7 ms·

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

by supportengineer 2y ago

beAbU 2y ago
Yes, with cheap third world labour, the same way many other technological marvels of the modern era are "automated".
- harvey9 2y ago
  This can't be done remote so you will need to bring that labor to where the work is.
  - kowabungalow 2y ago
    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.
    - lifeisstillgood 2y ago
      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 …
      - bmicraft 2y ago
        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.
    - harvey9 2y ago
      I was referring to installation
  - 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
    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.
potato3732842 2y ago
But will the scale justify the huge investment?
joshvm 2y ago
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?
- ianferrel 2y ago
  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.
  - edaemon 2y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xrarUWVRQ
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  >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.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    "Cheaply made, not cheap to buy!"
  - 0_____0 2y ago
    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.
hermitShell 2y ago
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.
Workaccount2 2y ago
There is a lot of liability in sticking your name on a hodge podge of random used lithium cells.
- dheera 2y ago
  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.
  - tinbucket 2y ago
    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.
    - bmicraft 2y ago
      Weight always is a factor since heavy batteries cost more to transport, period. It's always relevant, not least for the installation too.
      - dheera 2y ago
        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.
    - dheera 2y ago
      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.
  - etskinner 2y ago
    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?
idiotsecant 2y ago
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.
_ea1k 2y ago
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.
- garciasn 2y ago
  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.
  - speerer 2y ago
    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.
    - garciasn 2y ago
      It's April Fools, so you have to pay close attention today; glad you caught my hilarious joke.
  - _ea1k 2y ago
    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.
raincole 2y ago
Of course, but you will also 'scale' the safety implications.
dehrmann 2y ago
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.
- sightbroke 2y ago
  That is why you sort them. Some recent research into that: https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/2025-01-8130/ https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/20... You can also consider maintaining packs together to avoid complicated disassembling processes.
  - dehrmann 2y ago
    > 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.
    - sightbroke 2y ago
      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.
rolandog 2y ago
Standardizing battery packs would probably help with the automation; like with USB-C.
numpad0 2y ago
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.

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

beAbU 2y ago

Yes, with cheap third world labour, the same way many other technological marvels of the modern era are "automated".

harvey9 2y ago
This can't be done remote so you will need to bring that labor to where the work is.
- kowabungalow 2y ago
  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.
  - lifeisstillgood 2y ago
    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 …
    - bmicraft 2y ago
      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.
  - harvey9 2y ago
    I was referring to installation
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  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.

potato3732842 2y ago

But will the scale justify the huge investment?

joshvm 2y ago

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?

ianferrel 2y ago
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.
- edaemon 2y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xrarUWVRQ
Workaccount2 2y ago
>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.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  "Cheaply made, not cheap to buy!"
- 0_____0 2y ago
  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.

hermitShell 2y ago

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.

Workaccount2 2y ago

There is a lot of liability in sticking your name on a hodge podge of random used lithium cells.

dheera 2y ago
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.
- tinbucket 2y ago
  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.
  - bmicraft 2y ago
    Weight always is a factor since heavy batteries cost more to transport, period. It's always relevant, not least for the installation too.
    - dheera 2y ago
      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.
  - dheera 2y ago
    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.
- etskinner 2y ago
  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?

idiotsecant 2y ago

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.

_ea1k 2y ago

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.

garciasn 2y ago
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.
- speerer 2y ago
  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.
  - garciasn 2y ago
    It's April Fools, so you have to pay close attention today; glad you caught my hilarious joke.
- _ea1k 2y ago
  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.

raincole 2y ago

Of course, but you will also 'scale' the safety implications.

dehrmann 2y ago

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.

sightbroke 2y ago
That is why you sort them. Some recent research into that: https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/2025-01-8130/ https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/20... You can also consider maintaining packs together to avoid complicated disassembling processes.
- dehrmann 2y ago
  > 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.
  - sightbroke 2y ago
    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.

rolandog 2y ago

Standardizing battery packs would probably help with the automation; like with USB-C.

numpad0 2y ago

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.