set up at their gigafactory.

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