Time and use are different exposures.
Battery capacity can change through calendar aging as well as cycling. SAM’s lifetime documentation treats age, temperature, state of charge and cycle depth as model inputs or drivers. A published cycle count without its remaining-capacity endpoint and test conditions cannot establish a calendar replacement year for your installation.
Sources: SAM help: battery life
Read the conditions, then the contract.
For a buying decision, record the exact model and document revision, cycle definition, depth of discharge, charge/discharge conditions, temperature and retained-capacity endpoint. Read the warranty separately: record its term, throughput or cycle limits, exclusions and remedy from the actual contract. Missing conditions remain missing; a marketing cycle claim is not itself a warranty document.
Keep the lifetime estimate conditional.
A model is a calculation under assumptions, not a new endurance test. SAM offers different degradation models with different ways to combine mechanisms; the diagram does not add two curves or predict a universal decay rate. Our current portable-power evidence collection contains no reviewed long-term cycling or calendar-aging experiment. The absence is a coverage gap, not evidence of zero aging.
Sources: SAM help: battery life
What this changes when you shop.
- Cycle counts need conditions and a retained-capacity endpoint.
- Chemistry alone does not establish years of service.
- Keep warranty terms, modeled replacement years and observed aging separate.
Sources, scope and corrections.
Conceptual buying guidance. Numerical examples are explicitly hypothetical; no exact product or installation is approved by this article.
Primary concept sources
- SAM help: battery life
Battery Life Options, Cycle Degradation and Calendar Degradation; model-specific assumptions, not a measured lifespan for a catalog product.
Reviewed 2026-11-07. Publication date not established; review date is not a publication or experiment date.
Source access and provenance
Direct source captured.
Captured 2026-11-08T01:51:10.330251+00:00 · SHA-256
12656c4efc305aebf414651352a9e25c424b5f27deca1c4f273cf34acf45143c
Illustration rights and meaning
Original site illustrations authorized for SolarCompare publication; no third-party artwork is reproduced. Source documents and publisher media retain their own rights. Conceptual diagrams and explicitly hypothetical arithmetic. No illustration is a measured curve or manufacturer drawing.
Article history
- · Initial publication. No subsequent correction is recorded in this revision.
New evidence is reviewed outside the build. A correction changes the article revision and records its date and reason; original source publication dates remain separate. Held observations stay held in the performance library until the source discrepancy is resolved.