Ping Battery Vs. Elite Power solutions.

check out falconev.com
I'll match pings price

Don't let the duct tape put you off. If you treat it right, as I have you will get many miles out of it. I have a 36v 20 ah that I average about 1c discharge rate on. My motor is a Wilderness Energy hub, so in the 500-800 watt range. I generally discharge to about 75%. With 2850 miles on in in 11 months, my range is still exactly the same as it was the first month. Most of the other vendors are coming up to speed, using a prismatic cell similar to Pings. The ones to shy away from are the sellers that use the 18650 round cells. There are so many tiny cells and so many spot welds to rely on with that style pack, that a few cells or a few spot welds can fail too easy.

Just to confuse you more, High Tech Bikes, and Ebikekit.com both sell pretty good batteries too. As the offerings improve, the choices either get harder or easier, since a lot of good batteries are appearing on the market. At the point where you make the choice based on the vendors quality, it takes a lot to beat pings reputation.

By the way, most of the 18650 round cell packs reach a voltage of 58v. Most prismatic packs reach 60-61v, for a 48v pack. Sla reaches about 56-57v for a 48v pack.

I just got back from EPS website. There is a tempting appeal to the TS product. Good solid case around 12v blocks of cells. So you can put one here, and one there, about the bike.

But the rub is, there is no low voltage monitoring at all that I see in that package. They rely on you to have a low voltage cutoff in the controller. If the pack gets unbalanced, you will invariably kill some cells before the whole pack drops to the lvc. Ping's and even the cheezy round cell packs at least have a lvc on each paralell group of cells, so you don't kill off good cells because adjacent ones have power still.

The EPS type system can be used successfuly, it just takes the kind of approach that is used in the prius, that is never letting discharge fall below 30-50%. So if you buy 20 miles of range, and only ever use 12 miles of it, this kind of pack can work fine.

But if I were you, I'd go for anything but whole pack low voltage cutoff. Most of the lifepo4 industry dumped that idea several years ago. What would work better is to get 20 ah blocks of 3.5 v so you could use a ping type bms on em. I do agree, someday the duct tape has gotta go.

The only lifepo4 seller I say beware of is the one on ebay who changes his selling name about every two months. Known as mr Lau, he sold some bad batteries last summer under the names Jimmywu, east music, mp3hk, and a few others I can't think of.

The only lifepo4 seller I say beware of is the one on ebay who changes his selling name about every two months. Known as mr Lau, he sold some bad batteries last summer under the names Jimmywu, east music, mp3hk, and a few others I can't think of.

I don't know why people bad mouth Mr. Lau... I've had nothing but AWESOME dealing with him in the past 5 months....

Both battery packs I got (one 24v 20ah and one 24v 30ah) were awesome (and inexpensive -[under $250 each!])... Yes, they have the round cells, but they've held up great so far. I have at least 400 cycles on them each and they still have the same distance they had when they were first received. They replaced chargers that went bad, sent me new ones, and even upgraded the type of charger for basically free. (Minus the shipping which was like $20) They've even sent me Chinese tea (awesome stuff) and have been nothing but helpful.

Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones. (Also, I am VERY nice in my dealings with people from China.) I think they respect that and will do everything in their power to be as helpful as possible.

Just my .02

P.S. I'm running my packs on 24v 250w motors, so maybe the "lower powered" motors work better with their packs.

That is great to hear! One of the reasons I am so supportive of ping, is the tendency not to ever hear form the satisfied customers. Last spring when nobody knew if these duct tape packs would last more than a month, I began to post about my good results with a pingbattery. Many people did get 20 ah batteries that either did not work at all, or delivered less than 15 ah.

I don't doubt that your low amp rate helps with lifespan. I know my medium amp rate helps my ping stay balanced. I also agree that flaming a guy is not the best way to get cooporation. But if he is so good, why the change to a selling name with clean feedback at least 6 times a year? His record for customer service can be seen on the jimmywu thread on the endless shpere, where conuntless people following the thread chimed in, Yeah, he sold me the same crappy bms that smoked on day one. His failure rate may not be worse than any round cell pack seller, but his customer service is not so hot. He just doesn't seem to have enough english to deal with most americans. Most of em gave up and bought either chargers or bms from ping. Most of the bad bms boards were just plain missing one of the fets, and when you used the battery, poof. Nice, quality controll didn't even notice a largish component was not there on the bms.

That is great to hear! One of the reasons I am so supportive of ping, is the tendency not to ever hear form the satisfied customers. Last spring when nobody knew if these duct tape packs would last more than a month, I began to post about my good results with a pingbattery. Many people buying from East United Music or Jimmywu got 20 ah batteries that either did not work at all, or delivered less than 15 ah. When they tried to get customer service, they got to try to communicate with Mr Lau.

I don't doubt that your low amp rate helps with lifespan. I know my medium amp rate helps my ping stay balanced. I also agree that flaming a guy is not the best way to get cooporation. But if he is so good, why the change to a selling name with clean feedback at least 6 times a year? His record for customer service can be seen on the jimmywu thread on the endless shpere, where conuntless people following the thread chimed in, Yeah, he sold me the same crappy bms that smoked on day one. His failure rate may not be worse than any round cell pack seller, but his customer service is not so hot. He just doesn't seem to have enough english to deal with most americans. Most of em gave up and bought either chargers or bms from ping. Most of the bad bms boards were just plain missing one of the fets, and when you used the battery, poof. Nice, quality controll didn't even notice a largish component was not there on the bms. Mabye you got your stuff later, after he realized the net was on to his ways, and he could no longer send out defective product and skate with his reputation intact to another name. Maybe he wised up and now actually checks product before shipping to the west.

No reason a round cell pack can't work, but a good drop off the conveyor by the shipper can sure pop a lot of spot welds.

I've had good luck with elite. If you order 4 cells they come strapped together with all the hardware and covers you neeed. On the last batch I got, all 4 cells were exactly 3.31v. I wish they hadn't raised their prices though. I don't know anything about ping.

I've used YESA, Ping, and Elite TS batteries in my various electric bikes and scooters. YESA was good to me in their support and communications, but I had consistent problems with individual cells going bad. My two Ping packs have performed admirably with no maintenance required, and my relatively new Elite 48V, 40AH pack is working very well. One thing I try to do is to not charge 48V packs to a voltage higher than 58V, which helps to prevent overcharging of individual cells. How do I do this? I use 48V SLA chargers! The protection is well worth the negigible loss in range.

I wonder if anyone has tried the Tenergy 48V 20Ah battery. It comes with an intergrated BMS.
http://www.all-battery.com/48V20Ahlifepo4lithiumironphosphaterechargeablebattery-1-1-1.aspx

I'm planning on buying loose Headway screw terminal cells from here:

http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=9824

Not sure where I'm going to get the BMS and charger yet. I was thinking about buying them from Ping or maybe www.ecitypower.com.