Glubux's Powerwall (2016)

>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.

There HAS to be a way to automate this process and make it work at scale.

You would be amazed how many battery packs are multiple 18650s in a trenchcoat. Even EV battery packs use them. Though it does raise the question - wouldn't an old EV battery be a better solution than stripping apart laptops?

>You would 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.

> 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.