What to look for when you're buying a second-hand van
If you follow us on social media, you’ll know that we recently bought a second-hand Nissan MV400, which we intend to convert into a camper over the next couple of months.
It can be so daunting buying a vehicle second-hand to use as a base vehicle for your van conversion, but in this article, we’ll be covering some of the things that we look for when we buy second-hand vehicles, which help to reduce the risk of buying a lemon!
Review of Capacity and Terminal Temperature of EVE LiFePO4 battery cells from Shenzhen Luyuan
We recently received a set of 280AH LiFePO4 cells that we purchased from Shenzhen Luyuan (Amy Wan).
We wanted to know three things:
What are the individual cell capacities and how evenly matched are they?
What is the capacity for a reasonably high-C (in our case this would be around 160A so around 0.6C)?
What temperature do the terminals get to at the “high-C” test? These are the new welded-stud terminals with worryingly small surface contact areas, so we’d like some peace of mind that they don’t heat up too much.
How to justify the cost of Lithium when Lead Acid is so much cheaper?
One of the most common topics that we see on Facebook groups & forums is the question:
How can you justify the cost of LiFePO4 versus Lead Acid?
So in this article, we’re going to be covering this topic to shed some light on the numbers and to prove how good value for money LiFePO4 is!
Firstly, we’ll say that the chemistry of the battery system that you choose should be driven by two main things:
What are your current needs?
Do you think your needs will change in the future?
By needs, we mean what do you need to draw from your battery or run on it? Do you just need to run lights in your van, charge your phone and maybe charge a laptop? Do you need to run a large inverter that can run an induction cooktop, Nespresso machine and TV & PS4?