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People Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries To Power Their Homes (vice.com)
New submitter gooddogsgotoheaven writes: DIY Powerwall builders from around the world are harvesting old laptop batteries and turning them into powerful batteries capable of supplying energy to their entire homes. "It's the future. It's clean, simple, efficient and powerful," Jehu Garcia, one of the most popular powerwall builders, told me. He and people like him are deciding for themselves what the future of alternative energy will look like, instead of waiting for technology companies to shape it for them. "The end result is being able to rely on something I not only built myself but understand the ins and outs of to power some or all of my electricity in my home. That is inspiring," Joe Williams, another powerwall builder, told me.
Meh, you build yourself a little block shed separated from your house. Problem solved.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Where are they getting these used laptop batteries that still have life in them?
My experience has been that a typical laptop battery will last about 2 years. 3 if you're will to work in small spurts before hunting down a power outlet. Most are run till the batteries are useless, and then spend a while as a makeshift desktop by constantly being connected to the charger. In a couple cases, the laptop was still useful enough to spring for a replacement battery.
I just don't see where enough recycle-able batteries will come from for this "movement" to ever be anything other than an oddity. With the tedium of:
- connecting hundreds of cells that you've already determined are not new, if not at the end of their usable life
-purchasing or building your own controllers with failsafe features
-replacing cells as they begin dying off
I would think it would make most people opt for buying one of Tesla's products.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
You've got it pretty much covered; Li+ cells are finicky at best, you do anything to make them upset and they get very violent with you very quickly.
The main problem with using used cells from old laptop batteries is that they're not all the same age and therefore you have no way of judging what their true capacity or overall health is. If you were linking up the actual packs they're in, and using the built-on microcontroller-based charge-discharge controller to manage each pack, then it would be reasonably safe, but dismantling them from random packs and assembling them into huge banks? You're asking for disaster to happen. The best you could do there would be to have a very sophisticated management controller(s) monitoring smaller banks of cells, disconnecting them at the first sign of failure of any single cell in that bank -- and also a automated fire-supression system that can handle a catastrophic failure, and perhaps an explosion-proof enclosure for all the banks of cells. Li+ cells may be ubiquitos at this point in time, but they're still far from Amateur Night to work with, especially in the huge quantities these guys (who, according to the article) are indeed complete amateurs. From what I know of it (and I worked somewhere where I did quite a bit of research into the subject of building Li+ battery packs), if they were buying new cells in those quantities, the manufacturer might insist on seeing their controller design(s) before accepting the purchase.
That was also my first thought, before I read TFA. Searching on 'safe' in it I find these quotes, and it's not all the hits:
So, there is definitely some caution here, and awareness that such pre-used batteries may not be useful enough due to low charge levels.
They're not perfectly good. Most often, one group of cells is dead, but the others are fine. Sometimes all are fine, but so out of balance that the electronics cannot rectify it. Sometimes they are worn and don't have enough capacity for a portable application. And sometimes all cells are fine but the electronics is faulty.