Creating my single biggest D.I.Y. battery with 2800 18650 cells recovered from used laptop batteries

Are you tired of paying your electricity bill or maybe you need a DIY option for your electric vehicle or maybe your Caravan. I have 3,000 18,650

cells

that I salvaged from

used

laptop

s and plan to upgrade my home energy storage system with an additional 25 kilowatt hours. of storage, we have all the

cells

rated here at 100 million energy packs, so we have 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 up to 3.4 billion energy cells. Now what I have to do is improve the resolution a little. a little bit, so I'm going to take some packs and sort these cells so we have a 2300 milliamp hour cell there, so we have 2.3 billion power for 20 350 and then 23:52 2400 milliamp hour building a

battery

this way takes quite a while. longer, but it allows us to build a much stronger, healthier and hopefully longer lasting

battery

.

Now all the cells are rated into 50 milliamp-hour groups, so we have 23 24 low 24 high 25 low 25 high 25 high are actually too low and too high, so it's 2500 milliamp hours both of those two and that one there are 26, so 26 are all 26 low, they are all 26 hires and we have we have 27 high and then 27 low below we have 28 high and 28 low we have 29 low and 29 high we have 30 low 30 high so now we have to build this in a package so that the The way we're going to do this with the Excel headlines, we're going to go from largest to smallest.

Take the queues from here, the cells from here, the tickets from here, the cells from here, and so on, until the end, put them in a cell. The supports start again and again until we build the packages and that way we will give an even number of each cell in each package and hopefully we will build a better and stronger package by putting new insulating rings for the positive terminal to provide a layer additional protection once. Nickel fuse sheets have been installed to build the first battery. We need to place six cells here. Now these six cells are blank.

They are 0 volt cells. The blue color only indicates that they will not connect. Now we need to take our nine cells from here the three cells from here the three cells from here and another three cells from here that will be empty to allow room for the headline to be synchronized in nine cells we take it from this bottom row because that indicates the reason which is the lowest quality cells or the lowest power cells and we just put them aside. Now we review and recite anything that is not good, so let's use these drinks that are very useful and we will see the process of that a little later. but for now we have to transfer everything from here to here, so flip them over and put the positive side down so the insulators don't fall out.

Now we are going to run with all the new cells that are heat. -shrink on the outside so they look nice on the entire outside and put all these cells on the inside so the ones that are already gray on the inside and anything that isn't gray gets a new shrink wrap so everything looks consistent Using a small knife, run the blade along the side of the cell from the positive end to the negative end to remove the old heat shrink, then you can run your fingernail along the cut to lift up the old heat shrink and carefully unwrap the cell.

To not lose the little white neoprene insulator under the open heat shrink on these heat shrinks is sometimes a little difficult, they are glued pretty well. I've found the best way to do this is to just use your fingertips right at the end. and you snap your fingers like you're really clicking them, you open them up and then you just slide them over the sliding rings, you go back in and then you give them a little bit of heat. Here we are removing the small green center that covers the positive terminal, exposing it. ready to spot weld using an empty 10 by 20 cell folder as a template.

I

used

a bunch of small nails now directly on my bench to make a rough template for my bus bars. Initially I use some plastic insulation removed from the cable. I'll be using it to calculate the length of cable I'll end up needing to get the bus through. I am using 10 square millimeters or 7 gauge wire which is usually used for ground wires in modern homes for 240 volt power in Australia. Remove the green insulator and then twist the copper with an electric drill to twist it a little more than standard. If the cable is not straight, try reversing the direction of the drill a little and then back off by applying a little pressure to the cable.

It will straighten out quickly and look much better The parallel connection to the 18,650 cells is completed with a 5p cast nickel strip supplied by the battery connection The spot welding tasks have been carried out by a K spot welder powered by a cover K and the layer box connected to a CH be served with power supply. I'm almost done with all my spot welding and I've found a few ways to make this go a little faster and a little cleaner. Now there are two ways this nickel strip can be attached, it comes off the roll like this and it's pretty coiled.

All the nickel actually sticks out a little. We'll take it from down here. The nickel itself, the small gaseous part, sticks out a little. whereas if you turn it over, it sits pretty well in the hole. I also discovered that in the spot welds I did in the last few days, you can see here. I've done the spot welding at this angle, so Cross this way now is to prevent the cell from joining the fuse there and then over here, so if you weld at this angle, it actually prevents any chance of causing shorting this fuse and burning it similarly also allows you to go nice and fast, you can go all the way and I've narrowed it down to about when I make one of these cells on this side in this particular way.

I probably had a 95% success rate getting all the solder points right the first time, but more importantly, I can do it in about three minutes. The setup I'm using in the Kay world. I'm using 24 jewels and then you can adjust that with the knob all the way up and all the way down, which seems like the perfect balance between. speed mode and performance in automatic mode so when I come here there is no pedal or anything connected to this K World unit and it has spot welds so as soon as you touch those two tips, the spot welds automatically now you can set the trigger delay come on I have 0.4 seconds if you're new to this I would use a second and a half when you're in this mode you can set it to no it's not right it's not quite there. you can hold it down for a little bit longer to prepare it and then on the solder points, so if we come back here and do what caused the delay again, it's 2.9 seconds, we'll go back down to 2 seconds 0.2 of a second when you do this you don't have time at all you have to do it you have a punch enter this way you don't have time at all you have to do it and on the straight spot welds We're doing it this way it allows you to tear off the spot welds quite Quickly if you ever make a mistake and really need to remove these nickel strips, they are not very hard.

All I normally use is a pair of pliers. Grab one end and firmly hold the battery down and remove it. All we have to do is take a couple of cutting tools and then roll it up and remove the nickel strip and as you can see it's tack welded. down pretty well with only two point world points instead of four. I am very happy with the way it actually holds down, it doesn't need to be more than that for the load it will be under to hold the bus bars to the nickel strip I have been using this 150 watt solver, wait it is a beastly unit in combination with the soldering iron.

I have been using rosin core solder. Now I bought this at the local hardware store in the plumbing section. The soldering iron is probably overkill, but it has the heat mask to get the job done quickly and efficiently, so basically all I've been doing is holding it down there for a few seconds, grabbing the solder coating a little, now I'm heating up the nickel strip. as well as the copper bus bar, hold it down for a second, take it out, give it a few seconds to cool and then move it to the next position, you will get a weld, push the bus bar down, let the flux do its work on the copper buffer and we already finished the lugs.

I'll use a 35 by 8 so the 35 millimeter square ones will fit in there and be nice, they're not loose but not too tight and they have an eight millimeter hole, so that's what 80s, after that, I figure them out, I crimp them twice, so I crimp them twice on each terminal and use this hydraulic crimping tool from eBay with the 25 millimeter dies. One dash, we slide some heat shrink over the top and then tap it with some. heat once the cells have gathered on the bus bars, we bring it here to the charger and discharge the station.

I use this fantastic little charging unit or x6, they will do a 30 amp charge and discharge to and from our battery banks. I will do a regenerative discharge so I don't waste too much energy. You'll see a charge and discharge cycle every 24 hours or so and these

batteries

come out between 480 and wattages and 400 and 495 base amp hours, so they're pretty close considering it's almost 200 ppm. My patreon members asked me about the voltage drop between negative and positive having the terminals on each end and the design of my bus bar and nickel fuse strip, so I thought: We'll do it through a test quick and then we'll get the positive terminal and the negative terminal, so we're going to go there nice and firm and consistent and on the positive all the way to the other end and we've got three point one eight volts, now I'm going to place five cells on the time and in the middle of a package, so we start from this end and we're going to go to the nickel strip, not the bus bar itself. and we have three point one nine volts from that end, about five cells up three point one nine three point one nine three point one eight, so there's a 0.01 volt difference there and then to the other end three point one eight another time then there is a difference of 0.1 volt between the two ends and we are at a constant 29.99 or 30 amp load there and we are at the bottom of the package, so we have the balanced voltage of the balanced cable as three point two volts. and the battery voltage at the terminals is two point nine four volts with the fourteenth battery complete.

Now this completes this 14s 193P battery, making almost 2,818,650 cells salvaged exclusively from old

laptop

s. I'm so excited to share the next two episodes with you. of this story in the next episode I will be removing the ten kilowatt hour battery that I have had in service for the last four years and replacing it with this one in the final episode I will be installing the battery management system cable management and doing a couple of battery management tests uploads so stay tuned if you haven't already hit the subscribe button and the little bell notification to get notified when my next videos are posted so trimmers.

Thank you very much for tuning in. It's been nice and we'll see you next time.