LiitoKala Lii-50A 26650 5000 mAh battery

Back in early November last year, one of my readers got in touch and offered to let me test several batteries from LiitoKala, a brand many people know. Since I’m always interested in testing different batteries, I of course agreed.
The reader then ordered four batteries to be delivered to my address, and today I’m looking at the first one.

First, I’d like to say a big thank-you for providing the samples for testing. I’m sure my readers will join me in that.

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People have asked me about these batteries several times in the comments—and about LiitoKala in general, not just these models—so I decided this review might be genuinely useful.
All but one of the batteries being tested are 26650 cells with comparable specs, so in the third review I’ll put together a comparison chart.



So, first up is the LiitoKala Lii-50A. It came in the brand’s own box, though the post had dented it a little.


The product page lists some specs, but the translation is so bad it’s a mess. Still, you can get the gist of it.


The batteries are wrapped in glossy black heat-shrink tubing and have a code for checking authenticity. The positive terminal is flat and doesn’t protrude beyond the casing.


The dimensions are within the standard range for the 26650 form factor.


The battery arrived at about 75% charge. It took around 1300 mAh to charge it to 100%.
The initial “conditioning” run measured almost 5500 mAh, which is quite a lot.


The specified charging current is 2 A. The thing is, when I was first looking up the specs, I hadn’t come across the table shown above, so I charged it at 2.5 A, or 0.5C, which is perfectly fine too.
Charging at 0.5C took almost 3 hours, which is a bit long, though normal for batteries in this class.


The tests were run at 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2, 3 and 4C, where C = 5000 mA. Yes, you read that right: the specified maximum current for these batteries is 5 A, but I tested them at currents up to 20 A. There were two reasons for that:
I’d seen 20 A somewhere in a heading
the maximum current for the other three batteries is 20 A.

And yes, the battery works perfectly well up to 5 A. It handles 10–15 A reasonably well too, but at 20 A it “dies”—you can see this from the large voltage sag and the characteristic hump at the start of the discharge curve, caused by self-heating.


Here are the temperatures at 10, 15 and 20 A. I’d say 10 A is generally fine for this battery, 15 A is already pushing it and it’s best not to discharge it at that current for long, while 20 A is clearly too much.


At around 90 degrees, the heat-shrink tubing started to peel off. I didn’t have a camera or phone handy, so I had to take a photo with the thermal camera.
I’ve mentioned before that the heat-shrink on rewrapped batteries usually starts to creep at 90–100 degrees, sometimes even at 80, while the original wrapping can easily withstand higher temperatures.


After it cooled to room temperature, I ran the usual residual-capacity test. It delivered 71 mAh, which is pretty good. In my view, the lower this figure, the better.


The battery’s impedance when it arrived, after “conditioning,” and after all the tests. You can see that the resistance increased; I’d guess the last test took its toll.


Conclusion.
These batteries turned out to be unexpectedly interesting. They delivered more than the specified 5000 mAh in every test, and worked reasonably well at 10–15 A even though the specified maximum is only 5 A. I think if LiitoKala’s managers see this review, they’ll quickly update the product description :)

The one thing I didn’t test was service life. Unfortunately, that takes a long time, is difficult to do, and results from a small number of cycles aren’t very accurate. But since the battery has already taken some damage anyway, I might run at least 50 cycles to get an idea of how quickly it degrades.

That’s it for the first sample. I’ll get to the others a little later :)