My Recent Projects

[elimloth]

I have been busy in RL working on home maintenance. The 16 year old batteries that power my house at night have come to the end of their life, wit htheir storage capacity less than half when they were new. But, 16 years for lead-acid batteries is a great run, so no complaints other than batteries are no longer recycled in the U.S. - thy are shipped

Comments

[grey_lady]

Looks like a project and a half!

Good to 'see' you - and a happy belated!

[johnpalmer]

I don't do any electrical generation. But I still have a stab of "ooh, not fair, he's getting all the cool toys!"

(And I wonder how this stacks up next to Tesla's home battery? It looks like they're far bigger and clunkier - but also far better.)

Aquion vs Tesla Li-ion batteries

[elimloth]

There are several differences. The Aquion manganese/saltwater/nano-carbon chemistry is lower density than Lithium Ion chemistry. So yes, for the same capacity the Aquion batteries are bigger than the Tesla ones. That works out OK in home usage. The positive for Aquion chemistry is that it does not suffer thermal runaway ever. The Tesla home battery system has a lot of active individual cell cooling tech to stop the runaway explosions from happening.

Here's a review of several battery systems: http://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/2015/11/19/complete-battery-storage-comparison-and-review

Re: Aquion vs Tesla Li-ion batteries

[johnpalmer]

"Thermal runaway" definitely didn't sound *good* but then you got to the part about "explosions". And then I flashed on https://xkcd.com/651/, and realized that if a laptop battery has the energy of a "grenade"... yikes.

Re: Aquion vs Tesla Li-ion batteries

[elimloth]

A laptop LiIon batter hold somewhere around 200Wh of energy. An off-grid home system like mine hold 52,000Wh of energy. I really do not want any significant amount of that energy released suddenly.