It's fine to discuss Chinese manufacturer quality, but very few of us will travel to China to check out the manufacturers. We can deal with a domestic company that does that for us, ad Electric Car Parts Company in Utah is one that does this, and with whose owner I once had a good conversation about his process. This may be a good way to avoid problems of consistent quality. For anyone hoping to save a few dollars, however, my experience dealing with a Chinese distributor of LiFePO4 prismatic cells via Alibaba produced this key take-away: customer satisfaction has everything to do with the integrity of the distributor. From my readings and researches, one of the standout manufacturers of high-capacity LiFePO4 prismatics is CALB. Trusting that the experience of dealing thru Alibaba would be roughly equivalent to working with eBay or Amazon. I was wrong. I placed an order based on the absolute assurances from the vendor that the cells I was ordering were 200 Ah CALB cells. He even sent me the CALB SE200 Specifications sheet to further reassure me. i assumed they would be just like the ones I was seeing at the various EV parts suppliers, I'm one of those examples, however, of getting unlabled, probably used or certainly 2nd or 3rd quality cells. Return 200 lbs of prismatic cells to China in hopes of getting a refund?? Forget it about it! Even after sending test charts generated with West Mountain Radio's battery test device and software, Alibaba refused to accept my claim that I had not gotten what the vendor promised. I'm making cells work for now with doubled up active balancers, and having a capacity of something closer to 180 Ah still provides more than adequate power for my application.
Subsequent to this experience, I placed two test orders with other vendors in hopes of finding a reliable partner, and got two apparently correctly labeled cells that tested to full advertised capacity. However, one had a white label and one had a yellow label. What I learned (but could be wrong) is that the white labeled cells were meant for the US market, and the yellow labeled cells were for the China market. I'm confident there *are* reputable vendors with which one can connect via Aliabab, but I recommend taking the time to place test orders to evaluate the product on arrival with appropriate test gear.
[-tv]
"Grace O'Malley"
Cape Dory 27
Monroe, Michigan
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