Overview Lion Safari UT 1300 12V 105Ah LiFePO4 Battery – Today, we’re going to take a look at this Lion Energy 12.8 volt, 105 amp, hour lithium iron phosphate battery. A couple of months ago, I did a review on a Rockpal battery. I’ve heard quite a few good things about Lion Energy, but have never tried one myself.
Overview Lion Safari UT 1300 12V
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| Rated Capacity | 12.8V / 105Ah / 1344Wh | Cycle Life | 3500+ at 100% DOD |
| Weight | 23 lbs | Dimensions | 9.8 L x 6.6 W x 8.6 H |
| Open For Full Specifications | |||
This safari UT 1300 for the purposes of testing, reviewing, and sharing with you. So, this battery weighs in at 23 pounds, it’s a group 24 battery, which means it’s 10.2 inches in length 6.6 inches in width, and 8.8 inches in height. On the top here, we can see two handles for lifting the battery. We have the main negative and the main positive post both of these posts thread out.
So, you can see there’s a thread on the bottom, and there’s also a thread inside of the post on the left side. We have a battery state of charge indicator, currently showing 80 states of charge. On the top right, we can see it’s 12.8 volts, 105 amp hours, 1 344 watt-hours, and it’s rated for 150 amps continuous discharge.
On the right-hand side, you can see some additional specifications about the battery, pretty much what I had just read off already. Recommended charger setting is 14.6 volts at 45 amps for a standard charge, and on the left panel, we just have a little bit of information about the company themselves.
Taking a look at the instruction manual here, you can see it does look very similar to the Rockpal, but I noticed the Lion Energy is proofread a little better than the other. The main specifications for the battery, it is 12.8 volts nominal, it’s 105 amp-hours with a minimum capacity of 104.5 amp hours, and like usual, you can only charge it above freezing.
There are not many lithium iron phosphates that you can charge below freezing, and those that we do have typically have heaters, and what not built-in, it does support series and parallel connections. They ask that you don’t connect more than four in series or a 48 volts system. Guessing that has to do with the circuitry of the BMS itself.
So, when you connect your cables, you can use these large terminals. They provided here, or they also included this bag of miscellaneous hardware, and this bag contains two different length wing nuts. So, there is four wing nuts total, and there are some flat washers, and some split lock washers as well, and you can thread these either into the top of these, or you can remove this post altogether.
Safari UT 1300
Testing Lion Safari UT 1300
And thread it directly into the post itself, so like usual, I’m very interested to open this up, and see what’s inside, and see how it’s built. But before we do that, we want to do our capacity test on the off chance. We accidentally damaged something in the process. All right, so I got my charger x6 here, and it is currently charging at 8.6 amps or 116 watts.
So, I got my standard test setup here, many of you familiar with this already, basically, I have my battery connected to a 12 volts inverter, and I’m using the shunt from a barium BMS as a metering device. This android tablet shows voltage, amperage, wattage, amp-hours, and watt-hours discharged, and I’m plugging in a series of incandescent light bulbs as a resistive load, and for a 100 amp hour battery, we want to target 20 amps as a 0.2c rate.
We’ll leave this test run until the low voltage disconnect. This battery shuts down, alright, so we just passed the 100 amp hour mark, and we’re still at 12.47 volts. This is looking pretty good 105 amp hours, and it’s still going. There we go, it shut down at 10.06 volts, 107.15 amp-hours. This is exciting, this is one of the first times, one of these batteries that I’ve tested.
Not only met its rated capacity but it’s actually exceeded its rated capacity. I’m very excited to open this up and see what cells are inside.
Lion Safari UT 1300 Teardown
So, there are screws the whole way around the lid of this. There are little rubber inserts, and you can see the screws under there. I just need to remove all of these, inserts some of these cables are kind of short. I’m not sure, if we’ll disconnect these terminals at the top here, so we can see that each red and black have two conductors going up to the main terminal, and they are 8 gauge, 200 degrees celsius insulation silicone cable.
Standard silicone wire and those were held to the terminal block with a standard bolt, a flat washer, and a split lock washer, and the positive is done the same way. We have four number eight silicone wires. Now, I was hoping I’d be able to pull this battery module out. Especially, so we can get a look at the BMS, but it’s stuck in there, pretty good.
You can see, there’s some silicone on the sides, which I’ve largely broken free both on the top and the bottom. But, it must be attached at the bottom, probably more silicone or some sort of glue down there. But a close-up look of the cells here, you can see, each balance lead coming off. They are soldered on. They are nicely bundled here, you got decent-sized wires here, and each cell has a QR code intact.
You can watch the video for detailed testing.
Final Words
Overview Lion Safari UT 1300 12V – We finally have a battery that works as advertised. It met and exceeded the rated capacity. The build quality was fantastic, the low-temperature disconnect works. The terminals are of adequate size. I have nothing bad to say about this battery.
Now, I did test it at a 0.2c rate, I suppose if you test it at a higher discharge rate, you might see a little bit less, but I like to continue to use a 0.2c rate. So, I have a basis for comparison across all the batteries that I test.
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