Jesus. No cell balancing, protection or monitoring that I can see, and most importantly - wires directly soldered onto the battery instead of spot-welded. That's a fire hazard waiting to happen.
People, if y'all ever build your own battery pack, please think about safety. Or if you don't, place a giant bucket of dry sand above the pack, with the bottom layer being made of acrylic or other plastic that melts. That's about the only thing that can stop a battery fire.
He did and end run around saftey, and just put the whole system in a shed, which in any real emergency situation , dramaticaly reduces risk to life and property. Also each battery bank is.air gapped , which will significantly reduce any fire from spreading to adjacent banks.
The system looks well made, and has 8 years up time.
I live off grid and am useing lead acid batteries, but would like to switch to sodium.
"Behind the success of this project lies an unwavering determination to overcome technical challenges. Glubux had to solve several problems over the years: cell balancing, electrical safety, and storage management. But his system keeps improving. For example, his energy production capacity has increased from 7 kWh to 56 kWh."
I've been thinking about similar setups with lots of batteries as I have excess energy I can generate during the day and a lot of otherwise barely usable space in my attic. Fire hazard is my major concern. How do you make sure old (or even new) batteries don't do their usual thing, especially if they are in an environment with unstable temperatures and scarce monitoring?
Old laptop cells are going to need a lot more babysitting than a new LiFePO4 rackmount battery. Those generally do pretty well with the internal monitoring that they bring. Semiconductor fuse as overcurrent protection, passive balancing and monitoring of individual cell voltages seems to get you pretty far. Get your 48V or 51.2V battery in 5 kWh, 10 kWh or 15 kWh cell size from one of the Chinese outlets in dubious quality, or from real brand names like Pylontech. RS485 is usually present and there are kludgy home-assistant gateways, but they're not required for safety.
External monitoring is made by Victron, who initially did electrical solutions for boats. Their inverters are also very popular and pretty great.
Also, brick walls are kinda nice I have to admit, along with an exhaust for any fumes.
yep, I have brick walls downstairs where space is more scarce, the attic has lots of space but also lots of wood lying around.
I guess another possibility is to have the battery pack outside, attached to the brick wall, and ideally away of direct sunlight... but then no wooden roofs. It looks like no DYI is really feasible except maybe a concrete bunker as others have suggested. And even then it's probably uninsurable which is considered a no-no where I live.
This is my main problem with having a battery in the house. Once sodium based batteries and compatible inverters get on the market I might switch them out to lower the risk of catastrophic failure and losing the whole house.
The main issue here is that battery technology is not innately fireproof yet. The setup will make more sense for homes when we have switched to fireproof batteries. As for asking people to have fire suppression systems, that's asking for too much.
This is AI slop, unworthy of anyones time. If the author reads this: please just supply us with the prompt next time. We'll fill in the "lets dive into"s ourselves.
I went to the comments to see if I was the only one who felt this way. I don't judge using AI to correct spelling or style issues, but this is just too much.
Looks like awful lot of work to create such battery packs. I guess next step is to automate general assembly and dissasembly of battery packs via some smart AI robotics.
Try it manually first, can't automate a process if you don't know the process yet. That will prove the business case too, with a lot less upfront investment.
The problem is that it doesn't scale; unless you have quality and reliability guarantees on the batteries, you won't be able to sell it in anything but unregulated markets, meaning that demand will always be low and investments in "smart AI robotics" will never earn themselves back.
If you want more of the story, probably start over here [0]
[0] https://secondlifestorage.com/index.php?threads/glubuxs-powe...
Jesus. No cell balancing, protection or monitoring that I can see, and most importantly - wires directly soldered onto the battery instead of spot-welded. That's a fire hazard waiting to happen.
People, if y'all ever build your own battery pack, please think about safety. Or if you don't, place a giant bucket of dry sand above the pack, with the bottom layer being made of acrylic or other plastic that melts. That's about the only thing that can stop a battery fire.
> place a giant bucket of dry sand above the pack, with the bottom layer being made of acrylic or other plastic that melts.
Honest question: is this a real hack that people do in these situations or did you just come up with it?
6 replies →
He did and end run around saftey, and just put the whole system in a shed, which in any real emergency situation , dramaticaly reduces risk to life and property. Also each battery bank is.air gapped , which will significantly reduce any fire from spreading to adjacent banks. The system looks well made, and has 8 years up time. I live off grid and am useing lead acid batteries, but would like to switch to sodium.
4 replies →
From the article:
"Behind the success of this project lies an unwavering determination to overcome technical challenges. Glubux had to solve several problems over the years: cell balancing, electrical safety, and storage management. But his system keeps improving. For example, his energy production capacity has increased from 7 kWh to 56 kWh."
> with the bottom layer being made of acrylic or other plastic that melts.
Why is this bottom layer important?
19 replies →
Why is soldering a fire hazard?
Just curious.
2 replies →
55 days ago | 278 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43548217
I've been thinking about similar setups with lots of batteries as I have excess energy I can generate during the day and a lot of otherwise barely usable space in my attic. Fire hazard is my major concern. How do you make sure old (or even new) batteries don't do their usual thing, especially if they are in an environment with unstable temperatures and scarce monitoring?
Old laptop cells are going to need a lot more babysitting than a new LiFePO4 rackmount battery. Those generally do pretty well with the internal monitoring that they bring. Semiconductor fuse as overcurrent protection, passive balancing and monitoring of individual cell voltages seems to get you pretty far. Get your 48V or 51.2V battery in 5 kWh, 10 kWh or 15 kWh cell size from one of the Chinese outlets in dubious quality, or from real brand names like Pylontech. RS485 is usually present and there are kludgy home-assistant gateways, but they're not required for safety.
External monitoring is made by Victron, who initially did electrical solutions for boats. Their inverters are also very popular and pretty great.
Also, brick walls are kinda nice I have to admit, along with an exhaust for any fumes.
yep, I have brick walls downstairs where space is more scarce, the attic has lots of space but also lots of wood lying around.
I guess another possibility is to have the battery pack outside, attached to the brick wall, and ideally away of direct sunlight... but then no wooden roofs. It looks like no DYI is really feasible except maybe a concrete bunker as others have suggested. And even then it's probably uninsurable which is considered a no-no where I live.
Major selling point for official solutions by companies.
Their solutions need to comply to safety standards.
This is my main problem with having a battery in the house. Once sodium based batteries and compatible inverters get on the market I might switch them out to lower the risk of catastrophic failure and losing the whole house.
> unstable temperatures and scarce monitoring
You've described the worst possible place to locate them.
Build a shed, or a bunker!
The main issue here is that battery technology is not innately fireproof yet. The setup will make more sense for homes when we have switched to fireproof batteries. As for asking people to have fire suppression systems, that's asking for too much.
This is AI slop, unworthy of anyones time. If the author reads this: please just supply us with the prompt next time. We'll fill in the "lets dive into"s ourselves.
I went to the comments to see if I was the only one who felt this way. I don't judge using AI to correct spelling or style issues, but this is just too much.
Read like breathless hype to me; AI makes sense. I just figured the author was fanboying too hard.
What do you do about devices that need mains voltage AC?
There is an inverter somewhere that converts the battery voltage to whatever you need to power stuff. 110v AC, 220v AV, 240v AC
I can't imagine that's very efficient.
My favorite part of these comments so far is the number of comments that conflict
"This is nonsense and dangerous"
"Wow look how thoughtful this design is, the cells are individually fused!"
And he didn't die in electrical fire? What a madlad. Also this is inside of his house right? Rofl, straight to -> r/madlads
No, it's in a shed.
[flagged]
I used an AI to rewrite the article in a more interesting manner and suited to my needs.
There's basically nothing in this page other than "someone put some batteries together"
Looks like awful lot of work to create such battery packs. I guess next step is to automate general assembly and dissasembly of battery packs via some smart AI robotics.
Try it manually first, can't automate a process if you don't know the process yet. That will prove the business case too, with a lot less upfront investment.
The problem is that it doesn't scale; unless you have quality and reliability guarantees on the batteries, you won't be able to sell it in anything but unregulated markets, meaning that demand will always be low and investments in "smart AI robotics" will never earn themselves back.
You can sell the process, tooling, and support. Or, you can take a step back and wonder why it needs a capital solution and not a social one :).
It's not that much work, you just need an arc welder. If you're experienced, it only takes a minute.