Lithium Batteries, who has them?

[Toolman]

Terry,Tesla are looking for dealers, you may be able to get a couple at trade

[Dot]

Have you finished your conversion yet Toolman?

[T1 Terry]

Terry,Tesla are looking for dealers, you may be able to get a couple at trade

I heard mention that they required a min of 100 installs mth to accept anyone as an agent..... considering there is maybe 1,000 potential buyers that only adds up to 10 mths of sales and that does not look even remotely feasible when you consider the task of training that many installers to meet the 100 a mth min requirement yet only 10 mths to recoup the outlay and just break even.
The only way I can see them getting them into the country at all is if a conglomerate of solar installers sign up to purchase x number per mth from a central supplier.
Solar installers that are up to the competence level of installing these things are a tad thin on the ground and they co-operate with each other on about the same level as used car salesmen and motor mechanic
It will be interesting to see how Elon Musk handles the entry into the Aust market, I doubt if he will find too many agents willing to risk all... but I could be wrong

The other thing is, he is not the only one offering these battery set ups, Panasonic have had their E3DC up and running for over 5 yrs in Germany, Bosch for around the same length of time, so Elon Musk if playing catch up in a very limited market, good luck to him and I hope he pulls it off, it will destroy the electrical energy industry model that we have here in Aust at the moment and the US have already factored in the demise of centralised generation. The next few yrs will be very interesting

T1 Terry

[dapope]

You are in the right area to organise one or more to be transported back here. I'd put my hand up for 2 units at least......interested?

Tempted, but no. Schedule is tight enough as it is!

[Mrcoolabah1au]

Just buy them of terry

[native pepper]

If you do the maths on the tesla packs, you may find the they will be close to $10000 installed in Aus. Exchange rates, GST, import duties, freight from the USA and in Aus, installation costs, panels and off course suitable inverters and charge controllers.

Get my dedicated 80amp lifepo4 charge controller in the next week or so, it being tested for a month to ensure it does the job. Ordered two 60amp ones under test as well for the house and will use the 80amp for the bus.

[native pepper]

For any interested in the dedicated 80a lifepo4 solar charger I've been testing, forget it, it was a total failure and couldn’t handle the input without stuffing up and over heating. I'm now testing 60ah controllers in parallel and so far it is functioning well on 2kw of panels. In the next few weeks will have 4 x 40ah controllers which will test in parallel to find out whether the 60a or 40a works the best.

Very interesting exercise, seems large ah controller can't handle constant bulk charge and actually only ever get to their stated capacity for very short periods, They are also much more susceptible to temperature variances and on hot days get very hot and have only about 50-70% input. Smaller controllers in parallel overcome this problem I've found and do operate very well when only using 70-85% of the input capacity. Which could mean your charge controller should not work any harder for any length of time at full capacity when used with lifepo4 you have lifepo54 charge parameters

[bagmaker]

What voltage are you at @pepper? 12 or 24??

[nut17]

I am interested in your research Pepper, as my "Fangpusun" Chinese knock off of a Flexmax Outback 80 is definitely not doing the business. My 600AH LiFePO4 battery was at 493AH remaining yesterday with full sun on the 1080w x 24v panels and the controller was 'snoozing" and not putting out any charge current. Even running the microwave for a couple of minutes did not trigger the unit back into bulk charge mode. I have been considering installing a pair of eTracer 45Amp MPPT units. These appear to have a reasonable reputation and have fully customisable charge protocols. Anyone had experience with these?

Cheers Chris

[bagmaker]

@nut17, I have 2 of these charging my 940A/h lead battery, I don't know that you can change the charge parameters to adequately suit LiPoFe4 batteries.
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/MPPT-40A-Sol ... 1307583388
There are some really basic options to input cell capacity etc but no way to limit max batt voltage which would be bare minimum requirement for lithium, especially of the size and price we are using.