>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.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
Readit News
>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.
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.
$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...
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.
DIY (like this project) is only "worth it" if the person doing it enjoys the work or values the lessons.
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.
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.
And with even more passion and commitment and with business skills, you could earn $20k at a time.
This "efficiency" relies on the assumption of writing off the entire battery set at sale. That's not impressive at all.
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
^ has a wild picture of full setup
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.
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."
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 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.
Deleted Comment
The hazard appears to be accounted for.
That said, one should be prepared for it.
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.
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."
Look at Off Grid Garage (Andy) or Will Prowse YT channels for more info.