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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.
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.
Dude, I was soldering tabbed NiCD batteries into packs for my RC car when I was 12. Being afraid of small, low-voltage power sources because high-power sources could hurt you is like being afraid of house cats because lions and tigers can hurt you.
An incredibly useful amount of light can be provided by an LED headlamp for many, hours running on just a pair of AAA batteries. I hang it around camp all the time as a lantern providing indirect light, or more than enough direct light to read by. And that represents about 3Wh of capacity, versus the 60Wh for a smallish laptop battery. That small battery, reduced to only 10% of it's already meager original capacity, is not going to give you even remotely enough power for your laptop to be portable anymore, but would still provide twice the capacity of that headlamp. At 20% capacity you're probably overdue for a battery replacement if mobility is important to you, and that will give you 8 AAAs worth of power.
So we've got what, maybe $8 worth of decent quality NiMH-equivalnets right there, being thrown away as nicely packaged trash? If you can harness that trash stream to make solar lamps you could improve a lot of lives, while making sure those batteries get every last bit of life wrung out of them by people who know the value of a nickel.
I see two potential problems though - the first is pollution: we'd be interrupting a recycling-stream (one can hope) to re-purpose the batteries. We'd want to make sure they get back into that stream when fully dead. Hopefully there's large enough profit margins or subsidies in the system that people can make money buying dead batteries from people in the slums and villages to sell to the recycling plants, otherwise we have to trust to sufficient environmental awareness to keep these things out of the rubbish heaps.
The second is the fire hazard. I'm not certain how much, the fire hazard of a Li-ion battery increases when it's on its last legs, but distributing large quantities of low-individual-risk firebombs among the world's slums could be unfortunate.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.