Samsung SDI 48v ESS Lithium Battery Rack Mount Modules

Samsung SDI 48v ESS Lithium Battery Rack Mount Modules

     With blackouts going on in northern California most people are preparing, stocking up in hardware stores, looking for extension cords, water coolers, generators which pretty much sold out everywhere, causing all kinds of trouble, forcing people to look into alternative power options.
     But I will show you how to build an easiest, quickest DIY Powerwall money can buy, so let’s do it!  You will need some kind of box to use as an enclosure, I have this standard 19” flight rack case like it shows in the picture above from my old band days, which are fairly common and will be used to house the battery.     

   
So  to  start  whit, this   are 3.3kWh 48v battery Modules called Ess modules that stands for Energy storing system  which  are  setup as standard 19´ mounts which should easily fit our box. 
     So let’s begin mounting them up and screwing them up Whit that done let’s talk about  the module, beginning  whit  the measurements although it’s a 19´ standard rack,  on  the  inside behind the face plate its 17´ and a full 19´ from ear to ear and about 20´ from the rack mount to  the  back and 6´  height  which  should  let  you  install  4 units  on  the typical  rack  system. This  module  It’s  a  16s  which consist  of  2  8s  modules that could be broken apart, the problem is  that’s they  are  welded together, you  could  cut  them  apart and  install  a  new  connection or  bus bar, but there’s  probably a way for you to do it somehow if you really  wanted  to, but  as  they are their  ready to go 8s and 8s and if you wanted to use them as 24v you  totally  could you  would  just have to rearrange  the  main  bus  bars  to have both 8s as parallel and have a 24v system, but it’s probably best  to  be  used as a 48v system because its ready to go.
      It also has a fan which can be activated by an external system.  Each pair of cells has a thermistor so  that’s   4  termistors  per bank  of  8  cells  and  each individual  cell  has balancing going back to a Bms board that is  housed in this compartment  which us a  standard  Rc  type  of  plugin  so  any  Rc charger or any other  stuff  that’s made for the Rc world that could handle 8s would be able to work, In  this  case I will start checking individuals cells voltages, when I’m charging I want to make sure they are not unbalanced, so I was very easily was able to swap the bms board for my own equipment and  get it  running. On the Bms system we are checking and trying  to  figure out the communication protocols.
     I think its CAN commands going thru, so if we are able to figure  it out  you will have access to that so  you  could  have monitoring on this guy.  But if not you can very  easily used  third  party  equipment  to  check  the  balance  and status of this battery’s.
     The  nominal  voltage is 58.4 according to  info  on this rating sticker, as for the system power  output  is 3.971kW nominal  capacity  68Ah,  operating voltage 49.6-65.6 Vdc   This are made to cycle quite a bit so they are  going  quite conservative on the voltage because at 65 it’s about 4v and of course this things can go all the way up to 4.2 but of course you won’t get that really long life cycle on the higher end or the lower end so that’s why the recommended operating voltage is 49.6v to 65.6v.

   
    I will do a capacity test on these guys to see where they at, and what’s the average  capacity on the ones we have.   Some of this units are showing a slight swelling on the back of the units, it doesn’t seem to have an effect on the capacity or  the output capacity but I would  still  like to mention  that some of them are showing that.  Ok so here we  are showing 10kWh of battery at 48v, let’s  talk about capacity as you saw on the video I did a lot  of testing, the first cycle these came out a little low at 2.83kWh,  second 2.74kWh and 3.11kWh then I did a second cycle and they all average out at 3.3kWh on the second cycle I went from 4.2v all the way to 3v and  giving me  a total of 10kWh out of  these 3  ramdom  packs  that i sampled.  Since  these units  been  probably  sitting around  for a while they  will  need a couple of cycles to get their thru capacity out, and since there are around 1 thousand  of  them  and because they are so many we won’t get a chance to test all of them out,  but  since we  took  out 3 random samples  from  the batch and all average at around 3.3kwh that’s how we will be advertising them as 3.3kWh battery modules.
     So as you saw  from  the  video  this  is  pretty easy to assemble, as for the terminals here this are 48, straight to the  battery  terminals  whit M8 bolts making it easy to be able to connect all of them leading to an inverter and you are  ready  to go. Now let’s talk about inverters, since you will need some sort of inverter to use the power stored in this battery’s, this  are  48v  Dc unless you have some devices that work at 48v then you won’t be able to use it, most devices will either work on 12v or  24v if you have Rv appliances and  stuff or 120v  and  240v Ac for  the  bigger appliances  and in order to do so then you will need an inverter.
     If you want like a top of the line inverter then you can get one like this OutBack Radian Series 8000W Power Inverter which is grid interactive.     It also has all kinds of features  that  will let you use battery first or just to use the battery as back up, you could also install an emergency generator so that when the battery runs out in an emergency you could still have a generator to power the battery’s

     This inverter lets you use this battery in  an off grid  scenario, you could also take it out to a cabin  in the  middle of the woods and install this battery connect to the inverter and could use 110v or 240v and have enough to run your house like  an  Ac, anything  that below 8kWh  this setup will be able to handle it, this is  expandable so you can use a bunch of them up  to 16  of them, so this is a great setup if you want to use top of the line.

   Sometimes you can find them cheap like I did like in this case because it had the grill missing I paid  50%  of  retail price, there’s  was like 30 of them and you guys bought a lot of them so some of you guys reading this probably got one of them, but if that’s too much money and you want an affordable version let me show you what you can do.

    Here  we  have a grid tie inverter whit 48 to 90 volts  on  the  Dc side solar grid  tie  inverter,  so  you will be able to connect these battery’s and fully charge at 67v all the way to 45v this  will  run  and will  convert  the 48v into 240 ac and  when you connect it to your main circuit it will take all this stored energy  into  you  house  wiring system so you could use it  and  whatever  you don’t use it will go back to the grid, but this particular unit has a sensor that you could put to limit itself to only  what  your house is using, so this grid tie inverter will never let you feed back into the grid, and the best part is that they are very affordable, I bought this for about 240dlls in ally express, it’s a 2kWh inverter.

     I ran a  test to check  out  the  capacity of these battery’s and they ran for around 10 hours straight, no  problem  at  full peak and it never overheated, units like this are built to be able to output the peak power for extended periods of time without burning up.
     
    Let me  show you  how this work, this is probably not the  best  way  to  connect  this  but I like to complicate myself, you could just get  2 cables and conect them all and unto the inverter. 
     Now we have the battery running 1977 Watts pulling 36.4 Amps  from  the  battery and  although it’s not fully charged since it’s at 63% this could be here forever and we installed the sensor to limit then it will only be  putting out  what  its  needed, if it’s less than 2000 watts then it will limit itself to whatever it is and if its more than that it will put out full power all 2000 watts. so from this you can decide where to part from.

     Here’s is a simplified version of a solar off grid setup that you would be able to use whit whit these.

 





 

List of Materials:

3.3kWh 48v battery Module - Single 48v Module - https://j35.us/SamsungESS48v-single

13.6kWh 4 Module Pack kit - https://j35.us/SamsungESS

48v 8000w Outback Inverter https://kit.com/jehu/power-inverters/...

2Kw Grid Tie Inverter https://kit.com/jehu/power-inverters/...

DC Capacity Meter https://kit.com/jehu/diy-powerwall-bu...

Flight 19" rack case https://kit.com/jehu/diy-powerwall-en...

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