Information on the Lalela Lithium-Ion Inverter Trolley
Available at most Builders stores, the Lalela Lithium-Ion Inverter Trolley will ease away your load shedding woes.
27/05/2023
The recent talk lately about load shedding and the need for every home to have a generator inverter or UPS that can cope with the load shedding schedule has bought about one important fact. The current inverter/UPS systems use a lead acid or silver calcium battery and these are prone to failure under the current load shedding that we have to live with. It all boils down to 'cycles' and how many cycles a battery can withstand before it becomes useless. For those that did not know this, a cycle when referring to a battery is the number of times a battery can be charged and discharged (used), in other words, it means the lifespan of the battery. [wikipedia]
The Downfall or Lead Acid or Silver Calcium Batteries
Up until very recently, the only battery choice for a home inverter/UPS was either a lead acid or silver calcium and the major letdown for both battery types is that they only have between 150 to 200 cycles, which isn't that much of a lifespan considering that we experience up to 4 load shedding [cycles] every day, each ranging from 2 hours to 4 hours each that gives us around 120 cycles per month. That means that the above batteries have a lifespan of between 2 months if you leave the inverter/UPS on all the time, or slightly longer if you switch off and only use at certain times.
The Lalela Lithium-ion Inverter Trolley is available at Builders stores countrywide and retails at around R13,000 while stocks last.
The Rise of Lithium-ion Batteries
Lead acid and silver calcium batteries can be compared to the common rechargeable NiCad batteries or torch batteries. These batteries lose effectiveness over time whereas lithium-ion batteries [wikipedia] do not and therefore have a longer lifespan. The only advantage of lead-acid batteries over lithium-ion is the cost, other than that, lead-acid has a longer charging period (of up to 10 hours for a full charge, are not portable due to their weight, and have a relatively short lifespan when compared to lithium-ion batteries.
I am currently using the Lalela Lithium-ion Inverter Trolley in my home and very impressed so far. See the videos below for more information.
Introducing the Lithium-ion Inverter
It had to happen sooner or later - the introduction of an inverter powered by lithium-ion battery. Even though these units come at a higher cost, when you consider that a lead-acid or silver-calcium battery is only good for 150 to 200 cycles, the lithium-ion battery can outlast this with up to 2000 cycles. The Lalela Lithium-ion inverter trolley incorporates LiFePO4 [wikipedia] or lithium-ion phosphate batteries, which allows the inverter to store power via the battery and offer this as backup power that can be used during load shedding. Watch the video below for more information on the Lalela LiFePO4 battery that is currently available at Builders stores countrywide
How to Operate the Lalela Lithium-Ion Inverter Trolley
When you purchase the Lalela Lithium-ion Inverter Trolley it comes complete with an instruction manual that you may find lacking or hard to understanding. For a more comprehensive and detailed description on how the Lalela Lithium-ion Inverter Trolley works and advice on the proper usage, see the video below.