HN Reader

>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.

"I made 14 kWh more during lockdown"

https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...

^ has a wild picture of full setup

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.

I would highly recommend not to go this route but to buy LFP prismatic cells. Much safer, stable chemistry that isn’t as sensitive to heat.

Look at Off Grid Garage (Andy) or Will Prowse YT channels for more info.

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.

First thing to come in my mind is fire hazard...

"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?

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.

modern day coal mining

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 am a DIY electronics enthusiast, but the Internet made me scared of line power applications.

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.

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.

So not an April Fools joke?

I like how the article only shows a blurry RC battery charging station instead of the real stuff he did.

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...

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

Aside from the obvious fire risk, is this approaching the size where one would have to be concerned about arc flash?

Don't try this at home kids. I'd at least keep those batteries at least in a dedicated steel structure 100m from the house.

A thousand old laptop batteries and bunch of solar panels. The headline is a touch nonsensical as-is.

The photos show soldering to Li-ion battery terminals. Doesn't that cause internal heat damage as opposed to spot welding?

In other news: Man burns down house using 1k old laptop battery (cells)

Thank the powers that be no one will give my neighbours a permit for that.

That is gangster!

.

Anyone built a home power system with Sodium-ion Battery Packs?

These April Fool's jokes are getting ridiculous. Almost had me for a moment.

If you like this stuff Jehu Garcia on YT does this

Those scooters in the streets get discarded/buy em in bulk and re-use the batteries for ex

Something tells me his home insurance agent didn't know about this.

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 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).

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."

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.

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:

https://vrm.victronenergy.com/installation/13552/dashboard

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.

My sad brain keeps insisting this headline contains the phrase "thousand year old laptop batteries", which said brain also assures me is impossible.

Link to the primary source because the article is light on details and has a broken link:

https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...

This is so dangerous, and not covered by insurance.

> 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?

As someone completely unqualified for this type of work, this looks scary AF.

scott's tots groan... but wait they're lithium!

This is silly and clearly fake.

1000 years is pretty old for a battery, I'm surprised they still work /s