Test/review of LiitoKala INR26650-50A 5000mAh (Black)

Yes, this is a normal store, so a little earlier, I already showed this place.

Also here are the natural cells of the Shockli-5500
https://ru.aliexpress.com/item/Shockli-26650-5500-3-7-5500-26650/32898037810.html?spm=a2g0s.13010208.99999999.262.76403c00X74C4P

Barkuti, I just love people who quote a post with 10 or more 10Meg pictures. And only add the word: nice!

Nothing against these stores but I don’t buy batteries from gearbest, Ali, banggood. I would rather pay a few more bucks for peace of mind.

I don’t even make a lot of money. far far from it.

Gearbest and Banggood are big stores and get large shipments of batteries. They only want to sell genuine cells. On rare occasions they may get fakes, but once they find this out they will stop selling them and reimburse those who got the fakes.

Aliexpress is made up of many small independent stores just like eBay. As with eBay, you have to know if the particular store your buying from carries legit cells or fakes.

I buy cells from all 3 of the above places.

NKON is another reputable foreign seller.

Since your in the USA, you have many legit stores to choose from. Illumn, Liion Wholesale, IMR and MTN Electronics. If you don’t trust the foreign sellers, then you should buy from USA stores. I plan to buy a pair of the Shockli 5500 once MTN gets them back in stock.

JasonWW, they are back in stock at Mtn as of a day or two ago. Get them when you can!

Cool, thanks for the heads up.

I’ve seen a lot of comments about the lightblue LiitoKalas of 5100mAh with paper label.

They indeed can measure above 5100mAh, I found as up to 5400mAh but the measurement is not relevant at 1A discharge (like Opus measures).
The cell is officially rated at 15A discharge so that’s how we must test discharge to see how it holds out.
Note that at 10A discharge there’s overheat, but the cell holds well. I could not measure capacity at high current values, but the cells should be fine at up to 10A.

My tests were done on a set of 12 cells, all showed between 5200 and 5400mAh @1Ad.

I purchased an Lii-500 Engineer charger and a LiitoKala Lii-50A 26650 during the recent Anniversary Sale at AliExpress, 3/28 thru 4/1. I purchased from the “liitokala Official Store”, currently reachable through links here and here. The store claims an opening date of January, 2013 and has an AE store number of 217753.

I received these items packaged together only 18 days after purchase to the United States, which is, by far, the fastest delivery I’ve experienced from AliExpress. The items appear to be packaged in factory boxes and the charger included all accessories and documentation.

The 26650 cell has been cycled once at 700mA charge and 500mA discharge rates. This reported a capacity of 5436mAh. Though somewhat higher than HKJ’s “Black” test, it’s in line with other owners when using the Lii-500 charger for testing. I cannot perform any high-current tests, but the charger reports an internal resistance averaging 27mOhm, which is also similar to other measurements of these cells with this charger.

I tested recently the black model, like in the picture above, at 1A discharge. Out of 10 cells, the average was 5700mAh and the maximum nearly 6k (5957) and minimum 5400+. They are definitely better than the light blue ones since they are also rated at up to 50A discharge.

I agree Overmind, Liitokala 26650 batteries are very good; I have a bunch of them in fact.
But if you will check close you will find that 50A you mentioned is not a rated discharge number…… it is a model/part number of the battery.

In other words they are not rated at 50A discharge.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news…. :wink:

They have never been rated that high, usually it’s 20A. Maybe you are confusing the model name of 50A (meaning 5000mah) with the amperage ratings? Some people do.

Also, if it measures well above 5000mah, that is not necessarily a good thing. The higher the capacity, the higher the internal resistance and usually the lower the amps.

Yes, of course it’s unlikely to give 50A. Probably they refer to bursts / spikes, not continuous use.

Max current is easy to test if you have some high power resistors (which I unfortunately don’t at this moment).

The 50A label of these cells is derived from the manufacturer cell model they started rewrapping, PLB INR26650-50A.

True, but because of lack of consistency. I sometimes build battery packs and for this cells with poor consistency suck in one way or the other.

Excuse me but given two cells of the same model (which means same chemistry and internal construction) the one with higher capacity will also be more current delivery and power capable.

Yep. These batteries are definitely not capable of 50A output and even the cells in HKJ’s tests show a maximum rational current of 20A.

Yes, and this worries me a bit. My cell measured at 5436mAh on its first full cycle, so it may improve further during the next few cycles. That’s far out of line with both the Cyan and Black cells tested by HKJ. This suggests that the cells have changed. I have no method for doing high-current testing, but am very curious how the cells currently being shipped compare to the HKJ cells, which offered surprisingly good performance for the price.

I’ll be using the cell in an Astrolux FT03, which is a 9.5A light with the best cells and somewhat less with this LiitoKala. How much less? I just don’t know and my clamp meter broke years ago… oh well :wink: .

I would assume they did NOT have the same chemistry and internal construction. If they did, how could there be such a big gap in capacity? Almost 900mah more is a really big gap. Do you think they accidentally stumbled upon a way to get 5900mah, without sacrificing the performance?

Maybe the more logical reason is that the Lii-500 charger is not so good at measuring capacity? IDK.

You don’t need the best batteries to perform well in that light. The 48G cell did just fine and that is not a high drain cell, it’s a high capacity with a 10A continuous rating. So I would not be worried.

Agreed, its a matter of overall better cell quality. As for the consistency, 10% variance is within acceptable limits since it’s above the rating. Stating 5100 and having 5400+ is certainly more reliable than stating 5100 and having 4800-5300.

The cell should work fine in the FT03, but I am curious about whether they are still the same cells that HKJ tested. Those were barely 5000mAh even at 0.2A, yet many people in this thread have reported substantially higher capacities when testing with the Lii-500 charger.

Perhaps the charger reads high, but HKJ’s tests of this charger (in 2015) show expected capacities with a Normal test of li-ions. If you look at the chargers he tested around the same time, you can see how each one fared on the collection of test cells he was using at the time. I don’t see enough difference to explain why so many of us are seeing around 5500mAh from these Lii-50A cells.

I just wonder if LiitoKala has changed suppliers. I guess another explanation would be that they changed the charger somehow, but I doubt that. Manufacturers tend to strip components out of products in order to shave production costs, but I don’t think this would lead to exaggerated capacity measurements. Possible? Yes. Likely? I don’t think so.

:question: Okay, as you can see in the photo (also shown in a prior post), the battery voltage has dropped to 3.96 after the test has completed. Is this normal?

Out of curiosity, I popped the cell back into the charger today thinking the voltage would spike back up, but instead the charger has now put 870mAh into the cell over the past 1h 45m (default 500mA as I did not expect it to run for long). I removed the cell at 4.18V.

Oh, and I’ve experienced no heat issues when charging at 700mA; the cell never gets noticeably warm at all. I mention this because I’ve heard that someone recently had a Black Lii-50A catch fire :(.

I haven’t seen batteries drop that much. It’s usually from 4.20 to 4.15. Something like that. I’m not real sure, though.

Does that charger show all cells to have higher than rated capacity?