R10k plus for an affordable portable power station, 6 days of stage 6 load shedding and you can kiss your lead acid/gel and AGM's goodbye, BS, let me explain.

A lead acid battery cannot charge at a rate higher than 10%, therefore if you have a 100 amp/hr FLA battery inside a portable unit you cant charge it at a rate higher than 10% (10 amps) which takes around 10 hours to charge, if you allow the unit to cutoff at the 10.5 VDC setting (standard in small portable mobile units, they ar enot designed for SA load shedding). 3 X 2 hours of load shedding in a day, your batteries will be dead and destoyed with a month, some do seem to last for around 6 months, depending on the load.

I deal with this on a daily basis, I will not sell a FLA battery to a person using it for mobile power trolley, unless they can prove it has a way to set the cutout voltage to 11.5 VDC or higher.

What people dont undeestand is that the 10.5 VDC cutout is when the battery if flat/dead/empty/finished, no more power. If by now you dont know that it is really bad idea to discharge any FLA battery below 80%, well I am telling you now.

Some will say but you can drop it to 50 %, well I am telling you from first hand experience 3 things kill a battery:

1/ Heat
2/ Draining them below 80%
3/ Charging them at a higher rate than 10%.

What I am looking for a is adevice that can cutoff the load at 11.5 VDC or higher, there would be a huge market tfor this device, not only for the end user but also companies sitting with piles of dead batteries replaced under warranty,thanks to the 10.5 VDC cutoff voltage.

YOu want to save R3k plus per battery, eitehr way over spec the setup and make sure it never drops below 11.5 VDC

For all of you who have those 3.5 kw axpert (RCT/Meccer/etc) units with 24 VDC batteries, go into settings and increase the cutoff voltage to 23 VDC or above, if its not too late already.If you dont.

We may not be getting 8 hours backup out of the units, but at least my customers onyl replace the batteries after 2-3 years.

I cant waint for the Sunsynk combo (inverter/ battery) to arrive. A small all in one wall mounted unit.