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Using Discarded Laptop Batteries To Power Lights
mrspoonsi sends news of an IBM study (PDF) which found that discarded laptop batteries could be used to power lights in areas where there's little or no electrical grid. Of the sample IBM tested, 70% of the used batteries were able to power an LED light for more than four hours every day throughout an entire year.
The concept was trialed in the Indian city of Bangalore this year. The adapted power packs are expected to prove popular with street vendors, who are not on the electric grid, as well as poor families living in slums. The IBM team created what they called an UrJar — a device that uses lithium-ion cells from the old batteries to power low-energy DC devices, such as a light. The researchers are aiming to help the approximately 400 million people in India who are off grid.
If you're discarding laptop batteries while they can still hold a charge, not only are you doing it wrong, there is something very seriously wrong with you.
I discard my batteries when they can no longer keep a charge and even the OS tells me "yo dawg, your battery, replace it, it might be dead"
Sure, your laptop battery may not hold enough charge to power your laptop any more, but an LED needs a lot less power than your laptop, depending on what it's being used for. Most of the lightbulb-replacement LED bulbs I've seen want 9-23 watts, but the flashlights are more like 3w, and nightlights are more like 0.5 watts.
Also, that laptop battery is a battery of cells, and they usually don't all die at once. They may not be in good enough shape to remanufacture into new laptop batteries, but still have enough of them good enough to disassemble at third-world labor costs to recover cells for off-grid LED lighting.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Do the communities who benefit from the secondary-use life of these batteries have the infrastructure and culture to properly recycle the materials; or will they end up in landfill/discarded into the environment?
As soon as you get off the internet, turn off your air conditioner, hang up your telephone, and adjust your diet to compensate for the lack of food on your table, all provided by the ingenuity of America, you ungrateful POS. Wherever you are from, it doesn't matter, it hasn't been as productive, efficient, or as innovative as here in America
... and using only the "good" elements (when one or two elements fail the battery is dead for laptop use).
This is precisly what I've been doing for many years, any decent flashlight (or R/C or electronics) forum has at least one huge thread about people doing this.
I have an electric bike pack made out of the best cells recovered from (dead) laptops batteries. I've been using the individual cells for (flash)lights for years and in fact there are so many fake (or just "cheap") 18650 on the market now that if you don't know where to buy and what to buy you'll end up with something worse than a good cell from a bad 10-15 years old laptop battery. It is so bad that it is worse than SD counterfeiting...
Keep riding our coattails thinking you did anything to deserve it.
Every country on earth think they are the shit.. they are ALL wrong, including you!
So, these recycled batteries are being charged with what kind of charging controller, using what kind of input power?
If it's something creative like solar, I'd be very surprised if we don't get an impressive fire out of the first 100 unit-years of use...
Even if they have "grid power" to charge from, the charge controllers had better be good enough to sense a damaged cell, and when those sophisticated chargers refuse to charge the pack anymore, some genius level electrical engineer will hook up a "dumb" NiCad charger to the pack and get some more life out of it - the practice will spread and it won't be long before somebody sets the shanty town ablaze...
You are Exactly the person the grandparent post is talking about.
Here in Japan, we have current meters on a lot of electrical panels (Because you likely don't know: Japan is a major 1st world country, was #2 GDP until a year or so ago). Also, our electricity service is about 30 amps per residence. I have heat on when I need it, in the rooms I need it in (guess what... just like North America before about 1960s). I take the train to the office at 1/10th the cost, save the fuel/pollution and do email/read slashdot at the same time.
Guess what? My environmental footprint is about 1/5 of what is was in North America. And I consider my lifestyle is IMHO quite a bit better.
You've bought in to the corporate media message. USA (not North America now) is about 25% of the resource utilisation of the whole world. That is wasteful. I don't want to be a part of that, and so I do my part (see above, you wasteful POS). And not only that, but I work for a company that builds Electricity Grid monitor technology.
You? Keep being grateful that you can waste to everyone detriment... until you can't.
India is one of the countries where the US sends batteries to be recycled so it's almost certain that they are better at it than we are.
If not, we didn't care before when we sent them our batteries so why should caring about it be an issue now when it can get in the way of an improvement?
Was a real answer what you were looking for or was it just a petty flag waving exercise that makes us all look bad?
Those old batteries still need to be charged to power lights. If you're really off grid then how are you going to do that?
so you trade out the cost of a battery for labor, and the battery is still damaged goods when done
More likely they have the cheap labor and lack of environmental laws so the processing of the materials and disposal of the waste is much more economical.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
If you want to live that way, then do it. But don't tell others they have to live that way. It's not to anyone's detriment other than the person spending. And it doesn't matter if someone else wastes something that isn't yours so let it go already.
Yes, if you had made it to the second line before posting you would have noticed that I addressed that.
nice way to avoid disposal and let the slum people take care of a correct environmentally friendly disposal
And it doesn't matter if someone else wastes something that isn't yours
Yes, it does matter.
Are they investigating ways to ensure these batteries are properly disposed of once they can not longer hold sufficient charge for this secondary application? An off-grid slum doesn't sound like an area that would have much infrastructure to handle recycling efforts to keep these batteries from being a source of toxic pollution.
Love, legal.troll
This is a solved problem already. There are Chinese made solar lanterns available that are proving extremely popular in Africa. If the poorest Africans can afford them - much more so Indians.
http://panasonic.net/sustainability/en/lantern/
You surely have chosen the right nickname!
-- Cheers!
That's really my question here: what is the power return after charging a typical battery pack. If you wind up putting in 10Whrs to get 1 back out, then I'd have to wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient just to burn candles & kerosene. The fact that you're using an LED will be insignificant compared to the wasted power during the charging.
If a cell won't charge, then you're toting around a block of dead weight between the site of charging and the site of usage. (Not efficient.) If a cell won't hold a charge for more than a few hours (due to an internal short usually) then it's worse: you're just wasting energy at the charging site (until the short gets bad enough that the charger shuts down or worse, the battery explodes.)
For the shallow reader wanting to save materials and energy, this looks like a great idea. But, old batteries have been around a long time and if this really were a good idea, someone would have put it into use decades ago. In the dustbin it goes...
I have been doing it for YEARS for my high output flashlights. Not for the common 3W but for 10-12W versions (e.g. MC-E) in the past, and now most recently my 6 x 18650 (3p2s config) 12 x 3W monster flashlight (~5A current draw @ 7.4V). Two packs I have torn apart had a single dead 18650 cell, another had just degraded capacity cells.
Did I miss it? How are they going to charge the batteries if there
is no grid/power?
Along with the nasty lead CRTs that are to toxic for us enlightened westerners to deal with. Gift from the Gods!
> The researchers are aiming to help the approximately 400 million people in India who are off grid.
Our future?
I am stuck on band aides 'cause band aides stuck on me
The article mentioned that this was meant for places off the grid, so I'd assume they're using something like solar to charge the cells.
If that's the case, then there's nothing really wasted, since the sun will shine anyway.
Are they basically just remanufacturing the recovered cells into some kind of standardized battery pack with a standardized charging and usage interfaces?
I'm curious why this isn't done now if there's value in the cells vs. a more material-based recycling that uses them as input into creating new cells. I'd wager the argument is basically economic -- the cost of some other kind of battery input (new alkaline cells or "good" Li cells or whatever) is cheaper/better than these kinds of cells.
Won't they require recharging after a few (optimistic)days of low wattage use? I thought these people were off the grid?
As a loyal /.er I did not RTFA so I see one problem: How do they charge the batteries to run the LEDs if they have no power to start with?
Wouldn't the world be a better place if everybody in these slums was sterilised? Then no more children would be born into absolute poverty, surrounded by similarly fucked up people who can't even set up an electricity system.
Why is a slum a slum? Because of the PEOPLE who live there. The people who, knowing that their lives are awful and not worth living, STILL go on having children, who are born into abhorrent conditions.
I wonder why 400 million people in India are off grid? And I wonder why white people AREN'T off grid. Magic? Luck? Or DNA?
What is it with the ignorant American thinking that "less power means a lower quality of life"?
I've just changed a 35W halogen GU10 spot bulb in my bathroom for a 3W LED bulb. It requires 11.667 times less energy and yet gives me more light and less waste heat, which is not wanted in the summer.
My main computer for web browsing and document writing is a low-power computer which has a low-end Intel CPU with a built-in GPU and a 2.5" hard drive that runs on a 80W power supply. You don't need a power-hungry quad-core clocked at 4GHz with a 500W graphics card for day-to-day tasks.
Being energy efficient doesn't mean living like a fucking homeless person, it means being smarter about your energy consumption. But most Americans have been brainwashed by their own power companies so that they'll keep spending nearly 10 times more than everyone else on the planet.
Blah blah blah, I don't understand the concept of opportunity cost therefore people should ignore the expense of replacing equipment that is a little wasteful of a resource that is currently very cheap.
You don't need a 1kWe monster for day-to-day tasks, but if you want to have one for special tasks (computer game playing might be a hobby of yours, and is certainly less energy intensive than other hobbies you might have. Auto racing, for example), it might not make sense to also have an 80W computer for general use.
To pay off a $300, 80W machine in this scenario, at US prices you'd need to have like 3000 hours of low-intensity computing tasks. That's the break-even point assuming you're comparing it to a 1kWe monstrosity. If your gaming machine is closer to 500W (still pretty beefy, I'd think, and plenty of quad cores will fit into a balanced machine with that kind of power usage. At least a high mid-range device), it's closer to 6000 hours for break-even.
And it gets worse. It's unlikely that your 1kW monster is actually going to use the full power of all of its components when doing the general tasks, further eroding the advantages the smaller machine has.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
> It's not to anyone's detriment other than the person spending.
False premise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
I have to agree overall, but perhaps it is worth focusing exclusively on regions that have an existing electronics recycling industry. That way the worst case is they're ending up in the same places as now. For India they have this already, in Africa I suspect it varies substantially from country to country what type of wastes people are used to handling.
I know when I donate used electronics (for recycling) and expired textiles, the electronics are going to Asia and the textiles are going to Africa where 2 old shirts can make 1 newer shirt.
Do not tell the average mouth breathing person to do this! All batteries swell and then leak over time. Rechargeables also have a tendency to catch fire or cause fire when charging as they get old, i.e., when they no longer hold a good charge they will heat up more as the energy of charging goes to heat and not into the battery's chemical storage system.
No. Flat out, no! Recycle those batteries when they get old. They are literally ticking time bombs when they no longer hold a good charge. They are chemically unstable and need to be disposed of properly and promptly.
I'd be worried if somebody is using altered chargers to charge the battery even though they will make it so that it doesn't fit the same charger. But that is always true. That would be the exact same problem if they were being given free new laptops with working batteries, too. So that is a non-comment.
Electricity only comes in one type. Solar energy does not create different electricity that a power grid. It isn't flat or flabby or watered down, it doesn't have bees or mosquitoes stuck in it. In places that would use this technology, PV is probably more reliable and consistent than grid power, even during the rare hours when the grid is powered.
For the shallow reader wanting to save materials and energy, this looks like a great idea.
It isn't for people who have internet and time to read crap like this site.
For somebody with a name involving patents, it seems exceptionally daft to trot out the old "if this really were a good idea, someone would have put it into use decades ago." Uhm, no. Who the fuck told you that ideas make it to market based on how "good" they are?! Poor child, you've been lied to.
And I will false premise your false premise. External costs are realized by cheaper prices to the consumer which is a shortcut to you paying for them anyways if the costs of every single externality was actually built into the cost of everything. Unthinkers like you likely assume that these external costs would come out of the profit those greedy share holders make like the pension funds and crap which is wrong. Those costs would be folded into the costs of products which you would end up paying anyways. And no, someone who figures out how to minimize those costs will not sell cheaper because an arbitrary market value has already been set based around competition who doesn't have that advantage so it will just be profit for the owners and share holders.
Nobody ever said that- that I am aware of. I most certainly did not. If you think I did, you might want to try a different translation service or something. All I said was do what you want to do, and let everyone else do what they want to do. It's a simple premise of freedom.
Good for you. But I don't know what your point is other than you think you are super smart or something and want everyone else to know too? I will change out my bulbs when they blow and need changing.
You are correct, "you" do not need something. What I need is up to my needs and desires not yours. You are not the boss of anyone that I know of. But looking at your wording, it appears that you have more than one computer depending on your needs (read "main"). Is that not also wasteful or is the way you convoluted things the only proper way to do it?
Again, I do not know who ever said being energy efficient is living like a fucking homeless person. Do you often set up straw men arguments in order to shoot them down?
Most Americans are busy doing something else to care about the shit that seems to upset you. Most of them are the complete opposite of what you pretend they ware but I guess you need the straw man to burn along side the streets because you turned the power off to the street lamps or something. I dunno, but you set a lot of them up for no good reason other than making your point sound relevant.
Like I said, do what you want to do, just do not force others to do the same. If they want to do it, they will, if they do not, they will not. Its not yours so don't until it is, don't worry about it.
All the lights in the garden here (over 30, a mixture of normal high brightness white LED's and several Cree-based spotlights)
are all running from a setup I made from:
1. An MPPT charge controller from SparkFun
2. A solar panel I picked up on eBay for $20
3. The battery from an old Toshiba laptop with the cells rewired in parallel
4. A very simple LDR / transistor / relay circuit
Works brilliantly, and runs all night with plenty of spare capacity if I want more.
Yeah, me too. But you need to be able to tell the difference between 30,000 volts high frequency AC, which is what the flyback on the picture tube hit us with, and 1.2 volts DC, which is what a rechargeable battery cell is going to do to you.
If you have no fear, you aren't brave, and you might in fact be quite foolish. If you have fear and you overcome it, you are brave. If you have fear and you let it overcome you, you are cowardly.
Choose courage.
Poor people tend to breed more because:
You could sterilise them now, but the slums would still be repopulated in no time if you don't tackle the root causes of poverty.
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
useful info/....thnks..Hey try this http://a1bytes.com/ the best bytes on net for computer tips
Solar energy is actually flabby and watered down as it is typically delivered, especially on shoestring budgets.
When you have access to "mains" 110 or 220 VAC at 10+ amps, you trim it down and deliver it exactly as desired to charge your cells (within the budget constraints of how "smart" you can make the charger) in this scenario, the aged cells can probably be handled safely.
When you have 0.1sqm of budget solar cells delivering your power, and an aged LiIon cell as your storage medium, the electronics between those two are going to have to eek out every possible bit of power delivered by the solar side if you want a chance of the LED light lasting for more than a couple of hours after sunset. The saving grace here is that the solar cell _probably_ won't have enough power to make anything exciting happen in the battery, regardless of how you transform the voltage/current coming from it. The downside is that whoever is making the charger will probably scrap any cell safety considerations and just dump whatever they've got into the cell as "efficiently" as possible - and sooner or later the infinite number of users will hit on an operational scenario that makes it burn.
You should really look into it if you're so interested, find out about how to create simple circuits that only charge at the correct voltage and current.
You don't just grab a photovoltaic cell and duct tape the wires to the battery.
You know, for places off the grid there are these magical things out there that use solar energy to produce fuels. They're called "plants" and "livestock", they produce such things as wood and waxes, and they don't need any batteries. But for someone urgently needing to justify dumping a lot of non-recyclables somewhere it sure can be made to sound great...
One of the great ironies of our modern era is the simultaneous effort to reduce technology consuming westerners to the level of subsistence farmers in the name of ecology and to turn subsistence farmers into technology consuming westerners in the name of development.
Unfortunately, most multi-cell batteries do cell management wrong and are unable to isolate dead cells. A typical "dead" battery has one bad cell, with other cells having more than another lifetime of reasonable performance ahead of them. Most laptop and power tool batteries will work completely satisfactorily if you merely break up the cells and apply proper cell and charge management that is able to extract charge from and impart charge to each cell independent of other cells.
Most "dead" batteries that people throw away are good - except for one cell.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
So I guess fire is out for generating light for a mostly open 8th world toilet? They should really solve their shit problem, before worrying about lighting.
You understanding of economics is poor. You also missed the main point: Externalities usually affect others than those who benefit from cheaper prices.
It all works out in the wash. Your vegan all natural food benifited from the same cheap energy costs that my fast food did. Your prius takes advantAge of the same exteralities that my diesel truck did. Your solar pannels are the same. But in the same sense of "you didn't build that", the exact proportipns aren't the exact same but it works out kn the wash.
Rather obviously it does not work out in the wash. This discussion was about the massive waste of energy in the US which leads to a per capita consumption which is about twice that of other highly developed countries such as Japan and Germany and order of magnitude compared to developing countries. The externalities of the energy use affect people globally (like the war in Iraq and its dire consquences or global warming). As such, your idea that "It's not to anyone's detriment other than the person spending" is simple wrong.
It still works out in the wash.
Japan and Germany has benefited greatly over the years from the US wasting energy. The obvious is the lack of military needed by them because the US wasted energy, the investment the US has directly put into them by bases and such. But there are other ways they benefited like economic stability (trading with the US) and tourism dollars. Welcome to the new world order I guess. It's the same as the old world order except someone not as innocent as you thought.