I have a new litime 200ah lifepo4 battery i installed along with a shunt. Trying to get the battery to 100 soc to set the battery monitor up but im getting mixed signals on its soc. Its been hooked up for about a week and getting charged but its never gotten higher then 13.72 charge voltage but its “resting voltage” is 13.36. Now its not actually a resting voltage as there is a constant low draw a couple lights and detectors. I feel the battery isnt at full charge and want to know why my charge voltage cant hit 14.4 even though it could on my old lead battery.
The battery will have arrived at only 40 to 50% SOC so at 200Ah it needs to add in 100 to 120Ah so it has a lot of charging and with the loads on the system the solar does not have a lot of spare to make up the battery to 100%. If you look at your data, the Solar is producing lets say 170Wh of energy at 13.7V which is 170 ÷ 13.7= 12.4Ah. Therefore, even without any loads on the system you are going to need 10 days to fully charge the battery, longer with some energy going into loads. The other thing with lithium is they will not get to 14.2V with low charge current until they are at say 98% full. Lead acid would get to 14.2V when at say 80% full.
There is nothing wrong with your system, you either need to be patient or see if you can get an ac charger to get the battery full more quickly or if it is in a van or boat run the engine if you have alternator charging.
You should always fully charge a battery before installing it. I believe this is what Litime’s instructions say as well. Once again I shamelessly recommend the Victron Blue Smart IP22 30 amp. I do all sorts of stuff with it including bench testing and programming inverters as it can be used as a 12V power supply.
was just a day too impatient. Appreciate all the info.