Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) Batteries

[davidbrady]

Hi Greg,

The Yamaha is phenomenal technology and it seems ideal for your application, but I can't help thinking that it's really meant to be used without an external inverter or battery bank. Also, these smaller gasoline systems rarely beat Powertech at fuel consumption. I do see benefit at very low rpm use at almost zero load, sound levels, weight and form factor; you're not likely to find space for a 15KW Powertech in a GMC. Yikes! Nonetheless, it's interesting to compare efficiency.

Here's some Powertech fuel consumption figures I gathered:


From the Yamaha manuals I've gathered a fuel tank of 4.5 gallons and a run-time at full load of 7.4 hours at rated output of 4KW and 15.2 hours at 50%:

7.4 hours at 4KW: 0.61 GPH
15.2 hours at 2KW: 0.30 GPH

Without doing a bunch of extrapolation, from the 15KW Powertech numbers we see that 0.33 GPH gives 3.75KW and 0.67 GPH gives 7.5KW. I think that it's safe to assume that at outputs of 2KW and 4KW the Powertech fuel consumption numbers would be even better.