[Isaac Zachary]

So I put a 100AH LFP (aka: LiFePO4) battery in the Avalon. It's from Li Time. It has battery protection including cold temp shut off and automated warming. We'll see how it goes.

My main reason wasn't for fuel mileage though. The Avalon has no alternator, so there's no way to stop the car from charging it without disconnecting the battery. But it does have a theoretical 10X the amount of usable energy than the tiny lead acid battery it replaced. This will make running my amateur and GMRS radio equipment for extended periods of time a bit easier.

So far the battery seems quite a bit more "thirsty" than the lead acid. It took several hours of driving around for it to finally reach 14.4V. The lead acid would easily go up to 14.4V after a short time, even after an extended period draining it (and the LA battery fairly new too). At least now, at normal temperatures, the voltage drop is a lot less with a load on the LFP. And since the LFP battery sits at 13V, more or less, the drop is still above 12V with that load, whereas with the LA it would easily get down to less than 11V.

We'll see how it does in winter. I'll keep the lead acid on hand and charged just in case.