GNB Industrial Absolyte GP Battery?

[zer0freeze]

I have a question I hope someone here can help me. I'm not even sure i'm putting this in the correct forum. The question is has anyone heard of GNB Industrial Absolyte GP Batteries? Searches on Google only bring me to retailers sites where I can't find the answer to my question.
batteries.jpg
From what I understand these batteries store solar power. I saw these at my friends warehouse and he told me about them. I know the 9 cells you see in the picture weigh a couple of thousand pounds. My question is what is the application for a battery like this? Does it power something the size of a greenhouse or a stadium? Or even a city block? I looked online and found one on Amazon. Each cell goes for 5k new. If anyone knows anything about these batteries please let me know. I'd love to know what they are used for, and how powerful one cell is. Can one cell store the power for a house?

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

[bob-n]

It's a lead acid battery. Specifically, a sealed valve regulated lead acid battery (VRLA) with an absorbent glass mat (AGM). You could use it for home backup power or anything else where you need a lot of energy storage and benefit from the fact that it's sealed, so won't spill acid.

Being a lead acid battery, it is relatively heavy, so it wouldn't be first choice for use it for a car or other device where weight matters. A lithium battery will be lighter but more expensive.

More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRLA_battery

[zer0freeze]

Thanks for the info. Do you happen to know how much power they store? I'm trying to figure out how much power these things can store and what they can keep powered. If I'm right you can use these in combination with solar panels to run a building completely off the grid. I'm just trying to find out how much power they can store. Is it a building the size of a regular house or an entire city block..

[Mike90250]

The battery in your picture is one or two days storage for a house, not using electric heating or air conditioning

[sdold]

I thought those looked familiar. I've been seeing a lot of them in our warehouse lately. GNB Absolyte is a battery we have used a lot of over the years in our (State of CA) radio sites, so it's a well-established company. Right now we have probably 20 pallets of the 3288 AH versions that we'll be putting out as 48V systems. These are also the GP version and looking at the manuals for them it appears they are intended for cycle service in solar applications. I'm a little confused by what seems to be a charge current limitation of "5% of the C100 rate" in the instructions regarding solar charging (cycling). I hope that doesn't mean C/20 since that is pretty slow for Solar. But I might be reading it wrong, a factory person is supposed to call me tomorrow to explain it.

gnb.jpggnb 2.jpg

[sdold]

Here is the section I referred to above:

gnb instructions.jpg

[zer0freeze]

The model he has is the Type 100G81. The difference I see on the label is that yours run 3288 Amp-Hrs and the one my friend has runs 3888 Amp-Hrs. I'm not sure what that means exactly. If you find out anything from the gentleman you contacted please let me know. These batteries weigh 2-3 hundred pounds per cell. I saw 18 cells when I went to the warehouse. I just want to confirm that it's true that it can only power a house for a few days with no AC? I was thinking power a city block for a week.

[Mike90250]

3,288ah is pretty awesome. That would run my house (8kwh daily) a long time. My 800ah 48v battery (40kwh) is good for about 3 days , and then I get nervous and start the generator

[zer0freeze]

I don't mean to sound ignorant, but like I said I know nothing about these batteries. So Mike, the 800ah battery you use will last about 3 days. The battery i'm talking about has about 4 times the ah. Is it safe to assume that it could run your house 4 times longer, or about 12 days? Is that only one cell? Or do you have more than one cell? We have 18 cells and that would probably power a house for like a few months right? These numbers sound more legit considering the weight, and price of the batteries. I'm just wondering if anyone can confirm what i'm saying? I could be 100% wrong.

[sdold]

These are 2 volt cells, so they need to be connected in series to get the voltage you need. The AH value remains the same, just the voltage increases. We'll have 24 in series to give us 48V at 3288 AH, or 157 KWh. That's enough to run a typical house (30 KWh/day) at 20% depth of discharge daily, which is about the recommended daily max depth to ensure good life. Mike's pretty efficient, his daily use is small compared to most of us.

[bob-n]

zer0freeze, In case you're not aware of this, batteries have a very lousy "energy density". It takes a huge amount of battery to store a reasonable amount of energy.

Here are some relative numbers:
Gasoline stores 46.4 MJ/kg (megajoules of energy per kilogram of mass)
Lead acid batteries store 0.17 MJ/kg (270x less than gasoline!!!)
Lithium-ion batteries store between 0.36 and 0.875 MJ/kg, so much better than lead acid, but still bad.

So it may look like a huge pile of battery, but it's not as much as you might imagine. That explains why generators are so popular for emergency energy.

More information on the energy density of various things here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density

[Mike90250]

After using the battery for 2 days, lead acid batteries need to be recharged, or they will begin to be damaged by sulfation. Even if there are 3 more days before it goes dead, it's already dieing .

[zer0freeze]

So if I had for instance a greenhouse with solar panels. The energy from the solar panels would be stored in the batteries. Would this be enough to run some basic lights/water pumps without needing more energy from the grid. Would a project like this run on solar alone? Is this basically the application I'm looking at?

[Mike90250]

So if I had for instance a greenhouse with solar panels. The energy from the solar panels would be stored in the batteries. Would this be enough to run some basic lights/water pumps without needing more energy from the grid. Would a project like this run on solar alone? Is this basically the application I'm looking at?

It all depends on your loads and quantity of panels and batteries you chose to support the loads with. Generally, having batteries to run the loads for 3 days, is the minimum bank size for longevity. Too small and you are replacing batteries too often. And don't get too wrapped up with "it must be all solar" - using a generator 5 times a year, burning $40 of fuel, is usually a more rational choice than grossly oversizing the PV array and batteries (several thousands of dollars) just to make a statement

[zer0freeze]

I see. Thanks for all of the info.