From what I've seen (and I haven't really been following this), they're rather using old electric car batteries to do that. Electric cars have been around long enough for there to be old/broken ones available now and most of the cells in their banks are still good.
DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
101–110 of 183 posts
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not true for any of the United States. You can’t call yourself a Professional Engineer without being licensed, but anyone can call themselves an engineer. Train engineer, growth engineer, happiness engineer, and software engineer are all perfectly valid titles without a P.E. license.
Try calling yourself an engineer in Texas without proper licensure. http://www.mystatesman.com/news/state--regional-govt--politi... And the relevant court case: http://www.soah.texas.gov/pfdsearch/pfds/460/16/460-16-0550-...
The funny thing about that is, at least when I worked in the oil business, I'm not sure I've seen another industry that threw around the "engineer" with more abandon for technicians of all stripes.
I'd note that's a case where a business is representing themselves as an engineering firm and, and in some situations, it would be reasonable to expect that meant they employed licensed engineers. (The specific case is pretty silly though so is calling themselves engineers.) But individuals certainly call themselves and are called engineers all the time who aren't licensed in Texas and everyplace else.
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#103I appreciate the engineering and time people are putting into these projects. I absolutely hate the way this article is portraying these people's work. These are not "consumers who can't afford commercially produced powerwalls." These are people who could probably work professionally in the field if they're not already. These projects are not "a little research, invested time, and a little ingenuity," they are the cu…
While we're at it, what's reddit electronics subreddit say about this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/wiki/beginners
tl;dr; do not attempt anything with powerelectricity without safety precautions
ps: there are many electric safety pdf issued from various US states such as https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/dosh_publications/Electrical_Saf...
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really agree with you. The idea of a homebuilt powerwall sounds really cool. But it's not something I would come close to working with. Awhile ago I did a some volunteer work at a radio station. One of my tasks was to check for arcing. That involved going into the transformer room, disabling the safety systems, unracking some of the electrical components, powering the system on, turning off the lights and then look…
High voltage, sure, but outside of an inverter that you can/should buy prepackaged none of this needs to be high voltage. The system in the embedded video has 14 sets of cells in series, meaning 40-60 volts.
How many watts are we dealing with here? What's the actual power output of a 1 second long direct short? I'm pretty sure if you shorted that 40-60 volts across a hotdog it would explode. Even if we disregard if that voltage can stop a heart (which it can, 50v is minimum), the amount of power you are dealing with is the amount of power that causes things to explode.
I wouldn't go anywhere near a diy power bank without proper knowledge and training.
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#105This sounds like it could be rather dangerous, no? Connecting up a bunch of old lithium cells of unknown origin and using them hard. I'd also worry about an insurance claim being denied if it burned my house down. However, I very much approve of the DIY ingenuity and repurposing of old stuff.
Luckily, home owners' insurance covers stupidity as well as acts of God. So as long as there is no evidence of intentional arson, then insurance would have to pay.
In the case of electrical improvements (like hooking your hacked battery up to mains power) your insurance company just needs to do a little digging. They just need to find out if there were improvements without permits or if those improvements weren't made to code.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/interior-projects/how-t...
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't unique to Telsa, all vehicles are becoming more difficult to repair as computers and software replace what used to be handled by mechanical systems. I would actually much prefer to drive next to a Tesla knowing that the guy behind the wheel (potentially staring into space as it drives itself) hasn't implemented any "hacks". A similar argument exists for why DIY battery banks are not ideal. It's not inconce…
This stuff isn't black magic, it's science and engineering. As more hackers participate in this space, the open source components and techniques will get better and better (I'm not familiar with open source battery management systems but I would bet there is already some good stuff out there). I think there are a lot bigger dangers to hand-wring over than nerds needing out over this stuff. I think there are as many o…
> As more hackers participate in this space, the open source components and techniques will get better and better
I so strongly disagree with this assumption. We got a nascent not even close to open source scene on x86 and a few hobbyist tweak boards. They still use proprietary hardware, the firmware is still almost always proprietary, the drivers are often proprietary, and for general users 99% of their OSes are proprietary.
And the consequences of that world that doesn't care about right to repair or software freedoms or having control of computers impacts me. I can't get an x86 pc now without a hardware backdoor, I can't use 802.11an wifi without proprietary code, I can't display visuals to a screen without proprietary code. The screen itself is running a ton of proprietary code. My hard drive has a computer in it and thats wholly proprietary.
And that was in an ecosystem where moddability was handed to us on a silver platter with ACPI which only existed for IBM and Microsofts sake, not for anyone elses. It was not a charity. That is why we still have no mobile platforms that use a standard hardware abstraction layer that you can run a generic OS on.
The Internet of Things never developed an open source ecosystem. SmartTVs never developed an open source ecosystem. Set top boxes and consoles never devleoped an open source ecosystem. Cars almost certainly will never develop an even remotely functional open source ecosystem - companies will use open source code, because someone else did the work for them and they can save money. They won't contribute back, they won't respect their users, and they won't respect the developers that put in thousands of hours of free labor by sponsoring them. That isn't open source winning, that is corporate profits winning.
Look at John Deere. That is where we are going. This is not going to be a simple matter of find the ethernet jack, telnet into a shell, and start running code. This is signed payloads, read only rom, and no way to access the firmware.
If there is an open source car ecosystem, it will be like the open source phone OS world. A joke, that cannot practically run on anything, that at best is ripping half of the Android equivalent out of itself to even run. And I guarantee Ford et al will never be as philanthropic as Google was in open sourcing Android to release their car OSes middleware like that.
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#107One of the really disappointing things about Tesla is how incredibly proprietary all of their products are. For a company that has such lofty goals as "saving the world", it feels wrong to me for them to then sell DRM cars and unrepairable black boxes. Maybe I'm just too idealistic, but surely if we have an opportunity to create a new market for solar devices why would we decide to recreate the proprietary world of t…
This isn't unique to Telsa, all vehicles are becoming more difficult to repair as computers and software replace what used to be handled by mechanical systems. I would actually much prefer to drive next to a Tesla knowing that the guy behind the wheel (potentially staring into space as it drives itself) hasn't implemented any "hacks". A similar argument exists for why DIY battery banks are not ideal. It's not inconce…
Security precludes freedom. The trend from just about anyone being able to build their own home a half century ago to not being able to even make your own battery pack just shows the trend away from the freedom to experiment.
The right to repair died once magic computers came into the world. Before that trying to tell anyone their mechanical / electrical systems were undocumented proprietary and warranty breaking if you tried to repair them would have caused a riot. But since computers were sufficiently magical that a critical enough mass of people wrote off trying to understand them, the industry and all resulting industries undermined the right to actually own anything related to them.
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not true for any of the United States. You can’t call yourself a Professional Engineer without being licensed, but anyone can call themselves an engineer. Train engineer, growth engineer, happiness engineer, and software engineer are all perfectly valid titles without a P.E. license.
Try calling yourself an engineer in Texas without proper licensure. http://www.mystatesman.com/news/state--regional-govt--politi... And the relevant court case: http://www.soah.texas.gov/pfdsearch/pfds/460/16/460-16-0550-...
https://www.dice.com/jobs?q=software+engineer&l=Texas
-> 1 - 30 of 3,061 positions
doesn't seem to have scared too many away from the title..
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they can prove you knew it was an increased fire risk, they won’t cover it.
If it's not in the policy "we don't cover homemade lithium projects", your covered. Very few things a home policy won't cover like nuclear war, terrorist acts for example. If your operating as a home business building these then that could be an issue, otherwise you can be an idiot and build whatever you want and your covered.
We don't cover !@#$ing with the utilities in ways that are not standard is probably in there somewhere..
Re: DIY Powerwall Builders Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries to Power Their Homes
#110I wonder, they don't seem to put protection / monitoring circuitry in on the per-cell level (which would be prohibitively expensive). How do you know when a cell or a block of cells go bad? Or does it not matter? I think it could be bad if the resistance of one increases and you have a bunch of them in series...
Luckily they are not connected in series and the packs are monitored.