I was recently testing the Eco-Worthy 12V 10Ah LiFePo4 batteries I got from Amazon. So far, I LOVE these batteries. They are well made, have a good BMS, use F2 connectors, and come packaged well to protect them from damage. They have lots of great reviews online, and I have added mine to that list.
They are EXTREMELY light (2.36 lbs), very reasonably priced, and the amp hour rating is rated correctly (if not underrated) according to my tests. I have used this name brand before, and had great results. There are a lot of reasons to switch over to LiFePO4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate or sometimes just referred to as lithium) batteries from SLA (Sealed Lead Acid or sometimes just referred to as lead) batteries, and I will detail my opinions in this article along with my test results.
When the two batteries I ordered first arrived from Amazon, I unpacked one, and fully charged it using a NOCO GENIUS2 2A Smart Battery Charger that supports SLA, AGM, and LiFePO4 (lithium) batteries. Since these batteries are only charged to 50% of their capacity for safety when they ship, you always need to fully charge them before their first usage. I can highly recommend the NOCO brand chargers for this. I have used a lot of others in the past, and so far, they are my favorites. They work on everything I put them on, and don’t overheat, overcharge, or fail in any way.
Once fully charged, I hooked up one of my amateur radios to run as a load, and put a volt/amp/watt meter inline to see how many amp hours I would actually get out of one of these batteries before it went dead.
I ran the radio overnight starting around 9 PM to get some slow usage readings. In the morning by around 9 AM, it had only used 4.5 amp hours out of the 10 amp hour rating, and the battery was at 13.18V, so it was time to increase the load and get the testing completed. I added another much larger radio to the load, and kept logging my results every hour or so in a spreadsheet I created to calculate when the battery should run out of juice. It ran another few hours before I accidentally knocked the charger off while moving another radio, which reset the amp meter. However, I was keeping regular readings, and the last reading I took showed 9.319 amp hours of usage so far, and the battery was still only down to 12.68V. Both radios were still running fine, so I know it had at least another half hour of runtime in it, which is what my spreadsheet was predicting.
I repeated the rating test while I recharged the battery, with pretty much similar results, only in a much shorter window since the NOCO charger made short work of the recharge. I then ran all the same tests again with the second battery I had ordered, and everything went pretty much identically to the first round of tests. The second battery ended up putting out a little over 10 Ah before the test ended.
Time will tell how well these batteries hold up, but if these are anything like the larger Eco-Worthy 12V 50Ah battery I have been using for a 1.5 years so far, longevity won’t be an issue.