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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.
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...
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?
so you trade out the cost of a battery for labor, and the battery is still damaged goods when done
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.
And it doesn't matter if someone else wastes something that isn't yours
Yes, it does matter.
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 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.
Because this wasn't intended to be a practical solution to anything; it was a feel-good publicity stunt. As you say, a garden light with a built-in charger makes more sense.
"I wonder why they don't use car batteries instead?"
... because pretty much everything from a dead car battery can be recycled to make new car batteries and other stuff ...
The battery is broken apart in a hammer mill; a machine that hammers the battery into pieces. The broken battery pieces are then placed into a vat, where the lead and heavy materials fall to the bottom and the plastic floats. At this point, the polypropylene pieces are scooped away and the liquids are drawn off, leaving the plastic
Polypropylene pieces are washed, blown dry, and sent to a plastic recycler where the pieces are melted together into an almost liquid state. The molten plastic is put through an extruder that produces small plastic pellets of a uniform size. The pellets are sold to a manufacturer of battery cases and the process begins again.
Lead grids, lead oxide, and other lead parts are cleaned and heated within smelting furnaces. The molten melted lead is then poured into ingot molds. After a few minutes, the impurities float to the top of the still molten lead in the ingot molds. These impurities are scraped away and the ingots are left to cool. When the ingots are cool, they’re removed from the molds and sent to battery manufacturers, where they’re re-melted and used in the production of new batteries.
Old battery acid can be handled in two ways: 1) The acid is neutralized with an industrial compound similar to household baking soda. Neutralization turns the acid into water. The water is then treated, cleaned, tested in a waste water treatment plant to be sure it meets clean water standards. 2) The acid is processed and converted to sodium sulfate, an odorless white powder that’s used in laundry detergent, glass, and textile manufacturing.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
IBM did this for PR. It'll likely take far more resources to reuse the old laptop batteries than manufacture a good solution from scratch (like the one you referenced).
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.
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.
My guess, less than half would bring back their battery. Many would sell them. Also, your local staff would steal many of your deliveries and sell them at the local flea market. Then come back to you with all sorts of excuses and reasons about what happened. The smarter guys would buy fresh labels from some print shop and sell the batteries as new to some store. Most of your batteries would end up being disassembled for precious metals by some at-home shops in the slum. They rarely care about the toxic fumes they produce n the process, and the waste water that goes into the river behind their house. But then, there are different levels of "slum". But since we are talking about those without even electricity lines, that's probably what would happen.
Kinda of hard to do that in the dark. Oh and in Bangalore, they are talking about the poorest of the poor. the lowest caste who CAN"T sell to others ans contact with them makes those people outcasts. But other than that you are sadly correct.
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.
Actually if you go over to Alibaba and buy a 10 pack of 2 dollar 16850 rechargeable lithium cells for your flashlight there is a good chance that they are recycled e-waste. In other words never underestimate the Chinese workforce when it comes to making a quick buck.
Kinda of hard to do that in the dark. Oh and in Bangalore, they are talking about the poorest of the poor. the lowest caste who CAN"T sell to others ans contact with them makes those people outcasts. But other than that you are sadly correct.
I don't where you come from; but I can certainly tell you one thing that one can sell or buy anything in Bangalore irrespective of his or her caste. Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't allow to mod and reply to the same discussion. So I had to make a tough choice between trolling you down or replying to your post. I've opted for the latter so that at least you can think before you post the next time.
Maybe they did it to justify the West dumping all the broken electronics onto a barge and sailing it to India where it becomes somebody else's problem.
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.
Maybe they did it to justify the West dumping all the broken electronics onto a barge and sailing it to India where it becomes somebody else's problem.
This was my first thought. Sounds like a scheme to export an ever-increasing scrap battery problem to the under-developed world, while circumventing the over-developed world's stricter regulations about safe disposal.
India has an average of between 2000 and 3000 hours of sunshine a year, depending on the region, making a far stronger case for solar power and other innovative lighting solutions, such as the recycled plastic bottle solar pipe light mentioned by thunderclap.
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.