Not LifePo4 they are typically only 60% efficient. I just threw away my LifePo4 cells you can not get this chemistry cold it will destroy them if they are discharged.
Not sure about this company, Im finding it hard to believe this unknown company is doing what Panasonic and LG chem have been trying to do for decades. Tesla cells are not even to this level.
I stand corrected average typical efficiency of LifePo4 is well over 90% efficiency. I still hate them though, lol
Those Packs I just bought verses the headway cells are far better cells and cost the half what I paid for the Headways.
You sure the headways were geniune?
Considering the publisher of the artificial is who I bought them from.
Did you buy them new or used? It looks like they get batteries that are from packs that are below the 80% threshhold, which means they have been used a lot. I suspect it also depends on how you charge them. They donāt handle being overcharged well like when a car holds at 14v for long periods of time, they degrade a lot faster.
I had a proper BMS you need a BMS on any lithium chemistry or you will destroy them.
They cold discharged that is what killed them. You can not let this chemistry get cold while discharging.
The cells I had were nearly 100% capacity.
about zero. which ironically is close to NiFe batteries.
I saved the NiMH high voltage battery from my sonās wrecked Prius. Made some battery packs to run my trolling motor and underwater diving hookah. These cells are good and strong but can only be charged in series, not parallel.
You guys went way over my head. Right now my goal is to be able to power a thousand watts of LED lights for six hours a day and do it by charging a battery bank with a generator. I understand that lead acid is the least desirable way to do this but how close can I come with a one K to 1200 buck budget. Someone I know recommended an AIMs Inverter charger as the best way to charge the batteries from a genset. I really havenāt found any information I can understand on the web that addresses something like this. I thought I was linking this to one of Matts responses from two days ago. Also how many cycles I can get out of this system is not my main concern. I doubt Iāll be around long enough to see 10,000 cycles anyway. A few years out of this system is all Iām asking for right now.
There we go!! We needed some details. It gives us parameters to work with. 
You can do it with Lead Acid (LA) batteries but plan it so you donāt go below 50% of the discharge or else you are just burning through the batteries. The lifetime decreases dramatically around 40-50% of the discharge. 3 years vs 1 year.
Iām not sure you can get there with 1k. You need a minimum of a 6 kwh pack. If you are running the lights off 110, then you need to bump that up around 20%, which means roughly 7.2kw, double that to stay under 50%, and you are are at 14.4kw plus you need all the cabling.
Matts suggestion of buying a used EV car battery and testing and putting the cells together may actually get you there within budget. The costco interstate golf cart batteries have poor reviews but they only put out 1050wh or 1.05kwh and you need 14, and most likely 16 of them.
Golf cart itself typically refers to just the size of the battery and not necessarily anything else. You really want deep cycle batteries. But here is a fairly informative read.
This is an example of a 3.5kwh battery pack using used cells. It looks like you can get pretty close to budget with this, but it needs a bigger inverter. I donāt know what the Depth of Discharge can be for the pack without cell damageā¦ I think you can get to 80%. I donāt know about max draw without excessive heat either. (I will stand corrected if someone else wants to jump in.) Usually mechanically inclined people donāt like taking on electronics projects. I didnāt find anyone that really did DIY LA batteries with plate castings and such you could make yourself. Given you have a forge, casting seems like it would be right down your alley.
Seanās estimates sound pretty spot on to me - 14kwh would be a good number to shoot for if you want to pull 1000watts for 6 hours out of lead acids. I started my off-grid adventure with 4 flooded 12v deep cycle batteries wired at 24v. I kept the discharge to about 20% most of the time, equalized them monthly, and got about 3.5 years of service. They cost me 700 bucks, i want to say, with core charges.
Next I tried 4 flooded 6 volt trojans, again at 24v. About 3.5 years in, they were starting to exhibit voltage sag when my pump came on. It is a roughly 1100watt soft start motor, and I would see the voltage go down to 23 or something like that. I decided to replace them before they died on me, and I got 2 of those 3.8kwh Simpliphi batteries. The old trojans went out to live in my shop, and I will try and when they really croak, I might try reviving them with epsom salts or something. I have only had the lithiums for 6 months, so I cannot speak to their claim of 10k cycles. Time will tell I guess. I paid like 5500 for them, but they more than doubled my capacity, so we will see if they end up feeling worth it in the end.
I dont really know much about reviving old batteries, but some people claim to have had success with it. My advice would be to buy as much battery as you can afford, and then just figure you are going to be running the generator longer to make up the difference.
As for chargers and inverters, there are lots of options out there. I personally believe that for the sort of loads you thinking of running, 24v would be better than 12. It will save you a few bucks on copper. I am actually not sure how touchy LED lights are about their power- cheaper inverters make some electronics (like motors) unhappy. I suspect LEDs would probably be fine. The charger also does not need to be anything special - but you will want to size it according to the size of your battery bank. You cant fill a water glass with a firehose, and you likewise dont want to try and cram too many amps into a battery. I want to say trojan specāed 15% of the AH rating. So for my 225ah batteries, max of about 34amps in.
Combo charger/inverters are commonly available, but they might not be as easy to get optimally sized. Inverters use a certain amount of power even for very small loads, so efficiency gets better the closer you are to the peak power rating. You might want to get a 1200 or 1500 watt unit though just so you have a little wiggle room - but much more than that is probably inefficient.
You can sometimes find EV batteries from a wrecked car, but they will require a lot more research. Volts have a 16kwh pack, and you can pick them up for 2 grand or so. They are divided into weird module sizes, though, so it might be hard to get them to a usable voltage. Leaf cells are more modular, but most lithium cells will really need some sort of BMS. Lithium fires are bad news.
Anyway, if you havnt noticed, I like talking about batteries. So if you have any questions, I will gladly provide all my biased opinions 
Thanks for the information guys. It makes sense to me more than most information I managed to glean. Does the Northern Arizona place have a forum. I joined one that may have been that a couple years ago and every question pretty much got a boy are you a dumb ass response. Why ask questions if you are not a dumb ass? Anyway, These are the batteries I was looking at.
Now remember Iām still a dumb ass. I was told that if a battery weighed the same as another one it meant that they had about the same amount of lead in their plates and should perform similarly.These weigh about as much as the Trojan 105ās, What I am really trying to do is just get something in place short term because itās getting harder all the time to get things. I was told by some people I know that have an auto repair shop that Anti-freeze is in short supply as well as other supplies that may come from China. Apparently Prestone is made in Wuhan. I donāt know if these shortages are just regional or wide spread.
If I get my butt in gear I have a 1965 Chevy pick up that was set up as a mud truck. Lifted, lockers front and back, tricked out suspension. 454 big block. I was going to do a frame up rebuild on it a while back and that project got stalled. I have been going to bolt the body panels back together and sell it. It should be worth about 8K. Peddling that would put me in a position to may get some decent components, but I still want to find out what is possible on the very cheap.
if all you are going to run is led lights they are DC about 2 volts i know 2 pen light batterys will burn one out in a few seconds. but the led bulbs you buy have a resister in line with the bulbs to reduce voltage and current so if you could check out what the series of bulbs would require just use a resistor for each set then you would not even need to go AC for the lighting . would save a lot of power wastage. The bulbs we use for the hydro are not saving energy they are made to run on 115 volt the leds dont even heat up but the bottom were the reisters are gets hot . Take one apart and see what i am talking about . We have changed over to day light bulbs in 80% of our house the led 4 ft floresents use only 15 watts for 2 bulbs dont even need the ballast. but they use resisters as well. check into how they work you might be suprised how much light you could get for a couple hundred watts. way more than companys are letting on. If i was to go of grid that is what i would use. But i am 67 years old and dont want to leave my wife trying to fugure out how to fix things when i am dead so i will not be going of grid. I have had heart problems and i may only have a couple of years left.most people dont have a mind that can fix or create this kind of life style.
Yeah what larry said, Look up RV LED lighting. RVās run partly on DC and AC. The wall sockets are AC along with the Air Conditioner and furnace. However, most everything else is ran on DC, this is the lights, the Fridge, hot water heater and water pump.
So you can get high output DC LED lights and run direct from battery. The lights I installed are more than twice as bright as the old DC lighting and only use 4 watts.
Easiest and cheapest way I know for high out put charging are the RV DC converters.
Go to Power Max directly they build in all voltages. The beauty of these chargers is you mount close to your battery bank not the generator. You bring the power in AC from the generator to the charger and then short run from this charger to your batteries.
https://powermaxconverters.com/product-category/converters-ac-dc/
There are battery monitors you can get cheap that have Low Voltage Disconnect systems. So you can set this to 12 volts for instance and it will cut off the output generally use the ground side.
If you give leds too many volts they will pop in a couple of seconds. I run leds on 3.3v off the raspberrypi gpio port without a resistor and they work fine. The different colour lights have different values though. The reason for the resistor is to prevent a short if the led pops and it shorts it can blow out the pin on the pi from too much current draw. I have seen big heat sinks on voltage regulator that put off a lot of heat for converting 12 to 3 volts for automotive use. On/off doesnāt seem to be a huge issue. I use pwm which is on/off but -really- fast.
He probably has a few of something like these stacked in there essentially switched mode power supply with current smoothing.
https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/led-drivers/7736992/
You can bypass that completely if you can get the voltage right (which is right on the tag) and skip the inverter altogether. A boost or buck converter would help.
I am guessing you need to switch the negative and positive wires when you switch inputs if you do it more manually. (you can use relays and run those off a the aforementioned essentially blinky light program) Otherwise, you are looking at something like a UPS circuit.
That is kind of the other reason why I was suggesting the longer life batteries. If you donāt have to replace them, no one has to figure it outā¦ IF I was going offgrid, it would be batteries and solar, cause pretty anyone can figure out how to clean off the panelā¦ You can actually still use a grid-tie system in off-grid mode, so you only pull power when you are short, but that eats up a lot of the cost advantage or she can just restore service after you are on your merry way.
Yeah, this is a fairly good rule of thumb. The T-105s are rated for 225Ah if I remember right, these duracells have a rating of 215Ah. If you are going to go down the Lead Acid rabbit hole you will also need to learn about the Peukert Effect. It basically says that the more power you try and pull out of the battery, the less energy you will get in total. So 215Ah is the 20 hour rate. That means if you apply a load that drains the battery in 20 hours (about 11 amps for this battery) then there will be 215 Ah available or about 1290wh. If you bump up the amp draw to about 30 amps, you will only get 156Ah (the 5 hour rate) and the battery will only provide 936wh, the other 354wh will have snuck out, leaving your battery nice and warm at the end. Also, bear in mind you dont want to go below 50% DOD.
So, you want to pull 6000 wh out of your bank: Lets say you decide on 24volts - so you will need 250ah. Double that to get to 500ah and 24v, so you only ever use half. To get 24v you will need strings of 4 batteries in series. Each string will have 215ah, so if you did 3 strings you would be looking at 645ah (with the 20 hour rate). But, bear in mind you are putting a pretty big load on that battery - 1000 watts. Thats 41 amps at 24v. You can divide 41 by 3, and come up with 13.66amps drawn per string - which is a little bit higher than the 20hr rate above (but quite a bit less than the 5 hr rate). So yeah, 12 of those batteries should be able to squeak by pulling that load for 6 hrs. Do some homework on wiring battery strings in parallel, though, as I suspect it might be hard to get them to be well balanced with an odd number of strings. If you wire them up in such a way that you inadvertently put more load on a single cell, that could lead to premature capacity loss.
Dont forget to factor in the core charge, which is likely 20 bucks or so per battery.
And Larryās idea about gutting the LED bars and running them on DC might be worth looking into, but it also might wind up being more work than its worth. I have a 1500 watt inverter and it only pulls about 20watts at idle. I have never checked its draw when under heavy load - but I am guessing it is north of 90% efficient. I am not sure how much power the āballastā of the light uses, but you will wind up wasting some energy if you have to put resistors in.
All excellent information that I havenāt been able to get otherwise. I always thought that LED could be run on DC and had to be modified someway to run AC. Iām going to study all the information given. I have no talent for electronics. I can wire a house or old school vehicles. I havenāt even unpacked my grow lights since I got them. Iām still running fluorescent grow lights on the grid. Perhaps I wonāt even need all these lights or watts. Itās all trial and error right now. I have be leaning toward staying 12V because the power cord from the generator is 25 ft long to whatever charger I get and as for connecting batteries, I still have a few hundred feet of welding cable laying around. I would just need lugs. Iām sure Iāll have other questions once I research and digest what you have already provided. Thanks. Just for general information. I think Carl mentioned something about running an engine six hours a day as far as wearing them out. I assume clean producer gas is about the same as propane but with less energy. I have pulled apart fork lift motors that have been only run on propane for years 16 hours a day and found no appreciable damage to the lower end. New mains and just about brand new. Gasoline, especially with ethanol is much harder on an engine.
