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

tired of paying you electricity bill or perhaps need a DIY option for your electric vehicle or perhaps your Caravan I have 3000 18 650 cells that I've recovered from used laptops and I plan on upgrading my home energy storage system with an extra 25 kilowatt hours of storage we have got all of the cells sorted here to 100 million power packs so we've got 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 up to 34 hundred million power cells now what I need to do is upgrade the resolution a little bit so I'll be grabbing some packs and I'll be sorting these cells so we've got a 2300 milliamp-hour cell there so we got 2300 million a power to 20 350 and then 23:52 2400 milliamp hours building a battery this way does take quite a bit longer but it does allow us to build a much stronger healthier and hopefully longer-lasting battery [Music] all the cells are sorted into 50 milliamp-hour groups now so we've got 23 24 low 24 high 25 low 25 high 25 high actually they're too low and they're too high so they're 2500 milliamp hours both of those two and that one there is 26 so 26 they're all 26 lows they're all 26 hires and we've got 27 high and then 27 low underneath it we've got 28 high and 28 low we've got 29 low and 29 high we've got 30 low 30 high so now we've got to actually build this into a pack so the way we're going to do this with Excel holders then we'll go through from highest to lowest grab tails from here be cells from here bills from here cells from here and so on and so forth all the way down put them in a Cell holders start over and over again until we build the packs and that way it'll give an even number of each cell in each pack and hopefully build a better stronger pack [Music] placing new insulator rings for the positive terminal to give an extra layer of protection once the fuse nickel sheets have been installed building out the first battery we need to put six cells in here now these six cells are blanks they're 0 volt cells the blue color just indicates that they won't be connected now we need to take our nine cells out of here the three cells here the three cells here and another three cells here that will be empty to allow the room for the holder to go syn at nine cells out we take it from this bottom row because that states the reason it's the lowest quality cells or the lowest and power cells and we just put them to the side now be going through and reciting anything that's not great so be using these drinks quite handy to use and we'll go through the process of that a little bit later but for now we've got to transfer everything from here into here so go turn them all over and put the positive side down so the insulators don't fall out now we're going to be running with all the new cells that are heat-shrink on the outside to make them look nice all the way around the outside and put all these cells on the inside so the ones that are already gray on the inside anything that's not gray will get a new shrink wrap so it's all looking consistent using a small utility knife I run the blade down the side of the cell from the positive end to the negative end to remove the old heat shrink then you can just run your fingernail over the cut to lift the old heat shrink and unwrap the cell being cautious not to lose the little white neoprene insulator underneath the stock heat shrink open in these shrinks is sometimes a little bit difficult they're stuck together pretty well I've found the best way to do it is just use your fingertips right at the very end and snap your fingers like you're actually clicking them it opens them right up then they just slide on over you slider rings go back in and then give them some heat [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] here we're removing the little green center that covers the positive terminal exposing it ready for spot-welding using an empty 10 by 20 cell folder as a template I used a bunch of small nails now directly into my bench to make a rough template for my busbars I initially use some stripped off plastic insulator off the wire I'll be using to figure out the length of the cable I'll end up needing to make the bus pass I'm using some 10 millimeter square or 7 gauge wire that's typically used for earth wire in modern homes for 240 volt power in Australia we strip off the green insulator then twist the copper with a power drill to twist it just a little bit more than standard if the wire isn't straight try reversing the drills direction for a bit and then back forward again applying a little bit of pressure the wire will quickly straighten and will look much better [Music] [Music] [Music] the parallel connection to the 18 650 cells is completed with 5p fused nickel strip supplied by battery hookup the spot welding duties have been taken care of by a K weld spot welder powered by a K cap and the case of ply attached to a CH be served with power supply [Music] I'm almost through all my spot-welding and I've come across a few ways to make this go a little bit faster and a little bit cleaner now there's there's two ways that this nickel strip can go on it comes off the Roll like this and it's quite curled up all the nickel is actually sticking up a little bit we'll take it from down here the nickel itself the little fizzy bit is sort of sticking up just a little bit whereas if you turn it over it's sitting down into the hole quite nicely I've also found from the spot welds that I've done from the last few days we you can see here I've done the spot weld on this angle so across this way now that is to avoid there's the the cell joins there with the fuse and then around here so if you weld on this angle it actually avoids any chance of shorting out this fuse and blowing it similarly it also allows you to go nice and fast you can just go all the way along and I've got it down to about when I do one of these cells on this side in this particular fashion I had probably a 95% success rate getting all the spot welds right the first time but more importantly I can get it done in like three minutes the settings I'm using on the Kay world I'm using 24 jewels and then you can adjust that with the knob all the way up and down that seems to be the perfect balance between speed and performance mode on auto mode so that way when I come over here I there's no foot pedal or anything attached to this K world unit and it's spot welds on so as soon as you contact those two tips it automatically spot welds now you can set the trigger delay we go I've got the 0.4 seconds if you're newer to it I'd go one and a half seconds when you're in this mode you can sort of put it on nah it's not right it's not quite there you can hold it down for a little bit longer get it prepared and then at spot-welds so if we come back over here and we do what is it triggered delay again so that's 2.9 seconds we'll come back down to 2 seconds 0.2 of a second when you do this you've got no time at all you've got to do it got a hit enter this way you've got no time at all you've got to actually get it on and at spot-welds straight away we're doing it this way does allow you to rip out the spot-welds quite quickly if you ever mess up and you actually need to take these nickel strips off they're not really hard all that I usually use is a pair of pliers grab it at one end nice and firmly hold the battery pack down and pull it off that all we have to do is grab a pair of snippy tools and then roll it across and pull the nickel strip off and as you can see it's spot welded down quite well with only two points of spot world rather than four I'm very happy with the way that actually holds down it doesn't need to be any more than that for the load it's going to be under [Music] [Music] to attach the busbars to the nickel strip I've been using this 150 watt solver hang on it's a beast of a unit in combination with the soldering iron I've been using rosin core solder now I picked this up from the local hardware store in the plumbing section soldering iron is probably overkill but it has the thermal mask to do the job quickly and efficiently so basically all that I've been doing is holding it down there for a few seconds grabbing my solder siding a little bit on now I'm heating up the nickel strip as well as the copper busbar hold it down for a second take it off give it a few seconds to cool down and then move to the next one position it get a solder push the busbar down let the flux do its job into the copper buffer and we're done [Music] the lugs I'll be using a 35 by 8 so the 35 square millimeters so they fit on there and it's a nice fit it's not loose but it's not too tight either and they're eight millimeter hole so that's what the 80s after that decrypt them on I double crimp them so I crimp them twice on each terminal and I use this hydraulic crimping tool just from eBay with the 25 millimeter dies [Music] one script we slide a little bit heat shrink over the top and then hit with some heat once the cells been put together in the bus bars been attached we bring it over here to the charger and discharge the station I use this little I charge or x6 fantastic little unit they'll do a 30 amp charge and discharge to and from our battery banks I'll do regenerative discharge so we're not wasting too much energy it'll know a charge and discharge cycle every 24 hours or so and these batteries are coming out in between 480 and powers and 400 and base 495 amp hours so they're fairly close considering they're almost 200 ppm my patreon members has asked me about the voltage drop between the negative and positive having the terminals at either end and the design of my bus bar and the nickel fuse strip so I thought I'd run you through a just a quick test then we'll get the positive terminal and the negative terminal so we're just going to go there nice nice and firm and consistent and on the positive all the way the other end and we've got three point one eight volts now I'm going to get in five cells at a time and sort of in the middle of a pack so we start from this end and we'll go on the nickel strip not on the actual bus bar itself and we've got three point one nine volts of that end about five cells up three point one nine three point one nine three point one eight so 0.01 of a volt difference there and then all the way down the other end three point one eight again so there's 0.1 of a volt difference between the two ends and we are in a constant 29.99 or 30 amp load there and we're at the bottom of the pack so we've got the balanced voltage from 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 14 s 193 P battery making almost 2818 650 cells recovered exclusively from old laptops I'm really excited to share with you the next two episodes of this story in the next episode I'll be removing the ten kilowatt hour battery I've had in service for the past four years or so and replacing it with this one in the final episode I'll be installing the battery management system cable management and doing a couple of load tests so stay tuned for that if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and the little Bell notification so you get notified when my next videos are released so trimmers thank you very much for tuning in this has been an enjoyable one and I'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: HBPowerwall

Views: 1,574,972

Rating: 4.8436666 out of 5

Keywords: HBPowerwall, diy battery, 18650 cells, 18650ED, DIYPowerwalls, kweld, battery hookup, DIYPowerwall, diy 18650 battery, 18650 powerwall, 18650, Battery, diy powerwall, 18650 battery, diy lithium battery, powerwall, Batrium, BMS, powerwall2, jehugarcia, solar battery, offgrid battery, camper battery, kcap, ksupply, coupon code, 18650 battery pack, battery management system, how to lithium battery, Tesla battery, spot welder, portable generator, energy storage, How to, laptop battery

Id: PenPYwa00CA

Length: 17min 0sec (1020 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020