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EcoFlows + Heaters = Danger

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richiev

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I've shared this before, but again I had a screw up that almost nuked my tank, so resharing in a post.

EcoFlow batteries are not necessarily safe to use with heaters, even during normal conditions

On my frag tank I have a River Pro with extra battery connected to my critical equipment. Critical was defined as pumps + controller (so I can have a record of what happened). I also had a single, smaller, heater that is in my display versus the sump as an attempt to here some heat during an outage.

The problem is EcoFlows have a maximum wattage output that will turn them off, even if plugged in if that value is hit. This has happened to me multiple times, which is embarrassing, but now I'm giving up completely on heaters with these.

What happened yesterday is at around 9pm that heater (and unfortunately one I had on a QT tank) must've turned on and it tripped the max wattage/current sensor and the ecoflow turned off the AC output. Unfortunately that took out all my alerting, and because it's attached to my garage I didn't notice.

At 6am I got woken up by my kids saying there's an alarm going off, which was a secondary heater I have in there. Honestly I'm not even sure how that triggered.

I don't know exactly what temp it was at, but probably around 70°F. Also besides the power didn't actually go out, my automatic bubbler didn't activate, since it's plugged into a different strip.

I obviously have some failure testing to do and reconfiguration, but the main thing is this has happened to me multiple times with the EcoFlows turning off and it's very dangerous. It's most dangerous because the devices on that are almost by definition the most critical things, because non critical you wouldn't battery backup.

I'll share later some thoughts on safer setups, but raising this again so people on this forum or Internet search find it.

As good news even my acros still have polyp extension, so hopefully nothing dies.
 
Interested in hearing later what you do to better failsafe your system. I have two of these batteries and have only had to plug in a heater once thankfully and it worked fine for the couple hours I needed it
 
I would rather have 10hrs of return + wave flow than about 45 minutes if I add the heater. No brainer for me, just on runtime alone. Heaters absolutely eat through batteries to the point where it just doesn’t make any sense.

Perhaps a much smaller tank with a very large EcoFlow would change the equation enough to make it make sense, but I can’t imagine adding a heater to my delta.
 
I use a river 2 to mix my water 5g at a time, and yea if I'm heating the water the battery is drained by the time it's ready
 
derek_SR said:
@richiev you’re supposed to be one of the smart guys around here. :p
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I'll that that as a compliment :)

derek_SR said:
I would rather have 10hrs of return + wave flow than about 45 minutes if I add the heater. No brainer for me, just on runtime alone. Heaters absolutely eat through batteries to the point where it just doesn’t make any sense.

Perhaps a much smaller tank with a very large EcoFlow would change the equation enough to make it make sense, but I can’t imagine adding a heater to my delta.
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My overall setup is EcoFlows as my primary, short term, coverage which I hope to cover overnight or until I get home. My EV is my main backup, because it has a huge battery. However I've now found my EV has the same problem, where EcoFlows pull a ton of amps and can overshoot my car when charging. I think there's a setting on EcoFlows to reduce their charging rate, so I'll probably try that next.

When it's working right, with a small heater it should generally cover me for quite awhile. However, I've never really done that math on how much power a heater uses overnight, and given what I saw in these cases I should probably permanently keep them separate. Alternatively I should get a very small heater and use a worst case calc (eg 50w at max) and see what that would require.

For people with home batteries this seems even more confusing, because isolating heaters from a home battery seems impossible unless you have dedicated electrical circuits.
 
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