I have looked and can’t find a comparison between the two. I am putting in two 5kva Victron Multiplus inverters and need to add batteries. I will only pick from the Victron approved list, excluding Hubble because I don’t yet trust them (too many complaints online). So, choosing between Freedom Won E-Tower and Pylontech UP5000. The price difference for two batteries is large - 30% of the cost of one Pylontech UP5000.
Differences I can see (other than reputation where Freedom Won seems better than everything else) is that the Pylontech is a .5C battery, so I might need 4 of them rather than the 2 Freedoms.
Any wisdom please, I’d rather shed a tear on the original buy than many tears later for the wrong decision?
My personal opinion of the pecking order (from best to lesser), but all of these are good batteries. Do take a good and hard look at the warranty as well.
BYD (Premium/Flex)
FreedomWON Lite (with the OrionBMS)
Pylontech
BSL
FreedomWON eTower
SolarMD
BlueNova
Hubble
I’m completely ignoring cost. Hubble, for example, is quite affordable. Some installers prefer BlueNova over the eTower. This is just my list.
Thanks Phil. I am only really familiar with their older Lite-series batteries and I do find them to be absolute tanks, which is why I placed them at the top. They also have a higher max discharge current capacity, and the OrionBMS is a very decent BMS.
Pylontech really has excellent support of their product, and it is a well built battery. I think the premium you pay for it (over other brands) is worth it.
BSL is an excellent value for money proposition, and I learned this morning that when paired with certain approved inverters, they provide a 15 year warranty (5-year replacement, 10-year repair, probably a limited-warranty kind of thing).
I believe the eTower is very similar to the BSL. I heard it has the same BMS, but that may be no more than a rumour.
SolarMD has been around for a decade now, and we have a couple of really REALLY big (as in container-sized) batteries in a few systems. Not a bad option.
Similarly, BlueNova has been around for a long time, and their rack-mount units look beautiful.
Hubble has several models, you need to look carefully. Some have NMC cells (higher discharge rate, lower cycle life) and some have LiFePO4 cells. It is also a battery that came a long long way, and from what I hear it is well supported in South Africa.
I recently did the research on this because I went from a DIY pack that gave me headaches to a off the shelf pack that I didn’t want any problems with, I compared the US Pylontech batteries (2x US2000) to a single e-Tower.
Back then the e-Tower was still selling for R23.5k Incl and the pylons were R13k Incl (Man those were the days…)
Apart from having a higher constant discharge rate the e-Tower is definitely not in the same league as the Pylontech, even just comparing it to the other FreedomWon Lite batteries you will see they did not only cut costs on the BMS, they also have a much worse warranty, what is considered a “cycle” on the e-Tower is not the same as on the Lite range, and they also have a “fair use” clause in the e-Tower warranty…
I can’t remember the exact details but its something like 10 year warranty, battery breaks in year 9 : Thanks here is the 10% of the value for the remainder of the warranty, where with the FreedomWon Lite range they have to fix it again.
Thanks for the link. It’s interesting to read Warwick’s comments, especially on their use of the BYD batteries which was on the first BOM I got for my kit. They’re very competitively priced, but only 4kwh, vs the Pylon and FW at 5kwh. On par with the Pylon for price. I’ll do some more research in the morning but I’ve definitely cooled off a bit on FW. If the BYD do 1C then they’re a contender now.
I just checked now, I see the E-Tower online is knocking around R36k… That is terrible value.
I mean for that money you could basically buy 2x Pylontech US3000’s at R44k and have 7kWh of storage vs 5kWh.
Pylons are worth it purely based on much lower self-heating than most of the competition (which will result in longer life). They are actually much better value IMHO because of that.
Yeah, so it appears. While you can, from the look of it, limit the inrush requirements and not trip the battery, it looks like 4 batteries would be needed. I’ve asked some of the people you recommend. Got pricing on the 4 x US3000C, not pretty but also not suicidally high. For a 28% premium on the FWs (10kva) I can get 4 x 3.5kva Pylons. So 13kva vs 10kva for 29% more.
Mr TTT used the phrase “Rabbit Hole = 1, Trevor = 0” in private comms, he is krekt
I would whole heartedly recommend going with Pylontech, I personally have several US2000C’s in my battery bank. The oldest pair are nearly 6 years old and each have over 1000 cycles and still have 90% state of health.
Both manufacturers had their fair share of problems and higher failure rates as demand for their units forced them to up production to keep up with the demand.
We install both, I have over 500 pylontechs in the field VS maybe just over 100 E-towers.
Two batches ago, the e-towers were send out with the wrong firmware and we had to return to to almost 60 sites to go update the firmware. On the other hand a pylontech has send out a few batches that had BMS problems, as well as a few that was dead on arrival.
In general, the pylontech failure rate is much lower than the Freedom Won failure rate.
With both of them we are experiencing delays in replacing faulty units with Pylontech being the quickest at around 2 weeks.
With pylontech specifically, you would need to supply pictures of the complete installation, surge protection, fuse specs as well as a COC before they even except the return.
In your planned setup with 2 x 5kva Multiplus, you would need a minimum of 6 US3000 to maintain your warranty. Each US3000 can deliver 37A continuous discharge amps and one multi 5kva can demand 5000VA / 48V = 104.1666A. So you would need 104*2/37= 5.62 us3000 (6) to ensure that you dont run into any issues with warranties in the future.
Edit: In short, I still prefer Playtech’s. (Pylontech’s)
Ok, so staying with the Playtex theme (you’ll have to Google to get the context if you’re a lightie), this has lifted (the cost) and separated (me from my money).
I’ll have to play with numbers and check how many FWs I’d need vs Pylon 3000 vs Pylon 5000 and see which one hurts the least.
I suspect getting a Victoria Secret model to install might be the only way to rescue my shattered mood
Another option to consider is a 5kW Victon + 5kW PV Inverter that will halve the battery requirement and still give you up to 10kW during the day + 5kW at night.
