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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

Can these LifePO4 batteries be safely drained to 0% and then charged numerous times?

Yes and no. 0% you should be fine, but generally speaking you'll get longer life out of LifePO4 if you stay between 10% and 80%. Most battery based PV systems are installed to shut off (or switch to grid) at the 10% SOC mark for this reason.

This is my issue with LiPo whatever flavor where they tell you it has a "runtime" of X minutes, yet you are strongly advised to only use 70%-80% of that value. It's worse than hard drives using 1000 vs 1024.

I've found the difference in runtime between similarly-priced low-end units with similar power rating is hour+ (LifePO4 power station) vs not advertised but actually just minutes (lead acid UPS). And you can spend a bit more on the LifePO4 power station and get a proportional increase in runtime and power, vs. the lead acid UPS where the cost would quickly become prohibitive. And the LifePO4 power station gives you the choice to cut off above 0% or not, where the lead acid unit doesn't give you any control. So you can trade off 30% of your capacity for increased longevity if you choose and still come out way way ahead on runtime. Or you can not and still have much better battery longevity than lead acid. You can choose a spot on a Pareto frontier that lead acid can't even approach.

The rationale I've heard to justify conventional UPSs not even trying to compete on runtime is that they're just for giving you a few minutes to cleanly shut down your crap software that isn't crash-safe and/or for your auto-start generator to start up. But what I actually want is to keep working for an hour+ after the power goes out without owning/installing/maintaining a generator.

Both you and @mbesto here are persuading me to let go of my long held boat anchors based on LiPo tech is a bad fit for deep cycle battery use. I have several expensive SLAs that I have used with an inverter to get power remotely. Replacing that with a lighter/better battery chemistry is something I'd be willing to trade. I guess I need to quit being so curmudgeonly about the new batteries. I bet there's some with similar thinking I can unload these SLAs and recoup some to spend on the new batteries. :thinking-face:

You're reminding me that I have a couple conventional UPSs sitting in the garage. I should unload them before convincing everyone they're junk!

I have most certainly used 100% of the runtime. So you're more than welcome to do so as well, you might just have to replace it in 8 years instead of 10. YMMV.

Could be worse - could be lead acid and weigh 2x as much and you only get half the Ah.

>It's worse than hard drives using 1000 vs 1024.

So like SSDs? If you fill them up near 100%, performance tanks.

Yes, thousands of times, an order of magnitude improvement over lead acid. And the increased capacity means that they're much less likely to hit 0% (or whatever defined cut-off you set) during a typical outage anyway.

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