Lithium battery in Grand California

The Grand California is always somewhere between absolutely brilliant and absolutely disastrous. Good design, good equipment and then the… In the year 2022, VW is actually still installing an AGM battery to supply the camping equipment, and in addition, they have chosen the engine compartment as the installation location in Hanover. Both are not so favorable prerequisites. Certainly, from a production standpoint, it’s understandable that Volkswagen would put the battery in the engine compartment, since the Crafter has the battery in the same place to power bodies. However, the camper struggles with thermals, very warm in summer and very cold in winter.

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What is an AGM battery?

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Now why is it not good that VW has installed an AGM battery?

If you’ve watched the video from Varta, you’re probably thinking, “Reads great.” Sure, the AGM battery itself isn’t bad, but there are two really big drawbacks.

• the weight is very high at around 30 kilos
• only about 50 percent of the capacity is available

Certainly, an AGM battery can also be completely discharged, but this will cause damage to the battery. By the way, VW does not write anything about this in the user manual and the customer is also left in the dark about this when the car is delivered. The service life is shortened enormously, especially with deep discharges. As a guideline, the AGM charge can be used up to 50 percent without causing damage. What this means for the user is relatively simple: The battery in the Grand California is from Varta and has 92 amp-hours, of which only 46 can be used. This allows, for example, the diesel heating to be used for 23 hours at medium level. If we assume that the refrigerator is now also switched on, which consumes 65 watts per hour, it will usually be over after one night with heating. We were able to make this experience in the same way.

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The solution is a lithium battery

The remedy is a lithium battery. The battery does nothing other than supply the camping equipment with power, but has two advantages over the AGM battery.

• the battery weighs less than half at around 12 kilos
• it can be completely discharged

The greatest strength of the lithium battery is that it can be fully discharged, well at least almost. Modern lithium batteries have a built-in battery management system, or BMS for short. This system ensures a correct charging curve and protects the battery against complete discharge, ensuring that a residual charge of approximately five percent remains in the battery. Despite this, the camper thus has almost twice the power available! Thus, one night without shore power, becomes two.

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Plug and Play

We wanted a simple solution without having to change anything on our Cali. There are now various manufacturers of plug and play solutions. The batteries do not differ in size and shape from the AGM battery. The battery is simply exchanged. Now you read and hear a lot in the forums, for example : “The Grand California can not charge the battery” or “It is much too cold in winter under the hood respectively too hot in summer.” So hold on…

All manufacturers of play and plug solutions advertise with “Easy to replace with AGM battery, no conversion needed”. So the first question we asked ourselves, why wouldn’t it work? We ordered a battery from the company Wattstunde, more precisely the model LIFEPO4 LIX 100-D LT. This promises a plug and play solution and has a capacity of 100 amp-hours, which is pretty much the same as the original AGM battery. Regardless of the manufacturer, you currently have to expect a price of around 1000 euros for a 100 ampere-hour plug-and-play battery.

It was important for us to have a battery with built-in heating, because that is the biggest weakness of a lithium battery, they can’t be recharged at minus degrees. The manufacturers’ Arctic versions provide a remedy. A heating mat is embedded in the battery, which is switched on when the temperature is too low and thus keeps the battery core within the charging range.

The complete installation we have recorded in a video, there are already answered some questions, so who has 17 minutes time … 🙂

Finally, we take up a few questions that have been bothering us and that we can answer ourselves through our experiment and would like to share with you.

• Does the battery indicator in the camper unit still work?
  • Yes the display still works, however the volt range of a lithium battery is slightly different than an AGM battery and so the percentage reading is not correct. However, the voltage and charging power is displayed correctly! This is where the battery app can help.

• Does anything have to be changed on the solar system or the controller?
  • No the charging via solar works perfectly.
• Does anything need to be coded on the car?
  • No we could use the battery without programming.
• Is not the temperature much too high due to the engine ?
  • Our battery did not get warmer than 25 degrees during test drives, this can be checked with the battery app, admittedly it is not summer. Further tests are still pending here. But even the original AGM battery from Varta / VW must not be charged at over 45 degrees.
• Is the battery charged while driving ?
  • Yes just like the AGM battery, the “booster” can also be used.

We would like to go into more detail on the last point. There is the information that the Grand California allegedly, we say here deliberately allegedly, charges the battery with over 15 volts. That’s not true! At least our GC never passed more than a charge voltage of 14.8 volts to the battery in our tests, and that makes perfect sense because the original AGM has a maximum charge voltage of 14.8 volts. The watt-hour battery has a charge voltage of 14.5 volts +- 0.5, so this is within limits. The whole thing can also be seen in our video.

All the tests we have done so far have worked without any problems, of course we don’t have any long-term experience yet, we will give updates on the whole issue in a few weeks and months.

We are not influencers or anything like that, yet we had approached other manufacturers after the purchase and asked for a test battery to make a comparison. Unfortunately, we either received no response or were pushed away as too small. That’s a shame, but we’re not really surprised. We would have liked to show you other batteries in the next few weeks, whether and how the installation works with them. At the moment, however, we can only talk about the watt-hour battery, and customer service is difficult to impossible to reach for questions here as well. It seems like the manufacturers don’t need it at the moment, this impression unfortunately remains in the end. The batteries are almost all sold out at the moment, we could find the following offers at the moment.

• WATTSTUNDE LiFePO4 Battery 12V 100Ah LIX100D-LT DIN
• LIONTRON LiFePO4 12.8V 100Ah (not Arctic)
• Liontron Lithium Battery LiFePO4 Supply Battery ARCTIC -30°C
• Liontron LiFePO4 LX Arctic Smart Bluetooth BMS Lithium Battery 12.8 V / 100 Ah

In particular, the watt-hour battery is currently not available from the manufacturer. We can’t say about the Liontron how it works, but plug and play use is promised here as well.