>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.
My home was burned to the ground by a fire started by a charging electric skateboard. Well engineered battery systems, like an EV or a name-brand phone, are very safe, but these NMC cells are extremely volatile, and large packs cannot be extinguished once in runaway. I'm very glad the OP has this setup in a separate shed.
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.
No, arc flash risk is a function of voltage, and these cells aren't all wired in series, the capacity is expanded by building out more capacity in parallel.
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.
It's not the word on its own, it's the word in context: in a news article in a sentence like that one. It's not a 100% given, but it's fairly strong evidence given a basic understanding of modern language informed by the era we're in. Of course it could be a journalist emulating AI for some reason. But the signal here is quite strong.
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?
>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.
- It will likely take much less space.
- It will be easy to expand.
Now.
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.
Now what?
The costs their parent mentioned are the costs now, not back when the system was originally built.
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
"Now" as in "all of those things are true now, but they weren't when this project started ten years ago."
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.
300 Ah * 3.2 V => 960 Wh ~= 1 kWh
$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.
You can get 15 kWh for $1,3000 if you pick up in Texas (these use EVE MB31 which usually end up testing at ~310 Ah): https://www.apexiummall.com/index.php?route=product/product&...
It just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper every year...
What 13000? Here in the EU we pay around 3-3.5K for 15 kWh.
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.
$1,300.00
typo sorry, $1,300.00
13k or 1.3k?
The parable of the fisherman and the banker:
https://travis.vc/mexican-fisherman-parable/
Sometimes the doing is the fun part.
> - It will have new cells rather than used ones.
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.
There's even more to the riddle. Lithium recycling, cost of the power loss in old cells. Power transmit cost. Cost of power generation on site.
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.
> Our Earth is a limited resource
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.
We have LOTS of lithium
Maybe we'll run out of ion?
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.
There is a spectrum of DIY and the sweet spot depends on the person. Since I'm good with electronics my sweet spot is buying premade packs.
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.
It all comes down to what makes you happy.
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.
> but it really just highlights how efficient the modern supply chain is
This "efficiency" relies on the assumption of writing off the entire battery set at sale. That's not impressive at all.
There HAS to be a way to automate this process and make it work at scale.
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.
Where would you put this battery in that trenchcoat gamut? Inside a server rack, fwiw. https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-v2-lithium-battery...
Was definitely one of the harder parts of our solar install to get comfortable with.
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 think the previous version of this lacks the arrestors, unfortunately, wonder if they can be retrofitted. Thanks for sharing your take!
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”
I just assumed there was … special stuff in there
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.
There are some pretty huge cells now like the 4680s
And really tiny ones, 10400, which is AAA sized.
Don't, uh, buy those unless you're sure.
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.
There's a lot of risk in creativity when you're selling crap to the public at scale. Way better to just use what everyone else is using.
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.
Here's a video inside a recycling plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xrarUWVRQ
>You would be amazed how many battery packs are multiple 18650s in a trenchcoat
$50 of 18650s in a $500 trenchcoat with DRM protection. So wasteful.
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.
Ironically this news dropped yesterday while we were having this discussion
https://www.protoolreviews.com/doge-mandates-power-tool-manu...
Probably the only thing I can agree with doge on.
> 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.
"Cheaply made, not cheap to buy!"
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.
There is a lot of liability in sticking your name on a hodge podge of random used lithium cells.
I feel like for home battery backup there needs to be some kind of lower energy density solution that has zero fire risk.
Weight is not a factor for home energy storage, there is no need for lithium cells.
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.
LiFePO₄ (LFP) is overwhelmingly safe and cheap. Lithium isn't the problem here exactly.
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.
LFP is the present solution, but sodium ion is the next step. Given the abundance of sodium in the sea there should never be any problem sourcing it.
https://cambridgerenewables.co.uk/product/eleven-energy-4-5-...
Weight is not a factor for home energy storage, there is no need for lithium cells.
That depends on your living situation. I live in a third-floor apartment, so weight is very definitely a factor.
Weight always is a factor since heavy batteries cost more to transport, period. It's always relevant, not least for the installation too.
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.
The apartment building can have unified power backup in its foundation/basement.
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.
Yes, with cheap third world labour, the same way many other technological marvels of the modern era are "automated".
This can't be done remote so you will need to bring that labor to where the work is.
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.
Does USB-PD mean USB power distribution ?
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.
I was referring to installation
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.
I enjoyed noticing that your percentage (1×10⁻¹³) was so precise that it excluded the man himself (he is 1 in 8×10⁹).
I don't want to detract from your point. I just wanted to appreciate the hyperbole.
It's April Fools, so you have to pay close attention today; glad you caught my hilarious joke.
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...
Of course, but you will also 'scale' the safety implications.
Standardizing battery packs would probably help with the automation; like with USB-C.
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.
That is why you sort them.
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.
> maintaining packs together
(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.
But will the scale justify the huge investment?
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.
You can read it the other way around: with labour and knowledge, you can save $20k.
And with even more passion and commitment and with business skills, you could earn $20k at a time.
"I made 14 kWh more during lockdown"
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
^ has a wild picture of full setup
That fire extinguisher looks ridiculously useless for a setup like this. Good thing it's a separate shed, at least.
What would be an appropriate suppression system here? That's a lotta batteries all arranged like a boy scout arranges kindling logs for a campfire.
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."
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.
You can see the shelter here [0] and it is apparently 50m from the house [1].
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...
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.
I hope it doesn't contain any water at all!
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.
The fire extinguisher is in the wrong place entirely. If the setup is on fire are you really going to reach _in there_ to grab the extinguisher?
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.
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.
The hazard appears to be accounted for.
Yeah wind has never been known to blow fires 50 meters.
Or toxic exhaust for that matter.
How do you know the prevailing wind direction in his location?
How do you know that a favorable wind direction will eliminate the risk of a fire hazard?
How do you know it won't?
How do you guys know if the batteries will catch fire at all? Maybe the guy is lucky and for the next 50 years they won't?
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.
My home was burned to the ground by a fire started by a charging electric skateboard. Well engineered battery systems, like an EV or a name-brand phone, are very safe, but these NMC cells are extremely volatile, and large packs cannot be extinguished once in runaway. I'm very glad the OP has this setup in a separate shed.
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.
I don't. That's why I wouldn't place my livelihood on it.
> 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.
That said, one should be prepared for it.
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.
They don't look tightly packed compared to the constraints of being inside laptops and phones where they are given millimetres to expand.
Yeah, my first thought on reading the article was that it didn’t detail his fire control systems..
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.
Great if you are a skilled electrical engineer who owns a bunch of land somewhere that doesn't have any fire risk.
They keep the power pack in a shed away from anything too flammable. They could lose the shed, but it would be unlikely to take the house with it.
My thoughts as well, and that's coming from someone who sleeps directly above 2 powerwalls
Sounds like it is out in a shed.
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.
Commercial solar home battery use safer battery chemistries which don't experience thermal runaway like lithium ion labtop batteries do..
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.
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
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.
I'm not sure where, I've just seen some of his videos where he takes apart scooters
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."
Something tells me his home insurance agent didn't know about this.
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.
> considering their saftey risks
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.
Because the actual risk is so far overblown.
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.
Phones and laptops were not capable enough 15 years ago for what we expect of them today.
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?
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
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.
> 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).
If you have to ask, this is absolutely not the sort of work you should do yourself. Use a licensed electrician.
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)
Thanks. I think I got the name of the device, it's called ATS (Automatic Transfer Switch). Is this the things I should install?
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.
take the other person's advice - get an electrician.
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).
US isn't single phase.
Even though our transmission is three-phase, most homes in the US only get single-phase power.
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.
[0] NEMA 5-15R
My comment was less a nit and more I didn't understand how it really worked! Thanks for correcting me.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-phase_electric_power
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.
The photos show soldering to Li-ion battery terminals. Doesn't that cause internal heat damage as opposed to spot welding?
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.
The link in the article to the forum is broken, here's the correct one:
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
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.
Aside from the obvious fire risk, is this approaching the size where one would have to be concerned about arc flash?
No, arc flash risk is a function of voltage, and these cells aren't all wired in series, the capacity is expanded by building out more capacity in parallel.
Anyone built a home power system with Sodium-ion Battery Packs?
As someone completely unqualified for this type of work, this looks scary AF.
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.
scott's tots groan... but wait they're lithium!
modern day coal mining
.
That is gangster!
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
But how expensive would be to dig a, I don't know, 1000 by 6 feet hole in the ground? I have no idea of an equivalent gravity battery...
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.
The battery doesn’t have to hold the entire year’s energy — come on :-P
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?
holes in the ground are just wells, and gravity batteries are just dams. don't reinvent the square wheels, please...
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...
Much better read than TFA, the submitted link seems written by an LLM with pronoun confusion, swapping between "he" and "it".
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)
We've since changed the URL (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43552105).
What’s even better is that’s an entire community of people doing this. Some of those power walls are astounding.
The whole thread is so wholesome. Recommended reading :)
Thank you for finding this :-)
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.
We've since changed both the URL and the title (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43552105)
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.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43549073 (after changing the URL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43552105)
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.
Agreed. We changed the URL to the original source from https://techoreon.com/a-man-powers-home-8-years-laptop-batte..., and banned the latter site. Thanks!
Edit: We also changed the title (submitted title was "A man powers home for eight years using a thousand old laptop batteries")
@dang, maybe we can get the link updated? This forum post is better in every way
> 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.
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What changed fifty years ago? You're pointing out issues that have existed for centuries.
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How can you even tell?
What about it gives off the AI smell to you?
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.
Nice try, ChatGPT.
More seriously, for me it's the "likely".
Using "likely" is indicative of AI now...?
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 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.
Get me off this ride.
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.
How do you know how accurate you are? How do you know when you're wrong?
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.
> still notice that style of writing instinctively, and it still automatically flips a switch in my brain
See, this is what worries me. We have unknowable years of instinct, and none of it is tuned for what is happening now.
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.
Techspot:
>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
I wasn't going to get into that but I got the same feeling about the techspot article ironically
I've been approached to build a few of these sites now. No thanks.
> (AI loves to not "commit" to an answer and rather say maybe/likely)
Well fuck, I might very well be an AI, then ;)
LLMs had way more "average internet commenter" training material than it had "good journalism" training material.
Keep that in mind when people make them write journalism. It's like at an 8th grade level, maybe.
It's likely.
Let's delve into this
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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.
well it's that phrase, not just the word, although the word is a tell. And it's not absurd. It is absurd to think it's absurd. You are being ignorant.
It's absurd to think a single word (the comment didn't even say phrase), or even a single phrase, is evidence of 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?)
You are being intentionally obtuse.
It's not the word on its own, it's the word in context: in a news article in a sentence like that one. It's not a 100% given, but it's fairly strong evidence given a basic understanding of modern language informed by the era we're in. Of course it could be a journalist emulating AI for some reason. But the signal here is quite strong.
this part: "key to making the system work effectively and sustainably".
I think a giveaway 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.
A thousand old laptop batteries and bunch of solar panels. The headline is a touch nonsensical as-is.
I was thinking maybe he had a very low-energy home.
Somewhere in his posts I think I read that his house at 'idle' is drawing like 30watts. That seems pretty low energy to me!
Not low enough to run for 8 years without a recharge.
My sad brain keeps insisting this headline contains the phrase "thousand year old laptop batteries", which said brain also assures me is impossible.
Your brain is not alone.
I came here to either find this comment, or make it myself.
So not an April Fools joke?
Not unless it's an 8 year long one.
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1000 years is pretty old for a battery, I'm surprised they still work /s
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.
These April Fool's jokes are getting ridiculous. Almost had me for a moment.
This is silly and clearly fake.
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.
They should also have enough skill for a fire suppression system
> 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?
This is so dangerous, and not covered by insurance.
All the best things in this world aren't covered by insurance :)
I design hardware for a living, it's a objective fact.
I can only speak for the United States, but, generally, homeowners insurance “covers stupid” as they say in the biz..