Replaced old lead acid batteries with LifePO4 for home power system off grid

So I finally got around to replacing my ancient 35000 watt hours of LA batteries with about 30000 watt hours of LifePO4. What a major change this is! It over doubled my usable watt hours even though the total bank has less.  With LA cells I could only use about 25-30% with the new LifePo4 I can use 60%. Voltage sag is more or less a thing of the past. With a full system load the voltage only sagged 0.1 volt with my old bank under full load it was over 1.0 volt of sag.

Simply amazing!!!

Certainly sounds like a winner. In your specific situation,  did you compile a direct cost comparison between the two battery types? I'd love to see the numbers if possible,  while still keeping the vast performance improvement in the back of my (rapidly shrinking) mind. Thanks for this post, it helps to shape  my decisions

For the combination of home energy, farmyard vehicle propulsion, and potentially future EV purchase, I continue to try to keep up with developments in solar energy and storage.  While very tempted to sink money into LiFePO4, I'm more inclined to spend only 'dabbling' amounts of cash here and wait to see where battery storage is heading.  So much change in the battery industry and with sodium ion battery technology moving quickly, that may turn out to be a less costly and more eco-friendy option in the near future.  Wife uses an electric Polaris 4X4 Ranger for farm chores and we are sticking with lead acid for the time being, but I will likely test LiFePO4's in my electric golf cart which also is a farmyard 'go-fer' vehicle. As we reside not far from the Canadian border in the northern Plains (USA), I was very encouraged by a bar-stool discussion this past week with a gal from Germany.  She was mentioning her family farm in a mid-central location of that country where she had helped her father install a solar system that is grid-tied, yet supplying a good portion of their home power.  Germany has a decent committment to solar and likley subsidizes these installations (??), but I'm not sure about that.  At any rate, successes in northern regions have me still leaning towards solar integration (or stand-alone?) with grid for our remaining days here.  Just seems from my limited experience so far with that technology to be extremely under-utilized at this point.

Rico Loma wrote:Certainly sounds like a winner. In your specific situation,  did you compile a direct cost comparison between the two battery types? I'd love to see the numbers if possible,  while still keeping the vast performance improvement in the back of my (rapidly shrinking) mind. Thanks for this post, it helps to shape  my decisions

No when I bought these last year my thinking was if I treat them right they would be the last batteries for home power I'll ever need to buy as they will in all likely hood out live me! They were rated for 8000 full cycles or roughly 22 years. Then after much research I had also determined that keeping the battery cells between 20 and 80 percent would double and maybe even triple the lifespan. So now we are talking 16,000-24,000 cycles or days. Well there are 365 days in a year and 16,000 divided by 365 that's roughly 43.5 years and I feel I'll be lucky if I live another 25-30 years....  These are Eve 280AH cells and I have 32 of them in a 16s2p arrangement. I also got them on sale with free shipping for under $4,000. To me that's a no brainer as $4,000 would barely pay a power bill for 3 years for a small extremely efficient house.

I purchased them from the 18650 battery store.

You hit the 16 d nail on the head. That was exactly the type of thinking I hoped for, so thanks Larry