Shorai Battery (Lithium Iron Phosphate) Install and Review

After losing another lead acid after only a couple years (ok, 4). I decided to try out the new technology, and installed an LiFePO4 battery from Shorai.

Some technical information on the chemistry can be found here:

Lithium iron phosphate battery - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and Shorai's FAQ is here:

https://www.shoraipower.com/t-faq.aspx

I ordered the battery and their charger (which was an expensive combo at $160 for the battery and $80 for the charger). However, the 8+ year service life if properly taken care of should help offset that.


Unpacking the battery by aaronwood77, on Flickr

These things are light. Silly light. Like something's missing sort of light. Just 2.2LBs vs. over 8 for the stock battery.


Unpacking the charger by aaronwood77, on Flickr


Old vs. new by aaronwood77, on Flickr


Old vs. new by aaronwood77, on Flickr


Old vs. new by aaronwood77, on Flickr


installed by aaronwood77, on Flickr

The install went pretty easy, but not painless. The battery comes with foam pads (lots of them) for filling in around it if the battery is smaller than the stock battery. This wasn't the case, but the battery could move around a bit, so I used a thin spacer behind the battery, and a thick spacer between the battery and the tray, towards the front of the bike. After that, when the hinged door is closed and bolted down, the battery is very firmly held in place.

That was the easy part.

The difficult part was that the terminal connectors on the 2nd gen bikes are meant to wrap around the terminal blocks. The Shorai battery's terminal blocks were slightly wider (maybe 1mm) than the Yuasa's were. I pulled the cables off the bike, and flattened out the connectors with the bench vice, and then everything went together nicely.


flattened connector by aaronwood77, on Flickr

The charging/balancing cable isn't exactly the most weatherproof, so I've opted to not leave it permanently installed, and keep the rubber cover on the balancing port in place.


battery end of charging/balancing cable by aaronwood77, on Flickr


extension cable by aaronwood77, on Flickr

The charger's hook *is* handy, although the cables are short enough that I relocated it to the right footpeg while it was re-charging the battery after all my poking around (which was unnecessary, and I'll get to that later).


charger by aaronwood77, on Flickr

But hey, I got the gear-driven cams and v4 logos in the pic...

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Ok, now onto the performance:

Battery voltage, with the headlight on, engine off was 12.9V !

With this battery, the bike turns over faster than it ever did with the Yuasa batteries, and it *almost* started without the choke, in a 50°F garage. It was last started about a week ago. This is usually a 5-10 second of turning over ordeal, with full choke, and then it runs poorly on choke, as well.

Instead, it turned over very, very quickly, and caught but stalled without a choke. At 1/2 choke it started and ran smoothly.

The 200+ CCA claims, and the high starting voltage are certainly substantiated, although I wasn't able to measure the battery voltage during the start, it happened too quickly.

Recovery from starting was very fast, and then it was idling at 14.3 Vdc. Perhaps 10-15 seconds to get back up to 14.3 from 13.5 or so.

Later, while buttoning everything back up (and reconnecting my Küryakyn voltage meter, L.E.D. Battery Gauge | Küryakyn), I had the headlight on for multiple minutes. The resting (no load), battery voltage after all of this was 13.3 Vdc, which is still 90% capacity remaining.

One big advantage that I see with this battery type is that the voltage is very stable.

From the Shorai website:


I may see if I can take the voltage meter apart and adjust the trip points, or given the narrow range, make my own voltage gauge since the wide range of the one I have isn't well suited to the chemistry and behavior of the LiFePO4 type batteries.

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Unfortunately, I haven't ridden it yet, because it was late (and cold) by the time I was done getting it all buttoned up. I'll ride it to work tomorrow and then add to this.

 

Do you keep the OEM charging system of the bike?

 

Yep, the only change is the battery itself. The battery is designed to work with OEM charging systems. A separate project I may embark on is to switch over to a MOSFET based regulator instead of an SCR based one. But that's another $120 or so. The MOSFET regulators run cooler, and from all reports do a much better job of stable regulation. Although my bike's voltage is much better regulated with the new battery than it was with the old, which indicates that the new battery probably has a much lower series resistance than the old one did (and it was old, and failing).