RV is the second or even the prime home for most families, many appliances like light, oven, air-con, refrigerator ,stove ,washer etc.,a mini mobile house, it’s very critical to provide stable power for all of these. Before lead acid battery is the main power, but it’s very heavy and short service life, average two years.
Now we have a better choice, thanks to the LIFEPO4 technology. It’s just 12kg for 12v 100ah,2/5 of lead acid battery for same capacity. Let’s do a simple math calculation, for a normal RV,4 PKS 12v 100ah batteries are needed, if it’s lead acid battery, the total weight is 120kg,and it’s just 48kg for LIFEPO4,total 72kg are saved. What does it stand? It means that RV could save more oil to power the engine, longer mileage. Another big difference is the Depth of Discharge(DOD),average DOD of lead acid battery is around 50%,and LIFEPO4 is min.90%.Whatsmore,LIFEPO4 has fabulous service life, it’s min. 7 years, just need to replace twice or three times for the whole service life time of RV.
You may think that LIFEPO4 is much more expensive than lead acid battery that is the old story. Everything has been changed since 2017,now the exw cost of an 12v 100ah lifepo4 battery is around 270usd, 98usd for lead acid battery. Again, math talks, 260/7=38usd, 98/2=49usd.It is obvious that the lead acid battery cost more than LIFEPO4 battery, regardless of the oil wasted.
Now it’s crystal clear that LIFEPO4 will be the trend for RV energy backup, let’s forget about the heavy lead acid battery. Refresh our RV with light, longer-life and quiet LIFEPO4.
Except replacing 12v 100ah directly, now there’s another solution, making an 48v 200ah-400ah battery directly, being placed under the bed or seats, and connect with bi-directional inverter, so it could provide power directly to appliances, and being charged by grid with the inverter.
