Thread: Where did you fit your Lithium battery?

Originally Posted by drivesafe

If you are using a GENUINE Lithium battery charger, unlike lead acid battery chargers, where they go into FLOAT mode once the lead acid battery is fully charged, a Lithium battery charger MUST TURN OFF automatically once the lithium battery is fully charged.

My guess is that many of the fires we see on the news are caused by pour quality battery chargers that do not turn off once the lithium battery reaches a fully charged state.'

This continuous, ( even low current ) charging is what leads to thermal runaway in any lithium battery.

I'm using a Victron Orion charger set up with the suggested voltages specified by the manufacturer. It's all pretty new, but I did try and watch it. It did shut down charging when the battery was charged.

What I'm unclear about is how it will handle having 5amps or so of load going through the system when I've got the fridge and stuff inside the car. Will the charger just switch to satisfy the devices?

I do like that I can turn charging off when I'm not using the car in trip mode and there is no load on the secondary system.

Originally Posted by p38arover

I'm using a Kings 25A DC-DC to charge my lithium in the L322. I have a display on the dash which shows the charge current. The charge appears to drop to zero when the battery is fully charged.

Its not an issue while driving.

If you were to drive 15+ hours straight, then it might be a problem but as most trips are no more than 5 hours on average, even when charging directly off a "non SMART" alternator like those found in original Defenders, where the voltage remains at around a constant 14.3v, no one drives long enough for this to be a problem, even if the lithium battery was already in a fully charged state at the beginning of the drive.

Lithium Batteries charge in a similar way to lead acid batteries in that the lower the state of charge of the battery, the higher the current draw, and just like lead acid batteries, as a lithium battery approaches a fully charged state, the current draw reduces, so the battery is not effected by our short drive times.