LiTime 12 Volt 100Ah Mini Smart LifePO4 Battery Review with bluetooth BMS and LTCP

what's guys back to the channel in this episode we're going to be talking about Le time or Li time we haven't had one of other batteries on the channel so we thought it's probably a good time to check it out especially because they seem to be all over the place they're marketing uh everywhere and from what I can tell from their lineup on the website and all the things that they have available they have pretty much a battery for almost every specific use case even if the battery is mostly the same they have it like changed just a little bit marketed towards specific use cases so they're doing a really I would say strong job or very good job trying to Market everywhere and try to get you know a market share so you know it's probably a good time to take a look at them right so first of all I will say uh Le time or Li time is not a brand new company they've been run for a long time um and they used to be called believe it was and beer time and then some time ago they rebranded or reorganized or whatever and now it's lie time but on this episode we're going to be talking about Lee times's Mini xmart battery so Le time does have a mini battery uh but this one is the Smart X mini right so there is a difference very small but we will go over this battery from top to bottom and put it to test this battery is a 12.8 volt 100 amp hour battery and they have all different kinds of configurations of this battery as I talked about earlier so if you're interested in knowing more about this battery stick with us so this is the lifetime Lio 4 12.8 volt 100 amp smart X Mini battery obviously it's a lithium iron phosphate battery has a warranty for 5 years has a cycle life of over 4,000 plus and obviously the nominal voltage of this is 12.8 volts right the energy capacity that's in here you know if you take 12.8 time 100 that's 1280 wat hours and this battery is able to be configured in 4 s4p Max what that means is you can expand up to four of them in parallel or you can expand up to four of them in series or you can just do combination of series and parallel and just get a you know really big battery Bank the internal resistance of this battery is guaranteed to be less than 40 milliohms it's got all types of certification and this battery being the smart battery has Bluetooth integrated into the battery uh most of these batteries of this type including this one has BMS built in and the BMS on this batter is capable of 100 amps uh or 100 amps and the continuous output power at 100 amps is obviously 128 1,280 Watts right so the continuous charged current Max is 100 amps and the continuous discar or discharge current is also 100 amps but the recommended charge current is 20 amps so make sure you keep that in mind uh if you're talking about surge capabilities or whatnot this battery is capable to discharge a Max of 500 amps for up to 1 second um obviously the charging voltage of this type of battery is around 14.4 volts plus or minus .2 volts depending on type of charger you get most of the Chargers designed for 12vt lipo 4 batteries will charge this battery properly uh this battery has up to 20 types of protection they're advertising um on what you can do like the type of protection that it has for whatever reason all the types of protection that I was counting on or counting that they've marketed did not count up to 20 so I'm not exactly sure how they got that but you know they have like low temperature charging protection and all the important charging or discharging protections that you would want in a battery of this class right so let's talk about that real quick this does have low temperature uh charging protection which is the little icon that's on the bottom right of the battery that says ltcp and uh the battery will stop charging when it uh gets to uh a certain temperature and then it will start charging again when it comes above a certain temperature so I did notice especially with the huge winter storm that has been going on here and this battery being outside and or in the garage or with the garage being open you know we did experience that unfortunately didn't get it on video but we did see that uh the terminals on this battery is M8 volts and this battery weighs almost exactly the amount as the lead time Mini battery which is 19.13 lbs if you get the regular one that's not smart it will weigh just a hair or less this battery is ip65 rated and the housing material is a ABS in case you're wondering about the size of this battery it's roughly about 10 and 1/4 by 5 and 1/4 by almost 9 in high so obviously this is the battery there's not too much to go over on this battery especially because it's literally what you see is what you get right so on the front of this battery you know obviously has this sticker on here uh it seems like a pretty good quality sticker obviously if you're going to put it in like a wetter Marine type environment it'll probably fall off on the bottom corner right here what I talked about uh earlier is the low temperature charge protection that's what this stands for uh this one is the mini which lifetime has a mini but this one is the Smart X Mini and what makes it the smartx mini is that this has Bluetooth 5.0 built into the battery which allows you to use an app to communicate with the BMS or the BMS inside of the battery and also see additional features uh like you know turn it off type of thing from inside the app so that's obviously a nice thing to have uh you know other than that this battery is a little bit plastic feels like it's got that space on the inside to kind of get that Hollow expansion or you know space to built in there this battery does have a handle that can be removed by uh taking this uh this what do you call this material handle just out of here but you know I think for if you're moving this around a lot or even if you're not you can just keep this in here and it serves as a nice handle to to use right but it is easily removable this is obviously that material that will probably degrade if I get pretty fast if you leave it in in the Sun uh because you know you see these things break down pretty quick but if you're using it inside or not exposed to the sun you're going to be fine right obviously these are the terminals that you have to put on I've already put it on there and ran with it a little bit uh the back side has all bunch of warnings caution do not do this do not do that all kinds of fun stuff it even got a QR code you can scan to you know uh learn more about this battery and all the uh manuals and stuff like that but other than that you know there's really nothing too special that you see from just looking at the battery so let's get it connected to some loads and see how it works so let me flip the switch that connects this battery to a 2000 wat inverter using this 4 gauge cable uh I will go ahead and get the app started so you can see what's going on with that and what I will tell you immediately is that one thing I do not like about uh this this app is that you do have to register in account or create an account in order to use the app right so on the top of the battery there is a uh spot that tells you to scan this code to download the app and also all the other specs on the battery just in case for whatever reason you forgot um it's there but you do have to create an account and that's one thing I don't like about you know some of these apps because sometimes I just don't want to get it going uh sometimes people like creating accounts because all their stuff is safe but you know sometimes people don't and if you're really just trying to get it going you don't want to do that so I'll stop rambling anyways so once you get the app loaded you can add your battery by hitting this plus icon right here and obviously in this case I've already loaded the battery in here so if you go ahead and look at what's inside the app it's got all the information that you would want to know obviously what mode that it's in the state of charge that it's in how many watts and amps is currently being drawn out of the battery the voltage of the battery and the remaining capacity of the battery this app does have a few interesting features mainly uh around the what I would call it the advanced features which have been you know Made For Dummies I would say because it's got this thing here called balance and once you hit the balance all it really tells you is that your cells are you know well balanced it doesn't go into each cell and then tell you you know what the voltage of each cell is which is exactly what you would want for more of an advanced user but they've really made it you know as error proof or dummy proof right so balance really tells you just only that it's balanced if you go to the cells it just tells you the cells are functioning optimally or normally right instead of the temperature of each cell the voltage of each cell all that kind of stuff and it's also got the BMS here that really tells you the BMS is running smoothly right so for whatever reason um if you wanted to be have the advanced features of everything uh in there and view the exact balance of those uh or the details of those exact parameters it's going to be a little bit difficult to do that all right uh mainly because all it tells you is the the result not necessarily every detail and I will say I think uh some people will really like that mainly because they don't want to know all of that stuff they don't want any of that complication they just want want to know is it good or not so there's a market for that and I think the market that uh the company is going for is probably uh more or or more mass Market which is going to be I would say for the masses they probably don't care about all those details right so obviously other things in here is going to be called the temperature cycle time or how many times you've cycled this battery fir more version uh serial numbers and all that kind of fun stuff so that's here so let's go ahead and get some load connected right let's go ahead and get the load going here uh what we're going to use right now is the Heat heat gun mainly because the other heater is actually in use uh we got this heat gun going here you can tell here let me bring this here uh on this inverter you can see the uh right now it's drawing roughly 541 Watts or 24 550 something watts and from this battery it is currently drawing roughly close to 400 500 just fluctuating a little bit there but the current that's being drawn from the battery is fluctuating wildly around like 46 47 58 so you know that is what's live there and if you want to know how much it can go let's see if this heat gun can even Max it out right so let's turn up the heat so right now it's drawing um little over 1,000 Watts but it's not crossing the 100 uh it do cross it for just a little bit if you watch it it'll cross uh for a few seconds or maybe even a second the 100 amp mark and it will come back down so as long as it doesn't stay high above that what I noticed when using this heat gun is that it will still work fine right the problem is when I was using the electric heater to heat the garage uh it wouldn't actually stay on mainly because it was staying above 100 right so that search capacity and being able to handle small bursts of that power does seem to really help let's see if we can get the fan going on here at a higher speed and stay at the 132 38 139 140 142 144 there it goes and it cuts off and this battery does have the auto recovery so once it cuts off um after a few seconds it will turn itself back on as you can see there uh the battery uh or the inverter screen here shows you the battery did kick back on after about a second or two uh just to show you to get it going again let's hit the heat gun again and it is back in working motion so I did notice that it that part actually works really well and as I mentioned earlier I I didn't get on video but this battery was left outside during the winter storm or open garage inside the winter storm or during the winter storm that's currently going on and with the low temperature charging protection it was not actually able to charge so I do know that does work even if I did didn't take it apart and you know dunk it in cold water or get it on video I can tell you that definitely does work uh so other than that right everything works exactly as intended if you want to see the auto recovery time again let's see if we can get that going 147 there it goes so look at that um it does cut off exactly as you would want and if you go there to BMS it says under protection discharging over current protection your battery has pulled up to a shield and is in protect mode or pulled up the Shields and it's protect mode so when an event like that happens the uh what do you call it the metrics or the Telemetry or or the monitoring actually does stay updated in here so interestingly enough even though the battery kicked out uh the BMS or the things connected to the battery was actually you know updating and let you know exactly what's happening and that's exactly what would want in a battery like this so that's what's really going on with this battery and like I mentioned earlier it has also the same battery without the smart which actually cost I want to say roughly around 40 bucks less right so if you're in a situation where you want to be able to monitor each battery paying 40 bucks for uh the Bluetooth capability is obviously going to be nice but if you're in that situation where you want to just be able to throw a bunch of these batteries together and not ever check on them then you know saving 40 bucks maybe per battery may be a thing for you right but when you get troubleshooting them then you will probably really want that so I think having the $40 to to use the app to connectivity and all that kind of fun stuff it may may be worth it right but that's going to be up to you so with that being said I will say this battery at a normal pricing is going to be around $260 I believe the Le time mini not smart will be around 220 is $230 is right uh so give or take you know 10 bucks depending on what kind of sales you find them so maybe even 30 bucks more versus the 40 bucks uh to get the smart Bluetooth capability so in my opinion if you're going to use this for like one or two inverters it's going to be worth it I would not buy four of these and put them in series to a 48 volt inverter because that just doesn't seem like the smart thing to do you should just buy their 48 volt battery because they do offer a 48 volt battery and if you do buy four of these and put them in series eventually uh it may work fine for for the short term but eventually they're going to get out of balance you're going to have all types of issues so if you're going to do something like that just buy the bigger battery all right so they do offer like I mentioned earlier all types of batteries for almost every situation this battery should not be used for a starting battery like don't use this to replace your car starting battery because it's not designed for that they do have other batteries that are better suited but I will say not designed for that mainly because car engine Bas get really hot and you don't want to put these in in really hot engine bays and stuff like that so uh they do make golf cart batteries they do make a standalone you know off- grid batteries and stuff like that but this mini battery is really really nice I can't emphasize that enough mainly because it's really lightweight easy to carry has a Bluetooth connectivity and if you watch some of the other videos we've had so far we have those uh you know 48 volt eg4 waterproof batteries and the battery monitor thing on that thing the is really nice cuz you can see every cell voltage and stuff like that but that's a 48 volt battery and that's a big battery that's a heavy battery that's a 5 Kow hour battery this is really a 1 KW hour battery and sometimes you just need something small to you know just put something together or you just need the 12 volts right so hopefully this video helped you guys out if you have any questions let us know uh I think a lot of times they run a ton of sales like either on their website or on Black Friday I know they run a ton on Black Friday uh so uh if you're going to buy something I say make sure you get it on sale hopefully this video helped you guys out thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next time oh