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.

Comments

IDTS

[Frosty Piss]

Jesus. Nope, nope, nope. Dying in a fire isn't my preferred way to go.

Re:IDTS

[Captain Splendid]

Meh, you build yourself a little block shed separated from your house. Problem solved.

Re: IDTS

[arkane1234]

Fires bad, mmmm'kay?
Fire burns and stuff.

Re:IDTS

[sycodon]

I have had more than double the number of batteries for my laptops than I have had laptops.

Battery lifetimes seem to be about a third of the computer.

Where are they getting perfectly good batteries that are "recycled"?

Re:IDTS

[Athanasius]

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:

Gathering enough batteries is only the first step to building a DIY powerwall. Every cell then has to be tested—not all are safe enough to be used, several hobbyists told me. Lithium-ion batteries have a limited lifespan: Some laptop batteries harvested end up having too little capacity to be used.

Most hobbyists I spoke to said they don't keep their powerwalls inside their homes for safety reasons or to comply with local regulations.

One of the most frequent topics that came up in my conversations with powerwall makers was safety. Fusing together hundreds of recycled lithium-ion batteries is dangerous, and could cause a fire if done incorrectly.

On the DIYpowerwalls forum, there are dozens of threads dedicated to preventing these massive, homemade electronic devices from catching ablaze. YouTube too is littered with videos warning powerwall builders that their projects are unsafe.

DIY powerwall makers often aren't engineers or electricians. Most, including the most popular—like Jehu Garcia—lack formal training altogether. But they remain mostly unfazed by safety concerns, and said that more recently, makers have pushed each other to engineer more safeguards into their rigs.

So, there is definitely some caution here, and awareness that such pre-used batteries may not be useful enough due to low charge levels.

Re: IDTS

[PolygamousRanchKid]

That's why you don't work on your car in your living room.

Well, for some of us folks . . . that rusty Chevy up on cinder blocks on the front lawn IS the living room . . .

Re:IDTS

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Meh, you build yourself a little block shed separated from your house.

Yeah, that's what the Nuclear Boy Scout did.

Maybe we should encourage more folks to skip those dangerous batteries, and go straight for their own private nukes . . . ?

Re: IDTS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:IDTS

[chispito]

If these people were doing that, fine. They are not. They put these battery packs right in their homes. They are amateurs with no idea of risk management or statistics and often only passing EE skills.

And yet from TFA:

Most hobbyists I spoke to said they don't keep their powerwalls inside their homes for safety reasons or to comply with local regulations.

Re:IDTS

[AmiMoJo]

Laptop batteries are made up for several individual cells. Often only one or two cells die, and the rest are fine. Take the pack apart, test each cell and discard the duff ones.

This happens because cheap cells have variable quality, and because heat kills batteries but tends to be very uneven in a laptop, mostly on one side where the CPU is.

Between old laptop batteries and old power tool batteries, and even written off cars, you can get a nearly infinite supply of very cheap/free LiPo cells that just need disassembling and testing.

Not that I know about electricity

[keith_nt4]

But this seems to be a really, really bad idea. Just on the face of it.

Re:Not that I know about electricity

[Mr D from 63]

Nothing wrong technically if you know what you are doing, but I question the value return on all the effort and cost including the lifetime and maintenance requirements considering you are starting with used batteries many of which are already in the late aging phase. It seems to lean more toward enthusiast and hobby value than it does practical value. And that's OK.

Re: Not that I know about electricity

[keith_nt4]

Good thing I have slashdot commenters to know this stuff for me. So ya. What guy this said...

by burtosis ( 1124179 )
The problem with using laptop batteries is not the batteries, the tesla uses them. The problem is the smart battery circuitry needed to monitor currents and voltages, balance cells, thermally monitor strings (or ideally individual cells), gas gauge, and safely disconnect problem cells from the system. The major advancement in the tesla is the amazing cooling/heating system and the ability to rewire itself to stop using problem cells. Simply wiring up a bank of unmonitored cells is a disaster waiting to happen. The vast majority of home hobbiests lack the knowledge and wherewithal to implement proper battery safety. The packs in the stock photos, if lithium cells, are a disaster in the making. Disclaimer: have designed smart battery circuits for lithium batteries used in actual products.

Other sources of cheap batteries

[Andrew Lindh]

I think there's a huge stash of "almost new" Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries that aren't being used now.

Re:Other sources of cheap batteries

[93 Escort Wagon]

I think there's a huge stash of "almost new" Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries that aren't being used now.

I've got a few crates of them stored away for winter. It's gonna slash my heating bill by 70%!

Lithium batteries are not to be taken lightly

[stikves]

They are very power efficient, and also very dangerous:

- Overcharge it too much: boom
- Drain it completely, and then try to charge: boom
- Puncture: boom
- Overheat: boom
- Make your own battery with cells you found around, and not use a good controller: boom, boom, boom

Of course it is possible to use lots of cheap batteries, with a very good controller system. This is what Tesla does for its current cars. However the system needs to monitor each cell and pack, and have safety precautions to disconnect them if them become faulty.

Basically, do not try this at home.

Re:Lithium batteries are not to be taken lightly

[rickb928]

- Overcharge - Good charging apparatus.
- Drain it completely - Good charging apparatus and battery management, as noted in the article.
- Puncture - Stop puncturing your powerwall cells, please, just as you don't twist off the natural gas connectors to see want's inside. Darwinian problem.
- Overheat - battery management, and a thermostat
- Make your own battery with cells you found around, and not use a good controller - yeah, doing it right is pretty much a Darwinian problem.

Re:Lithium batteries are not to be taken lightly

[burtosis]

Basically, do not try this at home.

So, I can still power my home with it, right?

Yes you could but it's like giving a 4yr old the controls to a 20 ton front end loader in your backyard. I'd rather a trained professional operate something capable of demolishing my home in minutes but to each their own.

Re:Lithium batteries are not to be taken lightly

[Rick Schumann]

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.

Re: Lithium batteries are not to be taken lightly

[Rick Schumann]

Sure. When you start with nice new cells, but not with worn-out shitty old cells from old laptop battery packs. You're literally playing Russian Roulette when you do. You're underestimating what thermal runaway in a Li+ cell can cause; one internally shorted cell dumping it's entire charge can and will cause a cascade failure, setting off adjacent cells into thermal runaway also, which just continues until the entire bank is a fireball. Not. Worth. The. Risk.

Sounds good on the surface but

[burtosis]

The problem with using laptop batteries is not the batteries, the tesla uses them. The problem is the smart battery circuitry needed to monitor currents and voltages, balance cells, thermally monitor strings (or ideally individual cells), gas gauge, and safely disconnect problem cells from the system. The major advancement in the tesla is the amazing cooling/heating system and the ability to rewire itself to stop using problem cells. Simply wiring up a bank of unmonitored cells is a disaster waiting to happen. The vast majority of home hobbiests lack the knowledge and wherewithal to implement proper battery safety. The packs in the stock photos, if lithium cells, are a disaster in the making. Disclaimer: have designed smart battery circuits for lithium batteries used in actual products.

Extremely Hazardous

[LeftCoastThinker]

Unless these people built a cinderblock bunker roofed with a galvanized steel roof (i.e. no wood in the structure at all) and a steel fire rated door that is completely removed from their main residence, the first time one of these Lithium batteries fails thermally, their entire "wall" will likely go up and burn down their house. If they have each battery in a ceramic, isolated cubby outside their house, they are marginally better, but this is definitely not a good way to go about powering your house or living off grid... You are better off building your own lead acid battery array with deep cycle batteries...

Re:While you joke...

[roc97007]

Those would probably be perfectly fine for use in a static enclosure.

The problem that caused the fires was related to those battery packs being overflexed due to their size and the limited rigidity of the note 7 case for those size batteries was it not?

I have a mental image of a house down the street exploding after a minor earthquake. The neighbors are all loafing around the sidewalk looking at the debris. "A-yep. Samsung batteries. Shouldna used 'em."

Re:They're full of 18650's.

[CrashNBrn]

High drain 26650's are the real schnizzle at about 5 bucks each.

WTF!?!

[Shotgun]

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.

Disaster waiting to happen

[Anonymous Coward]

If one of the laptop battery is on recall list that's one ticking fuse in your powerwall

1 megawatt = 1000 kwh?

[superdave80]

FTFA:

The giant battery system will be able to store 1 megawatt of power—1000 kWh

I... don't even know what to do with that sentence. Watts are not equivalent to kilowatt-hours.