Liyuan Battery (Jack Zhang)

jonescg

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Location
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Hi all,

I have ordered about AU$14,000 worth of battery cells from Jack Zhang at Liyuan battery in China. For those who don't know, Jack Zhang is the one constantly posting spam on people's EV related Facebook pages about prismatic NMC and LFP cells.

He pestered me every day until I finally placed an order, and once that was paid, near silence! After almost 3 and a half months the cells have finally set sail. The Bill of Lading and Packing List documents had to be prised from them.

So hopefully they will arrive in Fremantle some time soon, but I just find this company's operations pretty ordinary. Has anyone got similar experiences?
 
nicobie said:
That's a pretty big risk to be taking on your first order!

I hope everything turns out OK.

Are the batteries for your race car?

No, these are for two separate projects. One is re-packing a Mitsubishi iMiEV with a larger capacity battery, the other is for a friend's own EV conversion. In my case the 135 Ah cells were not available, but they said they could put another production run through. Lately I have noticed Chinese vendors advertising a product on their website, you ask for an invoice, they send it, you order it, then they say they haven't got it in stock. You eventually get refunded, but not the cost of the transaction, which can be as much as US$30. It's happened to me twice now.

I've since heard a horror story where he's sold used batteries as new stock, so I hope this goes smoother.
 
Well the 60 Ah cells which were supposed to go into the iMiEV never got used for that purpose as the owner of the car had to sell the car. So I was tasked with selling the cells on Gumtree (like Craigslist).

Sold all 90 of them to a guy who was going to use them for storage, but I had this reply:

"Good morning...
I have charged and commenced discharge of one of the Cells and it is pretty much useless...
Data is:
Commenced Charge @ 3.5 VoC, charge current 5 A, after 132 mins & 11 Ah the voltage plateaued at 3.9 V.
Commenced discharge @ 1 A voltage immediately fell to 3.52 V, after 36 minutes & 600 mAh it was 3.47 V.
As you probably know a Lithium NMC @ 3.5 VoC would have at most a 50% SoC, a 60 Ah battery should require 30+ Ah to charge fully with a final voltage of 4.2 V.
A fully charged 60 Ah should not have an initial voltage of 3.5 with a 1 amp load.
I have looked at all the Cells in cartons and there are three different types based on the Vent shape, they have a range of very different batch/identification numbers, it is difficult to understand these variations if they they were from a single production run.
I feel I have purchased $4000 of junk.
I beg you to accept these back and refund my money - I cannot afford to throw away $4000.
Thank you
Kevin"

:warn: :warn: :warn:

Not good. I have heard the cells a chap in Brisbane bought were not great either. So be warned, be careful of buying from Jack Zhang!

- I edited this as I'll be running some of my own tests on these cells. I'm not completely certain that the guy was testing them properly, but will find out soon enough. In any case it seems they aren't what they claimed to be.


Edit #2
My sincere apologies to Jack Zhang - the cells are fine (for cheap prismatic NMC cells). The dude was using a shitty charger which wasn't set right. So far my (constructive) criticism of Jack Zhang's operation is that they were very slow to process the order, but the cells are prettymuch what I expected them to be. Will post a discharge plot soon to confirm they are actually OK.
 
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