Back on the Lithium
Sunday, November 2nd, 2008Mmm, it’s been a looong time since my last post but not due to a lack of things to write about, more to do with suffering from a hefty case of Bloggers fatigue.
So what’s been happening over the last year (yikes!)? Well we’ve had a 1kW solar panel array put on our roof – kindly paid for (mostly) by the federal government, converted my toxic two-stroke Victa lawnmower to a thermonuclear turf trimmer and written some Flash software for reading electricity meters with a web cam. More on those down the track but the really big news is that I’m back on the Lithium! Well I’m not on the full dosage yet but I have spent some serious cash for the trial phase on some LiFePO4 (Lithium Ferrous(iron) Phosphate) that I’m quite excited about.
For some time now I’ve been dealing with the very patient Armin Pauza who has set himself up as Lithium Batteries Australia and who is the national distributor for BMI. BMI are a Taiwanese company that manufacture battery cells and battery packs using LiFePO4 electrode material manufactured in Germany by Süd-Chemie AG under license from Phostech Canada. So these guys are the real deal. BMI also assemble the cells into battery packs of various configurations which all have built in Voltage Management Systems and come with a three-year warranty.
So far I’ve only done one simple test which was to pull out most of the very heavy lead batteries from under the bonnet of the e-e and replace them with a SINGLE (144 Volt, 10 Amphere hour) Lithium battery and drive it around the block a few times!
There is a lot to tell about these batteries so I have dedicated some web space to them on my electric-echo website here;