Unfortunately the cycle life of lead-acid is TRASH to the point where in any country except for Canada, LiFePO4 or even Li-Ion are more cost effective due to their far better depth of discharge, cycle life and absolute lifespan.
Even a “deep cycle” cell can only withstand tens of actual deep cycles. To get the rated 200 cycles, you can only discharge to 80%, which makes your 10kWh bank effectively a 2kWh bank. Suddenly it doesn’t look cheap anymore, especially when you’re lucky to get 2 years out of it micro-cycling. Lead acid is only good for rare emergency deep discharges i.e. UPS usage and it’s even questionable there now due to time degradation putting a short limit on its lifespan.
Here in Canada we can’t get lithium in any form other than overpriced packs, so I do have a dying lead-acid bank that I’m hoping to limp out until we get better chemistries. It’s basically a big capacitor at this point. I compensate by dumping surplus solar power into my boiler or air conditioner depending on the season, and shedding all but essential loads during outages.
Isn’t lead acid better for you then ?
Unfortunately the cycle life of lead-acid is TRASH to the point where in any country except for Canada, LiFePO4 or even Li-Ion are more cost effective due to their far better depth of discharge, cycle life and absolute lifespan.
Even a “deep cycle” cell can only withstand tens of actual deep cycles. To get the rated 200 cycles, you can only discharge to 80%, which makes your 10kWh bank effectively a 2kWh bank. Suddenly it doesn’t look cheap anymore, especially when you’re lucky to get 2 years out of it micro-cycling. Lead acid is only good for rare emergency deep discharges i.e. UPS usage and it’s even questionable there now due to time degradation putting a short limit on its lifespan.
Here in Canada we can’t get lithium in any form other than overpriced packs, so I do have a dying lead-acid bank that I’m hoping to limp out until we get better chemistries. It’s basically a big capacitor at this point. I compensate by dumping surplus solar power into my boiler or air conditioner depending on the season, and shedding all but essential loads during outages.