>the solution came with rearranging and adjusting the cells to ensure the packs worked more efficiently.
>Glubux even began disassembling entire laptop batteries, removing individual cells and organizing them into custom racks. This task, which likely required a great deal of manual labor and technical knowledge, was key to making the system work effectively and sustainably.
This kind of thing is cool as a passion project, but it really just highlights how efficient the modern supply chain is. If you have the skills of a professional electrician, you too can spend hundreds of hours building a home battery system you could just buy for $20k, but is less reliable.
> spend hundreds of hours building a home battery system
That is, in my opinion, the worst feature of this entire project. It is cool and nice and fun. But it takes a lot of time to research, acquire skills, get tools and build.
> you could just buy for $20k
I agree with a broader point but that particular price is extremely high and far from reality.
A reasonably good 18650 cell has a capacity of ~12 Wh (~3300 mAh * ~3.7 V = ~12.2 Wh). The battery mentioned in the article consists of "more than 1000" such cells. Let us assume 1200 cells. That would mean it has a capacity of ~14.4 kWh (1200 * 12).
It is possible to get a pre-assembled steel battery case on heavy-duty wheels for 16 LiFePo cells, with a modern BMS with Bluetooth and wired communication options, a touchscreen display, a circuit breaker and nice terminals for ~ $500. And it is also possible to get 16 high quality LiFePo cells with a capacity of ~300 Ah each, like EVE MB31, for significantly less than $100 each. This means that for less than ~$2000, it is possible to get all components required to assemble a fully working ~15 kWh LiFePo battery.
- That assembly would take a few hours rather than weeks.
- It will have new cells rather than used ones.
- It will be safer to use than a battery with Li-Ion cells.
I will point out that in 2016 when they started this project, the cost of new batteries would have been multiple times higher than it is today, so it would have been a moderately more "sensible" thing to do than it currently seems.
Thanks for the all the specifics! I admit that my $20k number was a very rough "I'm sure it must be less than this" estimate because I wanted to make sure I erred on the high side for the point I was making.
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.
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.
$20K for a home battery backup for someone capable of doing DIY would be far larger than what I assume he has built here. AFAIK the cheaper end is around $340 (2016) per kWh at 20 kWh that would be $6,800. In 2025 at $100 per kWh it would be $2K. If it's worth it would largely depending on a persons post tax required rate of return and how long it would take.
I spent almost as much as that for a 2 Powerwalls and installation in 2019. (Granted, I got a 3rd back from various incentives that probably weren't available for DIY.)
DIY (like this project) is only "worth it" if the person doing it enjoys the work or values the lessons.
If you took that same time, and invested it in working at Target, or Amazon etc, would you have more or less money than it would cost to buy an off-the-shelf battery? There are obviously other pros and cons.
That guy who was gaming a bug in the lottery in New England, near as I can figure was making about $20-30 an hour for his troubles. I suspect he may have made more off of selling the movie rights than off of the lottery.
He made more than he would have working retail for sure, but maybe he could have done better with another job if he weren't fixated on sticking it to the Man.
This battery thing feels a bit like the same sort of sentiment.
That said, any task you can do while talking to a friend or binge watching a TV show cannot be accurately accounted for in cost by just how much the clock moved.
The problem is likely cost effectiveness compared to just replacing a whole group of cells, compared to one single cell.
The unit economics of getting the remaining life from single used laptop battery are not very good. There's certainly lots of potential value for someone willing to do the work, if they can afford the opportunity cost, or if a business can source extremely dirt cheap cells and cheap high skilled labor.
You would be amazed how many battery packs are multiple 18650s in a trenchcoat. Even EV battery packs use them. Though it does raise the question - wouldn't an old EV battery be a better solution than stripping apart laptops?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Everything worth doing is worth over-doing. He should start doing mad scientist experiments and produce ball lightning, the amperage could be sufficient.
While very interesting, that seems like it would be one hell of a fire hazard as well. Especially for the ones that are tightly packed in the middle of each bundle.
> This growth forced the creator to build a separate warehouse, located about 50 meters from his home, to store the batteries and the new charge controllers and inverters.
> Despite being an unusual system, with recycled and homemade components, no major problems have been reported, such as fires or swollen batteries, which is a common issue with some second-hand electronic devices.
AFAIK 18650s like he's using never swell as they're in hard metal shells not pouches like most consumer electronics, so they don't have the ability to swell until they're catastrophically damaged. He's built a small building 50m away from his house to hold it anyways so it can probably be safely allowed to just burn, it's not like fire departments have much better options than waiting for it to burn out and hoping it doesn't reignite anyways.
That's the neat part about lithium fires you just can't, they're self oxidizing so there's not much you can do to definitively put them out the best option is usually to flood them with water to cool them down and contain the damage they cause.
Also the guy who made this battery pack has the incentive to not burn down his house, whoever made yours has the incentive of one more day on the assembly line… I dunno, wouldn’t judge him too harshly.
It's all fun and games until one of those thousand batteries decides to go exothermic :-). This is a really amazing story and I'm impressed by the diligence and amount of effort they put into recovering and reusing all of these batteries. A couple of dendrites though, a lightning strike, there are things outside of their control that could turn the building holding this collection of batteries into a very impressive incendiary device. If you've ever seen a fire at a battery factory, it is both fascinating and scary af. People are still trying to assess the long term damage from the Moss Landing grid scale battery fire in California.
I had an 18650 flashlight and saw a video of them spontaneously turning into a flare with rocket thruster like flames and got rid of it immediately. These batteries are scary powerful when it gives off the magic smoke.
That they are, energy is energy. I was part of a Battlebots team and that is where I learned the smell of various rechargeable battery chemistries when they burned :-). We also had an exothermic adventure with a battery pack we built, fortunately it was not at an event, it was in earlier testing, but it forever gave me a healthy respect for those batteries.
Here’s a 2017 page from Vice https://www.vice.com/en/article/diy-powerwall-builders-are-u... that refers to Glubux as being French. Since the posted article doesn’t say, I wanted to know the climate where Glubux lives and the loads he has on the system. I guess I can find more about Glubux from the secondlifestorage.com site.
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)
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).
Anyone have links to some of the actual posts this person made? The article is a bit light on actual details, sourcing, etc. beyond citing their username/alias.
Why not just dig a hole in the ground and make a gravity battery? Would be much more reusable without all the lithium garbage ... and also probably more efficient...
And the most efficient way would probably be to just have credits with the rest of the city grid. Sell electricity to them when you have a surplus (from solar) and then pay for electricity when you need it. These credits are a lot more efficient than storing the actual electricity in a battery hehe
The average US household uses about 10,000 kwhr per year. That's roughly equivalent to the gravitational energy of dropping ten tons down a 200 mile hole.
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.
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.
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.
6 replies →
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...
5 replies →
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.
6 replies →
$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.
2 replies →
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.
5 replies →
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?
27 replies →
There is a lot of liability in sticking your name on a hodge podge of random used lithium cells.
10 replies →
Yes, with cheap third world labour, the same way many other technological marvels of the modern era are "automated".
6 replies →
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.
7 replies →
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.
3 replies →
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."
4 replies →
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.
2 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
2 replies →
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.
9 replies →
> 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.
1 reply →
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.
3 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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?
3 replies →
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.
4 replies →
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?
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.
2 replies →
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=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.
4 replies →
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".
29 replies →
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!
1 reply →
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.
[dead]
[flagged]
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..