Dual Lithium Battery Systems

The B-TEC 200Ah 12V Generation 2 Battery

B-TEC 200Ah 12V Generation 2 Batteries is one of the latest produced by Enerdrive. The first thing to notice is that there are screws all around the top lid of the batteries which enabling the removal of the top  for maintenance should it be required sometime in the future. The warranty has now also been extended and Enerdrive offer a 3 year warrantee with a 2 year pro rata.

This 2nd generation 200Ah battery has another great new feature, which are the raised terminals, as opposed to recessed terminals, which, previously, presented issues with connecting cables coming in at odd angles making it difficult for proper connection.

This battery now also has an easily accessible reset button. For example, if you flatten the battery completely, by mistake or circumstance, by depressing the reset button you can wake the battery up again, enabling the battery to accept a charge.

Re-setting the battery is easy and right next to the reset button on the top face of the battery are clear instructions on exactly how to do this. In addition to these instructions, you will also find on the front face of the battery clear instructions and specifications of charging requirements.

Connecting B-TEC 200Ah 12V Generation 2 Batteries in parallel

These batteries also allow you to connect another battery in parallel so effectively if you connect 2 of these 200Ah batteries together you will get 400Ah bank output. However, it is important to do this correctly as we do not want to over-run the capacity of one of the batteries.

You will be interested to know that there is an Phone App available for Gen 2 B-Tec Enerdrive batteries which you can monitor your battery anytime giving you information like state of charge left in your battery, How many amps you are using from you battery, how many amps you are putting into your battery, the rate of capacity of your battery, including how many cycles you have put your battery through. A handy feature of the app on the last page of the app, is contact details and easy access to tech support for any issues what so ever you may have with your battery.

Here at Monteltham AutoElectric we can help you with every facet of your camping and auto hardware requirements. We can do all the work for you giving you the best advice possible with everything auto electric. If on the other hand you want to do all the fitting and planning yourself we can provide you with everything you need from batteries, inverters, regulators and more.

Mentioned above was the idea of connecting in parallel, two batteries, to give you double the Amp hours available in the form of a parallel bank.

So here are the pros and cons of this idea. It is always better to use one battery but sometimes you just need more storage capacity, and a bank of batteries will provide this. On the downside you are going to compromise the longevity of your batteries by connecting in parallel.

So, what is the proper way to connect two Enerdrive B-TEC batteries in parallel?

Using a 2000 W  ePower inverter in conjunction with the twin battery bank.

There is a problem with using batteries with an internal BMS (Battery Management System)is the possibility to overrun a board. The board in each battery has a rating For example, a 100 amp battery,  two batteries in parallel you can assume you can run up to 200 amps. However, the problem arises when the batteries discharge. At some stage one of the batteries will switch off, the internal board will isolate and switch off before the other, to protect the cells which is what it was designed to do. In this case the inverter which is attached to the two batteries is still consuming the original load but now it is taking it all from a single battery. This will be taking the load from a 100 amp device and the inverter is taking twice that load. This will overload the board and shorten the life of that battery and ultimately destroy your batteries.

So a way of protecting your system for example in this example we have two Enerdrive B-TEC batteries capable of a 200Ah load each and an 2000W inverter using around 180 amps. So as long as you do not use anything that will consume more than 200 amps you should be fine. This system will support that load and you can expect many years of use out of it.

So the rule is, when connecting two batteries in parallel do not connect any device to it capable of using more that the capacity of one of the batteries. This will ensure the maximum life of the batteries.

Connecting the batteries
Connecting the batteries in parallel, connect the positive terminals of each battery together and then connect the negative batteries together.

Connecting the load
In this case the load is the inverter and what we want to do is share the loads as evenly as possible, and using a staggered approach, instead of using one battery to connect the load we will use the positive terminal from one battery and the negative terminal from the other battery to connect the inverter cables as in the picture below.

Other good advice is to make sure the cables connecting your two batteries in parallel are as short as possible. The cables connecting the two batteries also need to be adequate in size. In the example we have used the connecting battery cables need to be the same size or larger than the cables used for the inverter.

Another bit of keen advice is to make sure you do not discharge your parallel battery bank 100%. A 100% discharge is not advisable and a way to help prevent this is to use an ePro plus Battery Monitor.

You may need more advice from us of how to install this but briefly this device will shut down your battery system way before your batteries are fully discharged.

This example we have used provides loads of 200Ah but if you feel this is not going to be enough reach out to the team here at Monteltham AutoElectric, we will have a setup which will provide everything you need.

More information on Enerdrive Products here

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Deep Cycle Batteries