Hi folks Dave here. Today I have on my workbench the
WOT cycle 12 volts 300 amp hour mini battery. Now just to be clear a watt cycle
sent this battery to me for a review I did not pay for it. It looks pretty large
but for a 300 amp hour battery looks a bit on the small side and indeed it is
smaller than you would expect and that's why they're calling it a mini battery
So what I'm going to do is put this battery through its paces I'm going to put it on my
other workbench and I'm going to attach it to a dedicated charge controller and solar panels and really put this battery through its paces and see what it can do
The only way to determine if it really has 300 ampires in it is to do a real
test, a deep cycle. Now this type of battery has its own integrated BMS and it's a
virtually plug-and-play part of an off-electric grid solar power system. This battery has over three kilowatt hours of storage in it. Let's take a look at the
label. There's the model number. 3.8 kilowatt hours 3.84 kilowatt hours, so you could say it has 3 to 3.5 kilowatt hours in it with a reserve
Let's take a look at the watt cycle website. They have a whole line of 12-volt batteries
and as you can see the 12 Mini is their new product They also have various other sizes as well Now let take a look at the 200 amp power battery You can see this is the 200 amp power version and it 21 by 8 by 8 inches
This particular one is not listed as a mini size. It has a 200 amp BMS but just note the size
21 by 8.2 by 8.5 inches and 45.2 pounds. We go to shop, 12 volt batteries and 300mperm Mini
it says it's nearly 12 pounds lighter than a 3-pack of 12-1-100 ampires
42% smaller than a 3-pack of 12-volt-100-ampar batteries and I believe that because I've had two of the watt cycle 12-volt-100-ampar batteries on my bench before
anyway it's 15.12 by 7.64 by 10.4 inches and 57.32 pounds. Now interestingly if we
take the dimensions of the battery and cube them you get a number like this one
159 cubic inches if I take the 200 ampire battery and I have one third to it it would be 1,951 cubic inches but this 300 ampere battery is 1,159 cubic inches so I'm just doing some rough numbers to see
what is the size comparison it a little bit hard to do that when the batteries on the workbench to get an idea you can tell it small but it hard to tell how much smaller Now I using their 200 ampire battery as a comparison because a 300 ampire battery you would think
would be one-third bigger. So in this case, it's not, because it's a mini-battery, it is a compact
form factor. They've crammed more power into a smaller box. Anyway, let's calculate the percentage
based on a one-third bigger 200-ampar battery, a non-mini size. And I'm coming up with about
41% or something like that. Let's just say 40%. So really, that's quite a lot of
impressive and these are just rough numbers so clearly there's more power storage in this battery this
300 ampire mini but the size hasn't grown to what i would expect it stayed rather small and i find
that pretty interesting other interesting specifications is that it uses automotive grade a lifepo
four cells i don't tend to rip the battery open to see what's in it i'm just going to test it from
a customer standpoint either it works or it doesn't 200 ampr bms ip 65 waterproof rating that's
good anyway it is allowed to put them in four series so that means 40 volt or up to 4 in
parallel that's quite a beefy system now here's an interesting size comparison they
have the 300 ampire mini battery compared to a 12 o 300 ampire AGM and other 12
0300 ampire batteries and it amazing with especially with lead acid this type of battery would compare extremely favorably to lead acid AGM batteries AGM batteries are okay but of course they can perform on the level of a lithium and phosphate battery And there a picture It looks like they have the aluminum encased cells that are in a vertical position
able to be charged as long as it's above freezing, and it can discharge down to minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit
I would certainly try to keep my batteries warmer than that, but some people do have to put their batteries outdoors
and so you have to be careful if you're going to have the battery in a cold location. Now they're claiming a 10-year lifespan, and that's not a problem with lithium iron phosphate, as long as you take very good care of them
Here they say 15,000 cycles or more, and that's 60% depth of this chart
If you don't run it flat dead every single cycle, you could certainly expect 15,000 cycles
I agree that that's very reasonable expectation. You might even get more, but that all depends on how you treat them
Okay, that concludes this quick look at watt cycles specifications on their website. Let's take a look at the bench test and go ahead and finish that up and see how this battery performs
Alright, I got the battery moved over to the other workbench. It was quite an effort
It's pretty heavy, but you would expect for 300 ms powers that there'd be significant weight increase
And I'm going to wire in a charge controller that's available, patch in my solar panels
and give this thing a complete full charge. Then it will bring over one of my inverters
It's the same as that one right there. And I will charge this battery up, run that inverter, and do a complete deep cycle test to see what it can do