LiTime 48V Battery Balancer for 24V/36V/48V Battery Bank

Connecting this Li Time battery balancer was no more difficult than connecting a 12v battery charger.This is my first balancer. I got it for a pair of 12v LiFePo4 batteries that I want to put in series. I didn’t want to have to deal with keeping the batteries balanced. I want to hook it up and safely forget about it for a while.I was initially surprised by how thin the product manual was (a few pages) till I looked at the balancer and read the instructions. To use, you connect the red/black pos/neg ring terminals to you batteries in pairs starting on the bottom left of the unit and moving to the right. It supports 24/36/48 volt battery banks. Since my bank is 24 volts, I only connected the left two pairs. That’s it. Super simple.The ring terminal leads are each 18 inches long. All the ring terminals have an insulating tube around them to prevent an accidental short circuit. I augmented that with electrical tape to make sure the tubes stayed it place.It has kept my two batteries balanced. To verify that it is working, simply measure each battery’s voltage with a multi-meter. A status LED would be nice, but that would have added more parasitic drain. I’m okay with using a meter.One final note, the balancer does use a little power. If you are frequently charging, as with solar, or you have a charging device always connected, then the drain isn’t an issue. If you are essentially storing your batteries, I’d disconnect the balancer.

Although this is a LiTime product (a name I recognize in LiFePO4 batteries) this product will work just fine with other brands of batteries such as my ECO-WORTHY LiFePO4 batteries for my solar setup. I often just use a single LiFePO4 battery or connect a single pair of big LiFePO4 batteries in parallel (since currently all of my inverters are 12V) but this was just what I needed for connecting a pair of big LiFePO4 batteries in series to keep the two batteries balanced when I'm testing 24V setups. I have a number of different solar charge controllers and many can handle either 12V or 24V battery systems but they can process more solar input (Watts) when connected to a 24V system so I've been experimenting with a 24V setup and this balancer gave me more confidence to use a 24V setup. So far it seems to do a good job of keeping the batteries balanced.

Experiment: beginning with two 12V LiFePO4 batteries,

-The first battery is 3.5Ah at 13.25V.
-The second battery is 2Ah at 13.0V.

Upon connection to the LiTime Battery Equalizer, both batteries dropped to 13.05V.
After 8 hours, both batteries dropped further to 12.89V.

Observation: it appears that this balancer/equalizer incorporates a dummy-load that absorbs energy, causing a faster reduction in battery voltage. Consequently, I will only deploy this balancer/equalizer in applications that strictly necessitate voltage balancing.

It was easy to install with the included directions. I am using it in a 24v configuration, so you only use the first 2 pairs of wires. I honestly can't tell you if it is working yet or not because this unit doesn't have any lights or displays on it. I really thought that the Li-Time unit would be one of the better balancers, but so far, I can't really tell if it's working other than the batteries appear to be staying fairly close in voltage. I will be load-testing it more in the spring once it is hooked up to my camper again, but right now, it is just a spare power supply in my basement. I haven't been able to give it a good test with a high load on the batteries to see how it recovers and re-balances, but my batteries are very close in voltage right now.. Li-Time needs to add a display with display with voltage/watts/amps for each battery. It does have a very solid and sturdy feeling of quality compared to other balancers I have used.

Do your research before using, other than that it is great.