I think a bit of a listing of what people are finding for warranties currently when they research and/or purchase lithium batteries might be useful for many shoppers going forward.
Warranties are changing a lot these days from the long ones of the past, it appears. I did a random look at a few listings for batteries to look at the warranties and was somewhat surprised the very many of them now list the tried and true warranty dodge of "defects in manufacturing" or similar terms, with a bunch of the specifically stating the warranty didn't cover a predicted usable life at all. They basically can say that if they don't find a manufacturing defect, and they get to determine if there is one or not, you are out of luck as how long it's life was doesn't count. It is really starting to look like the real world life on lithium is not all that long, although still longer than AGM by possibly twice as long or so. Especially with the now lower prices, warranty claims must be killing profits.
I had thread asking about how the Volta batteries were performing over time that was posted a while ago, and in the process of looking at Volta noticed who tightly they controlled the warranty term in areas like time and number and depth of charge cycles. Compared to many early claims for lithium in general the warranty was quite short.
Another user has a discussion going on about some Li3 possible problems and when on the Lithionics site I checked their warranty terms. Like many others it is not even close to what claims were a couple of years ago, but probably better than some others currently are.
Here is the gist of the warranty which is kind of interesting because they actually tell you how they determine warranty claims and the link to the whole thing.
https://www.getlithium.com/1-2022-Li...-Rev-07(1).pdf
Quote:
What Type of Warranty Does Lithionics Battery Offer?
-Our warranty is OBJECTIVE because it is both time based and usage based, and the consumer is able to
monitor usage on the BMS APP. Our warranty empowers the consumer, not the seller.
-Simply stated, it is a both warranty against manufacturing defects for 5 years, and, a guarantee of amp-hour
usage. What does this mean and how does this benefit the consumer?
-All iron phosphate cells are tested for cycle life via a 100 percent full depth of discharge at room temperature,
and will deliver 2000 cycles minimum. EXAMPLE: a 315 amp hour battery X 2000 cycles = 630,000 amp hours
of use. It is similar to an odometer. Counting individual cycles is not useful and does not protect the
consumer. Therefore, if your APP reports 300,000 amp-hours on the display, you are about half-way through
your useful battery “throughput” of power. If a battery fails at 300,000 amp-hours for a manufacturing defect,
then, the consumer knows exactly what his-her prorated credit should be. This is why our warranty is more
valuable than other warranties because it has objective values the consumer can see. This is called TOTAL
CONSUMED on the APP.
-Other factors affecting cycle life: our APP continuously records 2 more key factors that affect total life. These
are:
AGING FACTOR TEMP: the amount of time the battery is operated at high temperatures. The embedded
algorithm is a sliding scale that adjusts for actual temperatures.
AGING FACTOR SOC: the amount of time the battery sits at full charge and non-use. All batteries will lose
small amount of life if they sit fully charged for long periods of time with no periodic cycling. The loss has been
measured by some researchers to be 3 percent of capacity loss per 6 months of high State of Charge storage.
See page 2 for how the APP monitors the 3 measured conditions listed above.
Contact Lithionics Battery for our actual Warranty Statement document.
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So, if you know of any warranty terms please list them for others who may be shopping and for the rest of us to see how the manufacturers are currently looking at the predicted life of their batteries. I think it may be very interesting to see all in one place.
Lithium battery warranties list by brand/model
Linear Mode
