You can add additional battery capacity to the base system fairly easily.
The positive lead from the batteries to the Hub should come out from the plus terminal on one of the two pairs, and the negative lead out to the Hub should come off the negative terminal on the other pair of batteries. Taking the power off on opposite pairs of batteries makes the voltage drop through both batteries the same.
Adding Capacity LiFePo4 Batteries
To add capacity to the existing pair of LiFePo4 batteries, you can hook one or more additional LiFePo4 batteries in parallel to the existing ones. The plus terminals are daisy chained together with short cables, and the same for the negative terminals.
The leads from the bunch-O-batteries to the BlueSea Hub must come off of opposite ends of the stack up as shown in the sketch above. This keeps the voltage drop the same across each battery.
Some Cautions:
If you are reading this before you start your build (good for you!), its clear that if you think you may want more battery capacity later, you should make space for them now, and the space should be right next to the other batteries as its not easy to hook groups of batteries together in such a way that they will work well together if they are not right next to each other.
If your existing batteries are years old, you may have problems adding a new battery to the old ones.
If you are adding battery capacity because you are adding some heavier loads, you need to check that the current wires in the system that carry these higher loads are big enough.
I need to caution you here that this is not a system that is intended to grown into one of those 800 amp-hr things. If you want to do that, than this is not the place for you – but I wish you the best 🙂
If you see any errors or misleading information on this page, or there should be more information, please let me know in the comments.
Gary 7/30/22, 9/24/24