>the solution came with rearranging and adjusting the cells to ensure the packs worked more efficiently.
>Glubux even began disassembling entire laptop batteries, removing individual cells and organizing them into custom racks. This task, which likely required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge, was key to making the system work effectively and sustainably.
This kind of thing is cool as a passion project, but it really just highlights how efficient the modern supply chain is. If you have the skills of a professional electrician, you too can spend hundreds of hours building a home battery system you could just buy for $20k, but is less reliable.
> spend hundreds of hours building a home battery system
That is, in my opinion, the worst feature of this entire project. It is cool and nice and fun. But it takes a lot of time to research, acquire skills, get tools and build.
> you could just buy for $20k
I agree with a broader point but that particular price is extremely high and far from reality.
A reasonably good 18650 cell has a capacity of ~12 Wh (~3300 mAh * ~3.7 V = ~12.2 Wh). The battery mentioned in the article consists of "more than 1000" such cells. Let us assume 1200 cells. That would mean it has a capacity of ~14.4 kWh (1200 * 12).
It is possible to get a pre-assembled steel battery case on heavy-duty wheels for 16 LiFePo cells, with a modern BMS with Bluetooth and wired communication options, a touchscreen display, a circuit breaker and nice terminals for ~ $500. And it is also possible to get 16 high quality LiFePo cells with a capacity of ~300 Ah each, like EVE MB31, for significantly less than $100 each. This means that for less than ~$2000, it is possible to get all components required to assemble a fully working ~15 kWh LiFePo battery.
- That assembly would take a few hours rather than weeks.
- It will have new cells rather than used ones.
- It will be safer to use than a battery with Li-Ion cells.
I will point out that in 2016 when they started this project, the cost of new batteries would have been multiple times higher than it is today, so it would have been a moderately more "sensible" thing to do than it currently seems.
Yes, of course, this cost consideration is only relevant today.
I can imagine that ~9 years ago there might have been very little reasonably priced LiFePO4 cells available and if someone could get their hands on used 18650 cells very cheaply, it might have been a reasonable choice at the time.
Particularly if you can narrow down a couple brands where it tends to be a single cell or two that goes poopy while the rest are still good. Driving around picking up dead batteries that only have 1-2 good cells per pack is a thankless job.
It's likely just a statement of emphasis, though the correct usage would be something like, "now, something something something..." with a comma instead of a period
Thanks for the all the specifics! I admit that my $20k number was a very rough "I'm sure it must be less than this" estimate because I wanted to make sure I erred on the high side for the point I was making.
And there's a non-zero possibility he burns his house down and doesn't have anyone to sue over it.
At least if he bought a commercial battery and it experiences a lithium fire, he might expect to file a claim against the manufacturer, or his insurance company might on his behalf.
I am also in the EU and last year I have purchased a YIXIANG DIY battery case and 16 EVE MB31 cells for a combined cost of less than 2000 EUR without VAT.
It was shipped from China so I had to wait ~2 months to get it which is a disadvantage. Local warehouse stock was slightly more expensive.
This is not a feature. Our Earth is a limited resource, and being able to reuse batteries instead of discarding them to the trash is a desirable property.
Pick used EV or industrial batteries. This must be much more efficient due to a larger cell size than in laptops.
OTOH used laptop batteries can likely be obtained for effectively zero monetary cost, while used EV or solar backup batteries still cost quite noticeable money per kWh. With laptop batteries, you pay with your time; if you for some reason have an excess supply thereof, or you just enjoy this kind of work as a pastime.
Sort of. Compact NMC Li-ion cells from laptops and phones often use stuff like cobalt, supplies of which are much more limited and problematic than of lithium. The newer LiFePO4 chemistry does not use it, and, importantly, is rather hard to ignite. Its energy density per unit mass is lower, but it's not that important for stationary installations.
$20K for a home battery backup for someone capable of doing DIY would be far larger than what I assume he has built here. AFAIK the cheaper end is around $340 (2016) per kWh at 20 kWh that would be $6,800. In 2025 at $100 per kWh it would be $2K. If it's worth it would largely depending on a persons post tax required rate of return and how long it would take.
I spent almost as much as that for a 2 Powerwalls and installation in 2019. (Granted, I got a 3rd back from various incentives that probably weren't available for DIY.)
DIY (like this project) is only "worth it" if the person doing it enjoys the work or values the lessons.
If you took that same time, and invested it in working at Target, or Amazon etc, would you have more or less money than it would cost to buy an off-the-shelf battery? There are obviously other pros and cons.
I think Target isn't the right comparison here - the skills required for this project are worth much more than minimum wage bagging groceries. If you assume something like $50 an hour (on the low end for a skilled electrician), you get to the $6800 number in the parent post pretty quickly.
Getting certified and hired as a skilled electrician is a lot more complicated and much harder than acquiring the knowledge to be a skilled electrician. There are many people working Target-level jobs with that level of skill in some area.
That number was from 2016 is useful in determining if it was worth it but not useful if it will be worth it staring today as the number has changed in the intervening 9 years. The number will keep changing with an estimate of $80 kWh by 2030.
Of the three options, DIY battery packs, premade 100aH battery packs, or white glove powerwall a minimum wage earner would likely not have the skills to DIY the battery packs nor the money to pay for the powerwall.
Battery packs are an efficient market commodity and that’s pretty hard to beat for value for money.
Once full installations become more of a commodity then DIY with premade packs becomes less worth it.
That guy who was gaming a bug in the lottery in New England, near as I can figure was making about $20-30 an hour for his troubles. I suspect he may have made more off of selling the movie rights than off of the lottery.
He made more than he would have working retail for sure, but maybe he could have done better with another job if he weren't fixated on sticking it to the Man.
This battery thing feels a bit like the same sort of sentiment.
That said, any task you can do while talking to a friend or binge watching a TV show cannot be accurately accounted for in cost by just how much the clock moved.
The problem is likely cost effectiveness compared to just replacing a whole group of cells, compared to one single cell.
The unit economics of getting the remaining life from single used laptop battery are not very good. There's certainly lots of potential value for someone willing to do the work, if they can afford the opportunity cost, or if a business can source extremely dirt cheap cells and cheap high skilled labor.
You would be amazed how many battery packs are multiple 18650s in a trenchcoat. Even EV battery packs use them. Though it does raise the question - wouldn't an old EV battery be a better solution than stripping apart laptops?
There's a lot that goes into manufacturing battery packs beyond the cells. How's your thermal path to ambient in your home wall battery? How is the inter-cell thermal isolation? Is there a path for gas discharge in the event of a cell failure? Is the pack appropriately fused at the cell or module level? When a cell fails, does it take the whole pack with it, catch someone's apartment building on fire and kill a family of 5, or merely become stinky with a hotspot visible on IR?
How good is your cell acceptance testing? Do you do X-ray inspection for defects, do ESR vs cycle and potentially destructive testing on a sample of each lot? When a module fails health checks in the field, will you know which customers to proactively contact, and which vendor to reassess?
Yeah lots of batteries are 18650/26650 in a trenchcoat. The trenchcoats run the gamut from "good, fine" to "you will die of smoke inhalation and have a closed casket" in quality and I think that bears mentioning.
Bigger, fewer, more chill cells, fairly robust trenchcoat.
(IIRC, these packs are 16 100ah LiFePO4 cells in a steel case w/ built-in fuse, breaker, and BMS that monitors individual cell health and pack temperature, w/ automatic cut-off if any of that goes out of spec. The weakness is primarily the MOSFETs on the BMS potentially failing shorted. Fortunately, they've added some sort of additional fire suppression beyond just "steel case" in recent-ish versions of these packs)
Ah yeah, unfortunately I think we have the version before they added fire suppression, but at least it’s a more relaxed chemistry. Thanks for the analysis!
I can't see what the construction looks like but the mention of 'fire arrestors' gives me a lot of hope. If you haven't designed a battery that can take a cell runaway safely, you haven't done the work, and clearly they've done at least that much.
I get that the trenchcoat needs to be well designed and tested, but I am still flat out amazed that you both agree with “meh, most battery packs are made up of rechargeable domestic batteries you find in a kids toy”
For a highly engineered battery like a premium EV, there are coolant channels, temp monitoring, voltage monitoring, etc.
Soldering some connectors onto some random cells and knowing they shouldn't go over 4.2v is one thing, but measuring cell health via internal resistance, programming a controller to do temp shutoff and wiring up temp sensors, keeping cells balanced, is a lot of extra work, but critical if you at all care about not potentially burning down wherever they're stored.
Keeping the cells small and just using a hundred of them in parallel (and a hundred of these parallel packs in series to get up to the hundreds of volts needed), thus using ~10,000 cells, in EV batteries limits the maximum damage from one cell going worst-case, assuming your enclosure can contain it.
That being said, it seems there is a slow movement towards larger cells, from 18650 to 26650 or similar. But each cell on its own is still a dumb can of chemicals ready to go boom if you mistreat it.
I used to joke with my buddy back when he first got his Tesla that we were driving around on "over 7000 vape batteries!", as that was the fad at the time and where most normal consumers recognized them.
There's some optimization that happens in the chemistry and construction details for specific uses.
Also with bigger packs inter-cell consistency is really important (good cell integrators will test and bin them by ESR even if they're from the same lot, and using a really reliable cell mfg/vendor is critical because you're selling expensive systems with a number of failure points that scales with the number of cells and you want their process development to be super mature.
For most things cylindrical cells are the right answer. They don't puff up, they're available with protection circuits, they're cheap and highly available, you can get them in a variety of sizes and capacities, even in different chemistries.
Using a custom cell might make sense if you are making a) one megakajillion of a thing or b) you have extreme volume limits which mean you're probably using a pouch cell.
In HW engineering, Not Invented Here syndrome costs you big money. You have to have an actual business case for re-engineering something that already exists plus the capital.
95% with my stuff of the time COTS cylindrical is the answer, which means my shit comes in on budget.
Probably, but EV batteries are large enough that there might be an industrial recycling process for them, while old laptop batteries are basically free because it's too much labor to extract useful value from them.
I'm pretty sure most industrial recycling methods for lithium batteries involve grinding them up, so pack size isn't as much a factor as sheer volume. I think there just wasn't much juice for the squeeze until demand from EVs made recycling worthwhile.
When battery packs that have a non-zero chance of literally killing your users are commonplace, it actually does make sense to vendor-lock the battery. Believe it or not there is actual engineering that goes into making batteries beyond spot welding them to an interconnect and stuffing them into $.50 of ABS enclosure.
The "actual engineering" you are referring to is a $1.00 BMS board.
We are well past the point where we should have standardized batteries. We have bunch of standardized wall outlets that accommodate an array of "non-zero chance of literally killing your users" end products. No reason for battery packs to not be standardized (other than vendor lock in).
I'm sorry but you're dead wrong about the BMS. BMS doesn't address any of the things I listed.
You're also wrong about standardization - standarization at the cell form factor level is correct. Different applications have different capacity vs power density requirements, temperature range requirements, cost, lifecycle... a pouch cell that goes in a drone looks a lot like one that goes in a cell phone but they're optimized for completely different workloads.
Also we already have standardized interfaces for external batteries with most power banks using USB-C, so in a way your wish has already come true.
> When battery packs that have a non-zero chance of literally killing your users are commonplace, it actually does make sense to vendor-lock the battery.
Linus from Linus Tech Tips made a few episodes on building a battery out of individual 18650 cells, and one of the thing he stressed (as in, underlined) a lot on is that spot-welding cells is extremely dangerous and there aren't easy ways to put out a lithium fire.
Water is not only not going to help you, it's going to make things worse.
You __have__ to have a bucket of sand with you and if anything goes even slightly wrong you just toss everything in the bucket of sand and bring the whole bucket outside.
Went and found the LTT video. It's unclear what he did there. He said there was a spark, and then he ran outside with his pack. Spot welding the cells isn't usually that fraught.
Yeah burying a thing in sand is legit. Depending on the size of the thing that's on fire, water might be fine. Standard protocol for electronics that catch fire on a plane is to apply water to cool the device and extinguish materials around it, and then to put it in a special fireproof bag with a bunch of water.
That depends on the problem you're trying to solve. If it's only to build a home power system, sure, but if the goal is "I want to prevent these laptop batteries from ending up in a landfill" then using an old EV battery doesn't really help you much.
FWIW a lot of EVs use prismatic cells, not cylinder cells. Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid use cylindrical cells. Hyundai, Volkswagen, BMW, GM, Ford, and BYD all use prismatic cells.
> You would be amazed how many battery packs are multiple 18650s in a trenchcoat
Also laptop batteries used to be many (usually three or six) 18650s in a plastic trenchcoat.
You could literally rebuild your battery when it died, and pick the cells you liked the most. In theory you could pick higher-quality cells than those you find in the batteries sold on ebay from chinese stores. In theory.
Currently, that is LiFePO4. It is cheaper than LiPo packs used in electronics, half the energy density, twice as many charge cycles, and doesn't burst into flame. The lithium is flammable but requires external ignition.
Larger batteries, including some electric cars, have switched.
It seems unlikely that there's any practical chemical batteries with 0 fire risk.
But I do think there should be home energy storage that doesn't involve chemical batteries. Where are all the pumped hydro, flywheels, and compressed air storage for consumer use?
There’s no perfectly safe energy storage. The danger comes from the concentration of energy. Water can cause flooding or you can drown in it. Flywheels can disintegrate into shrapnel. It’s always risk management.
We're talking on the order of millions of kilograms for the building materials that needed to be transported to build it. The batteries needed for backup power for its occupants won't come anywhere close to that, even at far lower energy density than lithium.
There's already a pipeline sending old electronics to cheap labor for possible refurbishing, recycling and/or incorrect disposal. A small percentage they repackage into replacement laptop batteries and ship back, but they could also send more of them back as a value UPS with different value add parts.
Personally, I expect there to be a massive conversion to USB-PD as the primary power in the cellphone only regions.
And yeah - some LEDs and a usb wire around the ceiling solves lighting a house more sensibly than a three-phase converter under the stairs and enough power going through a light switch to kill me …
It means USB Power Delivery and is a standard for negotiating custom-other-than-5V voltages from a USB Type-C power supply and communicating to the device how much current it is allowed to draw.
It's why you can charge your phone with your laptops power brick without anything exploding, and why most laptops can charge (very slowly) from pretty underpowered phone chargers now.
Building large battery arrays out of old recycled cells does not require bringing the workers to the battery cells, any more than building iPhones requires you to bring the workers to where they mine ore. Large-scale product development often involves shipping materials and half-finished products around the world multiple times.
Buying a used Nissan Leaf and using V2H feature in CHAdeMO is it. Or you can remove and use its well-reverse-engineered minimum nominal 24kWh semi-removable battery. But no one wants a Leaf, so there's that.
From what I've heard, it is more economical to recycle the raw materials than to reuse small packs.
Reuse of vehicle sized packs seems to be pretty common, though. I'd guess that a DIY home backup could be built pretty easily from used vehicle batteries.
The dude has a warehouse/workshop to do this work and house the system. I’m super impressed by what he’s accomplished, don’t get me wrong; but, what he’s done just isn’t viable for 99.99999999999% of people.
Give me an array and battery system that can pull off the grid and/or array and power most of my home without me having to think a whole lot or pay a vendor thousands to install while making the total cost under $1000 and I’ll do it.
Until then, it just isn’t financially viable when my electricity costs are well under $70/month average across the year.
Recouping the costs for install of solar systems are estimated at 30-40 years as of 4 years ago when I researched it. I’m sorry, but that’s just not worth it for me and most others.
Sure, but it does get a lot simpler if you start from modules instead of cells. Nothing will get around the requirement to have electrical knowledge.
Cost is always an issue. These rarely make sense from a pure $$ sense, as everything in electrical is expensive. You could burn up that $1000 budget just to get a subpanel installed.
Usually the value proposition is some combination of savings, combined with the ability to backup critical loads. A generator could do that too, but a proper generator setup isn't cheap either, and it wouldn't save $$ at all. Battery solutions sometimes beat that.
When I priced out solar, it was never sold as a backup solution; it was apparently intended as a 'sell back to grid' solution. To add a battery effectively doubled the cost.
When I had solar, ~10 years ago, it was similar. We had net metering, no batteries, and zero backup if the grid went down. This was in an area where that rarely happened anyway, so I didn't really care. It'd be easy to add batteries, though.
But net metering is becoming less common, and if you can't sell to the grid at retail, then it'd make sense to store it locally. In some cases, it can also make sense to use batteries even without solar. A good sized battery can keep your refrigerator running for days, which is useful for areas prone to weather related outages. It can also easily fully power the electronics on a gas oven for a long time. And honestly, a big battery these days isn't even that expensive.
And if that isn't enough, some batteries can be topped up with the power from a large battery EV. DCFC tends to come back before a lot of residential power, so this can be really useful.
Unfortunately, that 'sell back to grid' price is often only a small fraction of the ~17 cent/kWh purchase price from the grid. The battery is less for backup but is instead to help make economic sense for your home, by storing the excess you produce when it is sunny...
Isn't the problem with parasitic charging? Suppose you had a bunch of used 18650 cells. To scale the electronics, they'll be wired up in parallel and/or series so the charging logic can be shared, but since the batteries are wildly mismatched, it results in parasitic charging.
(This might already be happening, but I haven't heard about it) The big thing EVs need right now is standardized battery packs. It reduces replacement cost, takes away anxiety that a replacement will exist when you need it, and enables down-cycle uses like stationary storage.
I think that may be a trickier proposition than it appears.
Certainly a standard form factor for a pack would be helpful for a specific manufacturer (similar to building multiple cars on top of the same basic frame).
Some of the issues I think one runs into is battery chemistries are rapidly changing so even if the shape of the pack remains the same the performance of it is rather different depending on what is put inside.
Then even with standard form and chemistry one pack to another can be rather different depending on the history of it's use (age, charge cycles, driven hard).
There is second life storage applications currently, and still more research going into it now.
Personally I think smarter controls and smarter diagnostic and pack sorting will be more useful.
You would never do this in a production product. You need batteries with similar internal impedances or undesirable things happen. This is the battery equivalent of the guy who welds two car front ends together and drives it around. It's cool and quirky but not a useful product for most people.
A ton of sand, but that's the main issue with those systems and why it's genuinely impractical as anything but a hobbyist project. They need constant monitoring as all of those cells are from laptop and risk thermal runaway at some point. Even with the best matching possible some cell in his configuration will have higher internal resistance and create heat. "Real" large off-grid systems all use LiFePO4 and are unlikely to just catch fire. That being said from the forum post he seems well aware and he probably has individual fuse for each cell.
You could also just bury it so that the worst of the explosion is mostly mitigated. I've also seen small container setup which would probably work better than his (seemingly) wooden shed.
I wonder if the correct solution here is build the shed far away from house and trees, on a cinderblock foundation filled in the middle with 8+ inches of sand, and you just stand back with the garden hose to keep everything around it moist.
Not gonna do you any good if the batteries themselves start going off, but if something else has ignited in the cabinet and the batteries are not yet on fire... you'd be glad to have the extinguisher, I bet
It's definitely now in the wrong spot. I assume that once upon a time there was one rack against the wall, and it was only slightly irresponsibly placed, and now there are two racks and hey kids, heat rises.
The extinguisher should be directly inside the door so as not to attract someone to traverse farther into the building without an escape plan.
Of course if he did so then there would be no extinguishers in the picture and then we would also bitch about it.
The only purpose of a fire extinguisher is to allow you to get out. They do not contain enough water to adequately put out any real life fire (especially not an electrical one like this).
If he can't reach to grab it because it's too hot, he should have already left.
I think I'd rather have the extinguisher near the door.
If you are outside, it does not tempt you to cross the room. If you are inside, you run for the door, and then turn around and decide if maybe you should just keep running.
Dry Powder or CO2 is what you need for energized electrical equipment. And considering there's potential lithium involvement, you might want something more specialized (e.g. F-500 Encapsulator Agent). I agree anything more than a small-scale incident you're just getting the heck out of dodge. I'd have built something along the lines of a concrete bunker, with an automated suppression system to buy time.
Let us hope that all the wires above the battery packs are of the same polarity. I can't tell for sure if that's the case but I hope the two that are closest together are just book-ended.
I experienced a 400v DC lithium ion battery catch on fire once, it was very scary. That fire extinguisher won't do much at all, even if it is placed in a more logical spot.
The firemen ended up putting the battery, half melted, into a big drum of water and it hook hours to cool off. The concrete was still warm to the touch where it burned for ~30 hours after the situation was sorted out.
The smoke was just absolutely unbelievable. Made me reconsider buying an EV. That fire was no joke.
The MV contactor wasn't even closed, it had 24v powering it for the internal cell balancer from the vendor, that was it.
Even though it might not seem like it because reporting on burning cars is very selective, EVs do catch fire a lot less than gar powered cars - even when adjusted for how many there are on the road. Additinally, many new EVs use cheaper LFP batteries now that are almost impossible catch on fire.
I hear you and appreciate your point, I just don’t think they’re for me. Maybe when my kids are grown. Scary does t begin to describe what happens, the amount of energy is mind-boggling.
Everything worth doing is worth over-doing. He should start doing mad scientist experiments and produce ball lightning, the amperage could be sufficient.
While very interesting, that seems like it would be one hell of a fire hazard as well. Especially for the ones that are tightly packed in the middle of each bundle.
> This growth forced the creator to build a separate warehouse, located about 50 meters from his home, to store the batteries and the new charge controllers and inverters.
Random lithium battery fires are extremely rare. It's like people freaking out about serial killers. It's something that definitely happens, definitely catches the news, and definitely is unlikely to happen to you even in 10,000 lifetimes.
The infamous Samsung note 7 exploding battery catastrophe was 90 incidents out of 2.5 million phones, or 0.003% exploding.
I think it's a stretch to compare the battery in a phone to the hand-wired collection of lithium batteries from various laptops. Even if the odds are still low, the calculus works out to be concerning when it's your home and livelihood.
> Despite being an unusual system, with recycled and homemade components, no major problems have been reported, such as fires or swollen batteries, which is a common issue with some second-hand electronic devices.
AFAIK 18650s like he's using never swell as they're in hard metal shells not pouches like most consumer electronics, so they don't have the ability to swell until they're catastrophically damaged. He's built a small building 50m away from his house to hold it anyways so it can probably be safely allowed to just burn, it's not like fire departments have much better options than waiting for it to burn out and hoping it doesn't reignite anyways.
> AFAIK 18650s like he's using never swell as they're in hard metal shells not pouches like most consumer electronics, so they don't have the ability to swell until they're catastrophically damaged.
They do swell, but they swell at the terminals rather than at the sides.
That's the neat part about lithium fires you just can't, they're self oxidizing so there's not much you can do to definitively put them out the best option is usually to flood them with water to cool them down and contain the damage they cause.
Yeah. Commercial home solar battery power as I understand is done with safer chemistries, such as lithium iron phosphate, which while they have a lower energy density (which is not a big downside for a stationary building) don't have the thermal runaway issues that labtop lithium ion batteries have. I wouldn't want to live next door to the DIY labtop battery array enthusiast.
He seems to be doing it fairly safely by having it housed in a building a whole 50m away from the main dwelling. A fire from there could spread to the house or elsewhere but it's no longer a metal fire so it's a lot easier to deal with and just contain the fire in/around the shed. I'd probably add a nice gravel buffer around it to help that and live in a reasonably well hydrated part of the country so there's not as big a fire risk from embers.
Also the guy who made this battery pack has the incentive to not burn down his house, whoever made yours has the incentive of one more day on the assembly line… I dunno, wouldn’t judge him too harshly.
It's all fun and games until one of those thousand batteries decides to go exothermic :-). This is a really amazing story and I'm impressed by the diligence and amount of effort they put into recovering and reusing all of these batteries. A couple of dendrites though, a lightning strike, there are things outside of their control that could turn the building holding this collection of batteries into a very impressive incendiary device. If you've ever seen a fire at a battery factory, it is both fascinating and scary af. People are still trying to assess the long term damage from the Moss Landing grid scale battery fire in California.
I had an 18650 flashlight and saw a video of them spontaneously turning into a flare with rocket thruster like flames and got rid of it immediately. These batteries are scary powerful when it gives off the magic smoke.
That they are, energy is energy. I was part of a Battlebots team and that is where I learned the smell of various rechargeable battery chemistries when they burned :-). We also had an exothermic adventure with a battery pack we built, fortunately it was not at an event, it was in earlier testing, but it forever gave me a healthy respect for those batteries.
Here’s a 2017 page from Vice https://www.vice.com/en/article/diy-powerwall-builders-are-u... that refers to Glubux as being French. Since the posted article doesn’t say, I wanted to know the climate where Glubux lives and the loads he has on the system. I guess I can find more about Glubux from the secondlifestorage.com site.
I find it amusing how a lot of people immmediately recognize 1000s of old laptop battery cells in a wooden shed a fire risk.
But they were as much of a fire risk (if not more) before being recycled, they were just spread out along the e-waste bins!
Every time I hear of a waste processing plant fire, I wonder if there was a (lithium) battery involved. Maybe from a single use vape, or a child's toy.
Sitting congressman Massie also has a few videos on YT about buying a wrecked Model S to scavenge its battery to power his house. Not quite the same as it's just one big battery, but cool idea nonetheless.
They are rather short and show the setup more than the construction and nitty gritty, IIRC
Where can I get one? I have seen that the Chinese manufacturers who made the scooters for Bird, etc. have been taking advantage of the discarded units by selling conversion kits to turn them into normal eScooters.
From what I've seen, some people buy them from Police or city auctions. Scooters that are "towed" because they're left in an inappropriate place, often are not picked by the companies that own them, so they're left for the city to auction them or whatever.
Folks are correct this is dangerous. But you could imagine a world where batteries were required to be built in a way that this type of tinkering of individual cells and matching them was safer.
If it could be done, would certainly would be better than turning batteries into "black mass."
It'd be interesting if they added this to the standard questionnaire - does your dwelling have sprinklers? ... oh and how many watt-hours do you have in battery storage?
Why are lithium ion phone and labtop batteries still legal considering their saftey risks? There are safer battery chemestries that aren't quite as energy-dense. But phones and laptops were capable-enough 15 years ago and performance-per watt is constantly improving. Sure, we might not be able to light up all the pixels on our screen and stream gigs of data constantly and won't be able to train AI models when our labtop is not plugged into the wall, but we sufficed just fine on the performance of last-decade's mobile devices.
The safety risks are marginal and you interact with plenty of other things/systems daily that are at least as dangerous.
> here are safer battery chemestries that aren't quite as energy-dense
^ that's the answer.
> But phones and laptops were capable-enough 15 years ago
They absolutely weren't.
> we sufficed just fine on the performance of last-decade's mobile devices.
I don't want to suffice.
All that said, I do think battery research is probably one of the most important things "we" can be doing (and energy storage in general), so I'm all about putting in the money and time to find improvements.
By that logic, we would have to ban cars, gas stoves and even kitchen knives.
Everything has risks — its about managing them. Lithium ion batteries are widely used because their benefits outweight the risks when handled properly.
Its like saying, “Why are candles still legal? They can start fires.” Well, because people know how to use them responsibly.
"Despite being an unusual system, with recycled and homemade components, no major problems have been reported, such as fires or swollen batteries..."
But when it eventually happens, without a proper fire extinguish system, I would assume every thing would go up in high-temp flames with no easy way of putting them out?
The installations public statistics are interesting to look at. Seems there was a recent addition of a generator not mentioned in the article or the forum. I’m curious for an update from Glubux:
I wonder if there is a more practical tutorial to route a power generator into the house with sort of a power switch. I don't know the exact phrase but basically I can route a few things like the fridge or the lights to this switch so they switch to the generator when there is an outage.
I know it can be done because I asked an electrician. But I dropped the idea when he said it could cost a lot (if done by a professional).
Depending on your breaker panel, the cheapest way to do this is with an interlock kit ($20) designed for your panel type. A low-tech solution that mechanically locks out a designated breaker (usually upper right) unless the main breaker is off.
The breaker that is exclusively locked out when main is on is connected to an outdoor receptacle for the generator cable. When the power goes out, you switch off the main breaker and the interlock now allows you to switch on the generator's breaker. This serves as the backfeed of power into the rest of the circuits from the generator.
The nice thing about this setup is the ability to use all the other breakers to control what loads you want on the generator. Downside is it isn't automatic.
This is what I do, I have a long "extension cord" - 50' or so, of whatever gauge can carry 50A, with giant nema-50 plugs on both ends. I may be mistaken about the amp rating, but I'm pretty sure it's 6AWG. My whole house generator is a Ford dual fuel 11kW I have in an air conditioned shed. I only have to shut off my water heater, everything else runs fine.
Definitely true for my primary house. I agree with you, just curious about the technology just in case I need to do something similar to my future cabin -- for example solar power + generator switch -- I guess the the principle is the same.
This is not difficult - you need to dedicate a few circuits (cables) and have them end on the generator (or UPS for some). It requires planning but the cost is not especially high (more cables must be used)
I did not do anything that complex. I dedicated some lines (cables) to certain devices and they are behind a UPS (generator in your case). Nothing fancy.
And by "I" I mean "a professional electrician" :) - I just did the design of what I want where.
Thanks, you know what, I'll just use a long industrial grade cord...I guess the lights and fridges can wait a few minutes :D
The only issue is central heating for winter as it's pretty harsh in Canada, but that's a bit too much for a generator I think. Maybe a few smaller heating units instead.
Hire an electrician please, I sell and run electrical work and a generator installation is not something you should take on yourself.
If you want to have a few electrical loads on a generator backed panel, you have an electrician install the generator, automatic transfer switch, and a subpanel that is fed by the automatic transfer switch, which is fed by both utility power (from a breaker in your main electrical panel) and generator power. If you’re using natural gas or propane to power the generator, a pipe fitter will need to run the gas line.
Then you tell the electrician to move the circuits you wanted backed by a generator from your main panel to the subpanel fed by the ATS. The subpanel receives power from the utility until the ATS detects an outage, which fires up the generator and transfers the power feeding the subpanel to the generator.
Generators can use gasoline, diesel, natural gas, or propane, or a combination of any of the aforementioned fuels. Ideally you’d have a multi fuel generator hooked up to a natural gas utility with a backup propane tank in case the natural gas service goes down.
You can also get a whole house generator and have the ATS feed your existing electrical panel, you’ll need a 24kW 120/240V for a 100A service or 48kW 120/240V for a 200A service
I’d recommend a Generac generator if you do get one, Costco sells them and will connect you with an installer.
If you want to get crazy, you could add a 50kva single-phase 120/240V UPS and the UPS would keep the power on while the generator starts up but that would be serious overkill (and tens of thousands of dollars).
I think this is a nit. "split-phase" is two 120V legs 180 degrees out of phase with each other. The word "phase" is starting to look spelled wrong to me, right now. I don't see the fundamental difference between "two phases [...]" and what i said "not single-phase"
I understand wye and three-phase power, and i also understand that when we plug into a scared face outlet[0], that is a "single phase" - but the stuff delivered to our house is two phases of 120VAC, 180 degrees out of phase.
again, it's a nit. you can use two conductors on a three-phase system and get a single phase, as well.
I sell and run union electrical work for a living in the United States.
Residential power in the US is 120/240V single-phase (split phase). Utility distribution is three-phase and virtually every commercial and industrial electrical service is three-phase, with the rest being 120/240V single-phase.
Anyone have links to some of the actual posts this person made? The article is a bit light on actual details, sourcing, etc. beyond citing their username/alias.
Why not just dig a hole in the ground and make a gravity battery? Would be much more reusable without all the lithium garbage ... and also probably more efficient...
And the most efficient way would probably be to just have credits with the rest of the city grid. Sell electricity to them when you have a surplus (from solar) and then pay for electricity when you need it. These credits are a lot more efficient than storing the actual electricity in a battery hehe
The average US household uses about 10,000 kwhr per year. That's roughly equivalent to the gravitational energy of dropping ten tons down a 200 mile hole.
Indeed, but to store (let's say) half a day's energy, then (based on the previous calculation) it would presumably need ten tons dropping down a hole 0.274 miles, or 441 metres, deep?
A man powers home via solar panels and a thousand old laptop batteries. Makes a big difference! My first thought on seeing headline here was confusion, I thought maybe he was using residual charge from used laptop batteries or something.
The 2nd quote is when I realized this article was written or assisted by AI. Not that it's a big deal, that's our world now. But it's interesting to notice the subtle 'accent' that gives it away.
I'm not on board with accepting AI-written articles. This is an article with little to no human input, farming clicks for ad revenue, that doesn't even link to the forum post, which is far more interesting and has pictures: https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
The article contains little detail, and has lots of filler like the quote in the parent comment. It's highly upvoted on HN's front page, which is surprising to me because I think there is quite a bit of distaste here for low-effort content to drive clicks.
The thing the article is referencing is interesting, but the article is trash.
> I'm not on board with accepting AI-written articles.
I haven't been on board with the "journalism" of the last fifty years, but this hasn't exactly prompted it to improve. Newspapers still have advertisements. Subscribers still have no say over editorial staff. The board still has say over the editorial staff. It's all fucked unless we can punt private ownership out of the equation.
80% of everything is crap. This isn't a very insightful position to take. One of the reasons I like Hacker News is it helps me find good stuff to read. Which this article isn't. So I will respectfully rebuff your rebuttal.
Because it's presenting a bunch of smooth prose that utterly fails at logical continuity.
1. What point is the author trying to make? Leading off "Glubux even began" implies that the effort was extraordinary in some way, but if this action was "key to making the system work effectively and sustainably" then it can't really have been that extraordinary. The writing is confused between trying to make the effort sound exceptional vs. giving a technical explanation of how the end result works.
2. Why, exactly, would "removing individual cells and organizing them into custom racks" be "key to making the system work effectively and sustainably"?
3. How is the system's effectiveness related to its sustainable operation; why should these ideas be mentioned in the same breath?
4. Why is the author confident about the above points, but unsure about the level of "manual labor and technical knowledge" that would be required?
Aside from that, overall it just reads like what you'd expect to find in a high school essay.
Edit: after actually taking a look at TFA, another thing that smells off to me is the way that bold text is used. It seems very unnatural to me.
The only thing as annoying as people using AI and passing it off as their own writing is the people who claim everything written not exactly how they are used to is AI.
> This task, which likely required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge, was key to making the system work effectively and sustainably.
This is obviously AI. The writer should know that it either required manual labor or it did not, not maybe (AI loves to not "commit" to an answer and rather say maybe/likely). It also loves to loop in some vague claim about X being effective, sustainable, ethical, etc without providing any information as to WHY it is.
That and it being published on some blog spam website called techoreon.
Edit: For fun, I had o1-mini produce an article from the original source (Techspot it looks like), and it produced a similar line:
> This ingenious approach likely required significant manual effort and technical expertise, but the results speak for themselves, as evidenced by the system's eight-year flawless operation.
What these sites are doing is rewriting articles from legitimate sources, and then selling SEO backlinks to their "news" website full of generated content (and worthless backlinks). It's how all those scammy fiverr link services work
At least this is a better effort at explaining why you would believe it is AI than the other poster who just says it's AI because they used the word "likely".
I still find it very annoying that in every thread about a blog post there's someone shouting "AI!" because there's an em dash, bullet points, or some common word/saying (e.g. "likely", "crucially", "in conclusion"). It's been more intrusive on my life than actual AI writing has been.
I've been accused of using AI for writing because I have used parenthesis, ellipses, various common words, because I structured a post with bullet points and a conclusion section, etc. It's wildly frustrating.
> because I structured a post with bullet points and a conclusion section
I do understand that this is frustrating, because in the last few months I see posts with these features everywhere. It's especially a problem on reddit, where there are numerous low effort posts in niche subreddits that are overdone with emojis, bolded sections/titles, and em dashes. Not all of these are AI but an overwhelming majority are to the point where if the quality of the content is low (lots of vague sayings), and it exhibits these traits, I can almost say for certain it's AI.
What is also less talked about is now AI models are beginning to write without exhibiting these issues. I've been playing around with GPT 4o and it's deep research feature writes articles that are extremely well written, not exhibiting the traits above or classic telltale AI signs. I also had a friend ask it to write a fictional passage on a character description and the writing was impeccable (which is depressing because it was better than what she wrote). Soon we are not going to have any clue what is real and what isn't.
>What is also less talked about is now AI models are beginning to write without exhibiting these issues.
It will be great when I continue to write the way I have for decades, continuing to be accused of being AI, while actual AI writing exceeds my ability and isn't accused of being AI.
The kids ask ChatGPT to rewrite it using the diction of a 9 year old,
so it doesn't look like it was AI generated. If you have a big enough corpus of writing, you could use yourself as the input style to emulate. Unfortunately I think we're going to has get over generated vs not as the technology improves. we'll have to judge a work based on its own merits and not use any tells. Quelle horrer!
As someone who "detects" AI frequently: it's often difficult or impossible to explain where the sense comes from. It can be very much a matter of intuition, but of course it's awkward to admit that publicly. I don't fault others for coming up with an overly simple explanation.
If I'm being entirely honest, in the general case I don't.
But I don't particularly care, either. After a couple tries I decided it's better not to point at object examples of suspected LLM text all the time (except e.g. to report it on Stack Overflow, where it's against the rules and where moderators will use actual detection software etc. to try to verify). But I still notice that style of writing instinctively, and it still automatically flips a switch in my brain to approach the content differently. (Of course, even when I'm confident that something was written by a human, I still e.g. try to verify terminal commands with the man pages before following instructions I don't understand.)
Of course, AI writes the way it does for a reason. More worryingly, it increasingly seems like (verifiably) human writers are mimicking the style - like they see so much AI-generated text out there that sounds authoritative, that they start trying to use the same rhetorical techniques in order to gain that same air of authority.
I think this is an excellent question and one people should be asking themselves frequently. I often get the impression that commenters have not considered this.
For example, whenever someone on the internet makes a claim about "most x", e.g. most people this, most developers that. What does anyone actually know about "most" anything? I think the answer "pretty much nothing".
Yes, this is an important point. Insert the survivorship bias plane picture that always gets posted when someone makes this mistake on other platforms (Twitter). We can be accurate at detecting poor AI writing attempts, but not know how much AI writing is good enough to go undetected.
Someone should run a double blind test app, there was an adversarially crafted one for images and still got 60% or so average accuracy. We all just can glance the data and detect AI generation like how some experts can just let logs run and say something.
Exposure to AI output itself triggers and trains rage response in lots of people. Blame AI for it, regular people have no control over.
Asking for cause or thought processes is just asking them to hallucinate. They don't know why, they just know that they saw it and that it deserves hate.
>However, in this ingenious setup, Glubux took those individual cells and assembled them into their own customized racks – a process that likely required a fair bit of elbow grease and technical know-how, but one that has ultimately paid off in spades.
Either this is also AI, or saying that it likely required a lot of manual labor is not indicative
But using "likely" is obviously AI in this context, or at least it's really, really shitty reporting.
This is supposed to be a news article, not someone who's hypothesizing about something that could have been. I mean, it either required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge or it didn't - no guessing should be required. If the author doesn't know, they can do proper research or simply ask the subject.
FWIW this article didn't immediately scream AI to me either, until the commenter pointed out the use of "likely". When you think about it, it absolutely becomes a fingerprint of AI in this context - it's not just that "likely" anywhere means it's AI.
Your inability to tell when things are AI doesn't mean other people can't.
Same phenomenon happens all the time with food or wine. One person thinks everyone is making up the subtle flavor profile comments and sneers at them. Everyone who can tell rolls their eyes. You can't convince someone that there's something they can't perceive besides just telling them.
I've had this experience with records: as a kid I rolled my eyes at people wanting to listen to music on vinyl cause obviously it was the same; as my hearing has improved I have found I can clearly tell the difference and definitely prefer it.
>Your inability to tell when things are AI doesn't mean other people can't.
I didn't even comment on whether this article is AI or not. My point is that it is absurd to point at a single word as proof of something being written by AI.
I wonder if we've had to re-learn how to make batteries like they did in the 11th century similar to how we had to re-learn the Roman concrete formula.
> A man powers home for eight years using a thousand old laptop batteries
... a single charge for each?
And speaking of applications that are too smart for their own good, why does Firefox start a drag operation when I click on a link instead of allowing me to select the text?
>Glubux even began disassembling entire laptop batteries, removing individual cells and organizing them into custom racks. This task, which likely required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge, was key to making the system work effectively and sustainably.
This kind of thing is cool as a passion project, but it really just highlights how efficient the modern supply chain is. If you have the skills of a professional electrician, you too can spend hundreds of hours building a home battery system you could just buy for $20k, but is less reliable.
That is, in my opinion, the worst feature of this entire project. It is cool and nice and fun. But it takes a lot of time to research, acquire skills, get tools and build.
> you could just buy for $20k
I agree with a broader point but that particular price is extremely high and far from reality.
A reasonably good 18650 cell has a capacity of ~12 Wh (~3300 mAh * ~3.7 V = ~12.2 Wh). The battery mentioned in the article consists of "more than 1000" such cells. Let us assume 1200 cells. That would mean it has a capacity of ~14.4 kWh (1200 * 12).
It is possible to get a pre-assembled steel battery case on heavy-duty wheels for 16 LiFePo cells, with a modern BMS with Bluetooth and wired communication options, a touchscreen display, a circuit breaker and nice terminals for ~ $500. And it is also possible to get 16 high quality LiFePo cells with a capacity of ~300 Ah each, like EVE MB31, for significantly less than $100 each. This means that for less than ~$2000, it is possible to get all components required to assemble a fully working ~15 kWh LiFePo battery.
- That assembly would take a few hours rather than weeks.
- It will have new cells rather than used ones.
- It will be safer to use than a battery with Li-Ion cells.
- It will likely take much less space.
- It will be easy to expand.
I will point out that in 2016 when they started this project, the cost of new batteries would have been multiple times higher than it is today, so it would have been a moderately more "sensible" thing to do than it currently seems.
I can imagine that ~9 years ago there might have been very little reasonably priced LiFePO4 cells available and if someone could get their hands on used 18650 cells very cheaply, it might have been a reasonable choice at the time.
At least if he bought a commercial battery and it experiences a lithium fire, he might expect to file a claim against the manufacturer, or his insurance company might on his behalf.
$80 per cell (before shipping) on the top Google product result for EVE MB31.
That's a good bit cheaper even than when I looked last, in early 2021.
It just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper every year...
It was shipped from China so I had to wait ~2 months to get it which is a disadvantage. Local warehouse stock was slightly more expensive.
https://travis.vc/mexican-fisherman-parable/
Sometimes the doing is the fun part.
This is not a feature. Our Earth is a limited resource, and being able to reuse batteries instead of discarding them to the trash is a desirable property.
OTOH used laptop batteries can likely be obtained for effectively zero monetary cost, while used EV or solar backup batteries still cost quite noticeable money per kWh. With laptop batteries, you pay with your time; if you for some reason have an excess supply thereof, or you just enjoy this kind of work as a pastime.
Of course. No one disputes that. I was just trying to point out that you can get better cells for less money.
> being able to reuse batteries instead of discarding them to the trash is a desirable property
I fully agree. No one is trying to suggest that we should discard used batteries into trash.
DIY (like this project) is only "worth it" if the person doing it enjoys the work or values the lessons.
Battery packs are an efficient market commodity and that’s pretty hard to beat for value for money.
Once full installations become more of a commodity then DIY with premade packs becomes less worth it.
He made more than he would have working retail for sure, but maybe he could have done better with another job if he weren't fixated on sticking it to the Man.
This battery thing feels a bit like the same sort of sentiment.
That said, any task you can do while talking to a friend or binge watching a TV show cannot be accurately accounted for in cost by just how much the clock moved.
This "efficiency" relies on the assumption of writing off the entire battery set at sale. That's not impressive at all.
How good is your cell acceptance testing? Do you do X-ray inspection for defects, do ESR vs cycle and potentially destructive testing on a sample of each lot? When a module fails health checks in the field, will you know which customers to proactively contact, and which vendor to reassess?
Yeah lots of batteries are 18650/26650 in a trenchcoat. The trenchcoats run the gamut from "good, fine" to "you will die of smoke inhalation and have a closed casket" in quality and I think that bears mentioning.
Was definitely one of the harder parts of our solar install to get comfortable with.
(IIRC, these packs are 16 100ah LiFePO4 cells in a steel case w/ built-in fuse, breaker, and BMS that monitors individual cell health and pack temperature, w/ automatic cut-off if any of that goes out of spec. The weakness is primarily the MOSFETs on the BMS potentially failing shorted. Fortunately, they've added some sort of additional fire suppression beyond just "steel case" in recent-ish versions of these packs)
I just assumed there was … special stuff in there
Soldering some connectors onto some random cells and knowing they shouldn't go over 4.2v is one thing, but measuring cell health via internal resistance, programming a controller to do temp shutoff and wiring up temp sensors, keeping cells balanced, is a lot of extra work, but critical if you at all care about not potentially burning down wherever they're stored.
Keeping the cells small and just using a hundred of them in parallel (and a hundred of these parallel packs in series to get up to the hundreds of volts needed), thus using ~10,000 cells, in EV batteries limits the maximum damage from one cell going worst-case, assuming your enclosure can contain it.
That being said, it seems there is a slow movement towards larger cells, from 18650 to 26650 or similar. But each cell on its own is still a dumb can of chemicals ready to go boom if you mistreat it.
Don't, uh, buy those unless you're sure.
Also with bigger packs inter-cell consistency is really important (good cell integrators will test and bin them by ESR even if they're from the same lot, and using a really reliable cell mfg/vendor is critical because you're selling expensive systems with a number of failure points that scales with the number of cells and you want their process development to be super mature.
Using a custom cell might make sense if you are making a) one megakajillion of a thing or b) you have extreme volume limits which mean you're probably using a pouch cell.
In HW engineering, Not Invented Here syndrome costs you big money. You have to have an actual business case for re-engineering something that already exists plus the capital.
95% with my stuff of the time COTS cylindrical is the answer, which means my shit comes in on budget.
Here's a video inside a recycling plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xrarUWVRQ
$50 of 18650s in a $500 trenchcoat with DRM protection. So wasteful.
We are well past the point where we should have standardized batteries. We have bunch of standardized wall outlets that accommodate an array of "non-zero chance of literally killing your users" end products. No reason for battery packs to not be standardized (other than vendor lock in).
You're also wrong about standardization - standarization at the cell form factor level is correct. Different applications have different capacity vs power density requirements, temperature range requirements, cost, lifecycle... a pouch cell that goes in a drone looks a lot like one that goes in a cell phone but they're optimized for completely different workloads.
Also we already have standardized interfaces for external batteries with most power banks using USB-C, so in a way your wish has already come true.
https://www.protoolreviews.com/doge-mandates-power-tool-manu...
Probably the only thing I can agree with doge on.
Linus from Linus Tech Tips made a few episodes on building a battery out of individual 18650 cells, and one of the thing he stressed (as in, underlined) a lot on is that spot-welding cells is extremely dangerous and there aren't easy ways to put out a lithium fire.
Water is not only not going to help you, it's going to make things worse.
You __have__ to have a bucket of sand with you and if anything goes even slightly wrong you just toss everything in the bucket of sand and bring the whole bucket outside.
Yeah burying a thing in sand is legit. Depending on the size of the thing that's on fire, water might be fine. Standard protocol for electronics that catch fire on a plane is to apply water to cool the device and extinguish materials around it, and then to put it in a special fireproof bag with a bunch of water.
Also laptop batteries used to be many (usually three or six) 18650s in a plastic trenchcoat.
You could literally rebuild your battery when it died, and pick the cells you liked the most. In theory you could pick higher-quality cells than those you find in the batteries sold on ebay from chinese stores. In theory.
Weight is not a factor for home energy storage, there is no need for lithium cells.
Larger batteries, including some electric cars, have switched.
https://cambridgerenewables.co.uk/product/eleven-energy-4-5-...
But I do think there should be home energy storage that doesn't involve chemical batteries. Where are all the pumped hydro, flywheels, and compressed air storage for consumer use?
That depends on your living situation. I live in a third-floor apartment, so weight is very definitely a factor.
If you reduce the energy density by a factor of 10, the weight for power backup needs will still be far lighter than the concrete.
Personally, I expect there to be a massive conversion to USB-PD as the primary power in the cellphone only regions.
And yeah - some LEDs and a usb wire around the ceiling solves lighting a house more sensibly than a three-phase converter under the stairs and enough power going through a light switch to kill me …
It's why you can charge your phone with your laptops power brick without anything exploding, and why most laptops can charge (very slowly) from pretty underpowered phone chargers now.
Reuse of vehicle sized packs seems to be pretty common, though. I'd guess that a DIY home backup could be built pretty easily from used vehicle batteries.
Give me an array and battery system that can pull off the grid and/or array and power most of my home without me having to think a whole lot or pay a vendor thousands to install while making the total cost under $1000 and I’ll do it.
Until then, it just isn’t financially viable when my electricity costs are well under $70/month average across the year.
Recouping the costs for install of solar systems are estimated at 30-40 years as of 4 years ago when I researched it. I’m sorry, but that’s just not worth it for me and most others.
I don't want to detract from your point. I just wanted to appreciate the hyperbole.
Cost is always an issue. These rarely make sense from a pure $$ sense, as everything in electrical is expensive. You could burn up that $1000 budget just to get a subpanel installed.
Usually the value proposition is some combination of savings, combined with the ability to backup critical loads. A generator could do that too, but a proper generator setup isn't cheap either, and it wouldn't save $$ at all. Battery solutions sometimes beat that.
But net metering is becoming less common, and if you can't sell to the grid at retail, then it'd make sense to store it locally. In some cases, it can also make sense to use batteries even without solar. A good sized battery can keep your refrigerator running for days, which is useful for areas prone to weather related outages. It can also easily fully power the electronics on a gas oven for a long time. And honestly, a big battery these days isn't even that expensive.
And if that isn't enough, some batteries can be topped up with the power from a large battery EV. DCFC tends to come back before a lot of residential power, so this can be really useful.
Some recent research into that: https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/20...
You can also consider maintaining packs together to avoid complicated disassembling processes.
(This might already be happening, but I haven't heard about it) The big thing EVs need right now is standardized battery packs. It reduces replacement cost, takes away anxiety that a replacement will exist when you need it, and enables down-cycle uses like stationary storage.
Certainly a standard form factor for a pack would be helpful for a specific manufacturer (similar to building multiple cars on top of the same basic frame).
Some of the issues I think one runs into is battery chemistries are rapidly changing so even if the shape of the pack remains the same the performance of it is rather different depending on what is put inside.
Then even with standard form and chemistry one pack to another can be rather different depending on the history of it's use (age, charge cycles, driven hard).
There is second life storage applications currently, and still more research going into it now.
Personally I think smarter controls and smarter diagnostic and pack sorting will be more useful.
And with even more passion and commitment and with business skills, you could earn $20k at a time.
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
^ has a wild picture of full setup
A roof-mounted water tank with a thousand gallons ready to dump into the shed? A drum of baking soda?
Or maybe rebuild the shed out of cinder block and clear any overhanging vegetation?
Maybe this whole setup is on desert dirt with plenty of clearance. The fire plan is "run away and wait."
You could also just bury it so that the worst of the explosion is mostly mitigated. I've also seen small container setup which would probably work better than his (seemingly) wooden shed.
Would be better if the ground was paved around the shed, but it seems to be far enough from other free standing structures.
[0] https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
[1] https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
The extinguisher should be directly inside the door so as not to attract someone to traverse farther into the building without an escape plan.
Of course if he did so then there would be no extinguishers in the picture and then we would also bitch about it.
If he can't reach to grab it because it's too hot, he should have already left.
If you are outside, it does not tempt you to cross the room. If you are inside, you run for the door, and then turn around and decide if maybe you should just keep running.
Dry Powder or CO2 is what you need for energized electrical equipment. And considering there's potential lithium involvement, you might want something more specialized (e.g. F-500 Encapsulator Agent). I agree anything more than a small-scale incident you're just getting the heck out of dodge. I'd have built something along the lines of a concrete bunker, with an automated suppression system to buy time.
There's no protection over the bus connections. Any falling conductive item is now a spark hazard.
Using spring loaded alligator clips as test leads apparently for monitoring. I hope that's not a permanent configuration.
Everything is bolted down and I see no inline disconnects or even any fusing except on low voltage sections.
There are exhaust fans but I can't tell if there's inlet fans.
From this one picture, which may not be fair, this is not a safe setup. I would feel uncomfortable with this on my property.
The firemen ended up putting the battery, half melted, into a big drum of water and it hook hours to cool off. The concrete was still warm to the touch where it burned for ~30 hours after the situation was sorted out.
The smoke was just absolutely unbelievable. Made me reconsider buying an EV. That fire was no joke.
The MV contactor wasn't even closed, it had 24v powering it for the internal cell balancer from the vendor, that was it.
The hazard appears to be accounted for.
The infamous Samsung note 7 exploding battery catastrophe was 90 incidents out of 2.5 million phones, or 0.003% exploding.
That said, one should be prepared for it.
They do swell, but they swell at the terminals rather than at the sides.
Also the guy who made this battery pack has the incentive to not burn down his house, whoever made yours has the incentive of one more day on the assembly line… I dunno, wouldn’t judge him too harshly.
But they were as much of a fire risk (if not more) before being recycled, they were just spread out along the e-waste bins!
Every time I hear of a waste processing plant fire, I wonder if there was a (lithium) battery involved. Maybe from a single use vape, or a child's toy.
Those scooters in the streets get discarded/buy em in bulk and re-use the batteries for ex
They are rather short and show the setup more than the construction and nitty gritty, IIRC
If it could be done, would certainly would be better than turning batteries into "black mass."
The safety risks are marginal and you interact with plenty of other things/systems daily that are at least as dangerous.
> here are safer battery chemestries that aren't quite as energy-dense ^ that's the answer.
> But phones and laptops were capable-enough 15 years ago They absolutely weren't.
> we sufficed just fine on the performance of last-decade's mobile devices. I don't want to suffice.
All that said, I do think battery research is probably one of the most important things "we" can be doing (and energy storage in general), so I'm all about putting in the money and time to find improvements.
Everything has risks — its about managing them. Lithium ion batteries are widely used because their benefits outweight the risks when handled properly.
Its like saying, “Why are candles still legal? They can start fires.” Well, because people know how to use them responsibly.
Why do we still let kids go outside when there are so many kidnappings?
The samsung battery debacle around the note 7, which made headlines for weeks, was from 0.003% of phones catching fire.
"Despite being an unusual system, with recycled and homemade components, no major problems have been reported, such as fires or swollen batteries..."
But when it eventually happens, without a proper fire extinguish system, I would assume every thing would go up in high-temp flames with no easy way of putting them out?
https://vrm.victronenergy.com/installation/13552/dashboard
I know it can be done because I asked an electrician. But I dropped the idea when he said it could cost a lot (if done by a professional).
The breaker that is exclusively locked out when main is on is connected to an outdoor receptacle for the generator cable. When the power goes out, you switch off the main breaker and the interlock now allows you to switch on the generator's breaker. This serves as the backfeed of power into the rest of the circuits from the generator.
The nice thing about this setup is the ability to use all the other breakers to control what loads you want on the generator. Downside is it isn't automatic.
If you have to ask, this is absolutely not the sort of work you should do yourself. Use a licensed electrician.
And by "I" I mean "a professional electrician" :) - I just did the design of what I want where.
The only issue is central heating for winter as it's pretty harsh in Canada, but that's a bit too much for a generator I think. Maybe a few smaller heating units instead.
If you want to have a few electrical loads on a generator backed panel, you have an electrician install the generator, automatic transfer switch, and a subpanel that is fed by the automatic transfer switch, which is fed by both utility power (from a breaker in your main electrical panel) and generator power. If you’re using natural gas or propane to power the generator, a pipe fitter will need to run the gas line.
Then you tell the electrician to move the circuits you wanted backed by a generator from your main panel to the subpanel fed by the ATS. The subpanel receives power from the utility until the ATS detects an outage, which fires up the generator and transfers the power feeding the subpanel to the generator.
Generators can use gasoline, diesel, natural gas, or propane, or a combination of any of the aforementioned fuels. Ideally you’d have a multi fuel generator hooked up to a natural gas utility with a backup propane tank in case the natural gas service goes down.
You can also get a whole house generator and have the ATS feed your existing electrical panel, you’ll need a 24kW 120/240V for a 100A service or 48kW 120/240V for a 200A service
I’d recommend a Generac generator if you do get one, Costco sells them and will connect you with an installer.
If you want to get crazy, you could add a 50kva single-phase 120/240V UPS and the UPS would keep the power on while the generator starts up but that would be serious overkill (and tens of thousands of dollars).
I understand wye and three-phase power, and i also understand that when we plug into a scared face outlet[0], that is a "single phase" - but the stuff delivered to our house is two phases of 120VAC, 180 degrees out of phase.
again, it's a nit. you can use two conductors on a three-phase system and get a single phase, as well.
[0] NEMA 5-15R
Residential power in the US is 120/240V single-phase (split phase). Utility distribution is three-phase and virtually every commercial and industrial electrical service is three-phase, with the rest being 120/240V single-phase.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-phase_electric_power
If one of those batteries develops a short circuit and the house catches fire, no insurance company on Earth would pay for damages, so they say.
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
Look at Off Grid Garage (Andy) or Will Prowse YT channels for more info.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery
And the most efficient way would probably be to just have credits with the rest of the city grid. Sell electricity to them when you have a surplus (from solar) and then pay for electricity when you need it. These credits are a lot more efficient than storing the actual electricity in a battery hehe
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
The tail end of the thread is particularly interesting: https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
I'm curious what prevents the whole contraption from certain eruption into flames over time:
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?attachments/image_rv... (image)
The article contains little detail, and has lots of filler like the quote in the parent comment. It's highly upvoted on HN's front page, which is surprising to me because I think there is quite a bit of distaste here for low-effort content to drive clicks.
The thing the article is referencing is interesting, but the article is trash.
Edit: We also changed the title (submitted title was "A man powers home for eight years using a thousand old laptop batteries")
I haven't been on board with the "journalism" of the last fifty years, but this hasn't exactly prompted it to improve. Newspapers still have advertisements. Subscribers still have no say over editorial staff. The board still has say over the editorial staff. It's all fucked unless we can punt private ownership out of the equation.
1. What point is the author trying to make? Leading off "Glubux even began" implies that the effort was extraordinary in some way, but if this action was "key to making the system work effectively and sustainably" then it can't really have been that extraordinary. The writing is confused between trying to make the effort sound exceptional vs. giving a technical explanation of how the end result works.
2. Why, exactly, would "removing individual cells and organizing them into custom racks" be "key to making the system work effectively and sustainably"?
3. How is the system's effectiveness related to its sustainable operation; why should these ideas be mentioned in the same breath?
4. Why is the author confident about the above points, but unsure about the level of "manual labor and technical knowledge" that would be required?
Aside from that, overall it just reads like what you'd expect to find in a high school essay.
Edit: after actually taking a look at TFA, another thing that smells off to me is the way that bold text is used. It seems very unnatural to me.
More seriously, for me it's the "likely".
Absurd.
The only thing as annoying as people using AI and passing it off as their own writing is the people who claim everything written not exactly how they are used to is AI.
This is obviously AI. The writer should know that it either required manual labor or it did not, not maybe (AI loves to not "commit" to an answer and rather say maybe/likely). It also loves to loop in some vague claim about X being effective, sustainable, ethical, etc without providing any information as to WHY it is.
That and it being published on some blog spam website called techoreon.
Edit: For fun, I had o1-mini produce an article from the original source (Techspot it looks like), and it produced a similar line:
> This ingenious approach likely required significant manual effort and technical expertise, but the results speak for themselves, as evidenced by the system's eight-year flawless operation.
What these sites are doing is rewriting articles from legitimate sources, and then selling SEO backlinks to their "news" website full of generated content (and worthless backlinks). It's how all those scammy fiverr link services work
I still find it very annoying that in every thread about a blog post there's someone shouting "AI!" because there's an em dash, bullet points, or some common word/saying (e.g. "likely", "crucially", "in conclusion"). It's been more intrusive on my life than actual AI writing has been.
I've been accused of using AI for writing because I have used parenthesis, ellipses, various common words, because I structured a post with bullet points and a conclusion section, etc. It's wildly frustrating.
I do understand that this is frustrating, because in the last few months I see posts with these features everywhere. It's especially a problem on reddit, where there are numerous low effort posts in niche subreddits that are overdone with emojis, bolded sections/titles, and em dashes. Not all of these are AI but an overwhelming majority are to the point where if the quality of the content is low (lots of vague sayings), and it exhibits these traits, I can almost say for certain it's AI.
What is also less talked about is now AI models are beginning to write without exhibiting these issues. I've been playing around with GPT 4o and it's deep research feature writes articles that are extremely well written, not exhibiting the traits above or classic telltale AI signs. I also had a friend ask it to write a fictional passage on a character description and the writing was impeccable (which is depressing because it was better than what she wrote). Soon we are not going to have any clue what is real and what isn't.
It will be great when I continue to write the way I have for decades, continuing to be accused of being AI, while actual AI writing exceeds my ability and isn't accused of being AI.
Get me off this ride.
But I don't particularly care, either. After a couple tries I decided it's better not to point at object examples of suspected LLM text all the time (except e.g. to report it on Stack Overflow, where it's against the rules and where moderators will use actual detection software etc. to try to verify). But I still notice that style of writing instinctively, and it still automatically flips a switch in my brain to approach the content differently. (Of course, even when I'm confident that something was written by a human, I still e.g. try to verify terminal commands with the man pages before following instructions I don't understand.)
Of course, AI writes the way it does for a reason. More worryingly, it increasingly seems like (verifiably) human writers are mimicking the style - like they see so much AI-generated text out there that sounds authoritative, that they start trying to use the same rhetorical techniques in order to gain that same air of authority.
See, this is what worries me. We have unknowable years of instinct, and none of it is tuned for what is happening now.
For example, whenever someone on the internet makes a claim about "most x", e.g. most people this, most developers that. What does anyone actually know about "most" anything? I think the answer "pretty much nothing".
Asking for cause or thought processes is just asking them to hallucinate. They don't know why, they just know that they saw it and that it deserves hate.
>However, in this ingenious setup, Glubux took those individual cells and assembled them into their own customized racks – a process that likely required a fair bit of elbow grease and technical know-how, but one that has ultimately paid off in spades.
Either this is also AI, or saying that it likely required a lot of manual labor is not indicative
Well fuck, I might very well be an AI, then ;)
Keep that in mind when people make them write journalism. It's like at an 8th grade level, maybe.
This is supposed to be a news article, not someone who's hypothesizing about something that could have been. I mean, it either required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge or it didn't - no guessing should be required. If the author doesn't know, they can do proper research or simply ask the subject.
FWIW this article didn't immediately scream AI to me either, until the commenter pointed out the use of "likely". When you think about it, it absolutely becomes a fingerprint of AI in this context - it's not just that "likely" anywhere means it's AI.
Same phenomenon happens all the time with food or wine. One person thinks everyone is making up the subtle flavor profile comments and sneers at them. Everyone who can tell rolls their eyes. You can't convince someone that there's something they can't perceive besides just telling them.
I've had this experience with records: as a kid I rolled my eyes at people wanting to listen to music on vinyl cause obviously it was the same; as my hearing has improved I have found I can clearly tell the difference and definitely prefer it.
I didn't even comment on whether this article is AI or not. My point is that it is absurd to point at a single word as proof of something being written by AI.
>"If it's interesting and/or you already have a relationship, which their publisher _likely_ does, it's pretty easy to get an article written."
Woah, you must be AI. You used "and/or" and "likely"! (See how absurd that is?)
> This task, which likely required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge
If you were a human writing this, you might consider asking the man how much labour and knowledge the task took. Writing AIs don't ask questions.
Thank the powers that be no one will give my neighbours a permit for that.
... a single charge for each?
And speaking of applications that are too smart for their own good, why does Firefox start a drag operation when I click on a link instead of allowing me to select the text?