I’m extremely excited to announce that we’re just a couple of weeks away from stock arriving in Australia for our new under-seat battery!
It has taken a lot more effort than anticipated to get here, but I think we ended up with a really good product.Â
Inside we have  4x 160Ah EVE LiFePO4 cells and a 200A JBD smart BMS with Bluetooth.
As outputs on the front, as you can see from the description in the picture, we have:Â
- 2x 65W USB C chargers that can charge laptops, iPads, etc without a power brick.
- 2x 18W USB A
- 3x 50A Anderson plugs (inputs or outputs, two more under the seat)
- 1x 175A Anderson (input or output, one more under the seat)
- 1x 50A yellow Anderson that takes an unregulated solar panel and puts it into the MPPT
- Touchscreen display that will show you state of charge, temperatures, cell voltages, current in or out, time left, etc. It also lets you disable the battery, which is handy for installation.
Everything about our design is with the ease of installation and the usability of the battery in mind. So not only is it a stainless steel case that can be slid under the seat from the back into T5, T6 and T6.1 vans, but we’ve also designed all the cables in a way that it can be installed by a DIYer without the use of any specialised tools. The seat still needs to be taken off due to ensure none of the cables get snagged, but that’s done quickly and easily by removing two nuts and two bolts.
All the connectors are pre-crimped Andersons that can be pulled through and then clipped into the plastic Anderson plugs.
There is even a bracket for a DCDC/MPPT combination (the current design is for Redarc, an Australian manufacturer, but we’re looking into it for the rest of the world). Once the battery is installed, the DCDC can be attached to a bracket by four nuts. This bracket is then slid into a slot in the side of the battery and secured by two screws into the top of the battery.Â
If you accidentally overload one of the USBs, the cig socket or the merit socket, you can simply unscrew the fuse panel that’s under the front of the seat, without actually having to remove the seat.
Now having a battery is great, but most people want an inverter with it. So we’ve designed a 2500W inverter that goes under the other seat, with the 12V power cables going in the channel between the seats, so there aren’t any visible wires.
The power points on that one can be swapped or European or UK plugs as well. It surges up to 5500W, so you can run any residential appliance on it. We ran a heat gun and a circular saw on it at the same time, without either the battery nor the inverter tripping.
So it’s a great solution for tradies that need to run a 305mm mitre saw out of their van.​​
If that’s still not enough connectivity, we have one final piece to the puzzle, a panel that can be connected in the back of the van, with two more USBs, 3x 50A Andersons and one cig socket. It also comes with another touchscreen, or there is a version without the touchscreen too.
While for the time being it’s only available in Australia, we’re speaking to distributers in the UK and in Europe and with any luck, we’ll have them available there in late Q3 2023.
This battery has been a collaboration between Muller Energy and KombiLife, with KombiLife being the sole distributor in Australia.
If you have any questions whatsoever, I’m more than happy to answer all of them!
Cheers,
Ruben
