> And lead acid is also terrible for solar applications because no matter the capacity, recharging is very slow. Even solar could recharge the battery, the slow adsorption rate prevents it from doing so.
This doesn't make sense to me. Surely you can reach a sufficient rate by adding more lead-acid cells in parallel? You're kind of forced to do this anyways since they don't like being discharged below 50% of their actual capacity. So you end up building in a shitload of excess capacity in parallel, in the process attaining high aggregate discharge/charge rates.
It's just annoying because you waste a lot of physical space on underutilized batteries. But for a stationary system, it's not such a big deal, assuming you're not trying to fit it into a studio apartment. You end up with a dedicated battery shed or cellar, at least they're cheap.
I actually run quite a few of them in parallel, but that doesn't solve the problem:
As the other person stated: charging lead acid is time constrained. And that means that you can't fully charge the battery within the time period when you have sun.
Lead acid deteriorates quickly if left (partially) discharged. This is why lead acid works so well with cars (almost always fully charged at all times).
Depleted lead acid (50% charge) needs to be recharged within 24 or serious damage will occur, accumulating over time. A week of bad weather may thus be hard on battery longevity.
Can't you just alternate between sets of cells with sufficient excess capacity then? They don't all need to be in lockstep at the same phase of their charge:discharge cycles if it takes so long.
Perhaps that becomes cost prohibitive even with the low cost of lead-acid, I've never attempted this. It just appears obvious from a high level that excess capacity can overcome all these limitations.
This doesn't make sense to me. Surely you can reach a sufficient rate by adding more lead-acid cells in parallel? You're kind of forced to do this anyways since they don't like being discharged below 50% of their actual capacity. So you end up building in a shitload of excess capacity in parallel, in the process attaining high aggregate discharge/charge rates.
It's just annoying because you waste a lot of physical space on underutilized batteries. But for a stationary system, it's not such a big deal, assuming you're not trying to fit it into a studio apartment. You end up with a dedicated battery shed or cellar, at least they're cheap.