Using Discarded Laptop Batteries To Power Lights 143
mrspoonsi sends news of an IBM study (PDF) which found that discarded laptop batteries could be used to power lights in areas where there's little or no electrical grid. Of the sample IBM tested, 70% of the used batteries were able to power an LED light for more than four hours every day throughout an entire year.
The concept was trialed in the Indian city of Bangalore this year. The adapted power packs are expected to prove popular with street vendors, who are not on the electric grid, as well as poor families living in slums. The IBM team created what they called an UrJar — a device that uses lithium-ion cells from the old batteries to power low-energy DC devices, such as a light. The researchers are aiming to help the approximately 400 million people in India who are off grid.
sorry, all my laptop batteries are dead (Score:1)
If you're discarding laptop batteries while they can still hold a charge, not only are you doing it wrong, there is something very seriously wrong with you.
Re:sorry, all my laptop batteries are dead (Score:5, Informative)
If you're discarding laptop batteries while they can still hold a charge
You are likely to discard the battery as soon as it can no longer hold a satisfactory capacity for your application. The battery is no longer effective for your use at that point, and you're wasting electricity time and $$$ and not getting the portability you want.
Based on the IBM study:
Re: sorry, all my laptop batteries are dead (Score:2)
It would be a good idea to force notebooks vendors to sell an adapter to ease the conection to old baterries.
Like they are forcing cellphones to have USB chargers in Europe.
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IF you look athe picture in the article, it appears the cells have been removed from the battery pack casing, and it says they have been "refurbished". I'm guessing that the cells were checked and failed cells have been replaced.
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That's true, but I don't know of a way of doing any better. Last I check battery packs are sealed, and the cells are inherently integrated with the packaging of the battery, so there isn't an easy way for me to separate individual cells and swap cells out with fresh ones to repurpose or keep using the pack.
I also can't imagine it being affordable to break apart sealed battery packs on a large scale.
These are also Lithium ION batteries; Lithium will catch fire and react explosively if exposed to mo
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A lot of batteries die completely because one cell is faulty. There is loads of info on replacing dead cells in power tool and laptop batteries in the internet, but you can of course recover the remaining good cells and use them for something else. They are popular with people building their own large batteries for solar backup packs.
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It doesn't fill up faster and the efficiency (already poor) goes down the drain.
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IBM did this for PR. It'll likely take far more resources to reuse the old laptop batteries than manufacture a good solution from scratch (like the one you referenced).
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Kinda of hard to do that in the dark. Oh and in Bangalore, they are talking about the poorest of the poor. the lowest caste who CAN"T sell to others ans contact with them makes those people outcasts. But other than that you are sadly correct.
I don't where you come from; but I can certainly tell you one thing that one can sell or buy anything in Bangalore irrespective of his or her caste. Unfortunately, Slashdot doesn't allow to mod and reply to the same discussion. So I had to make a tough choice between trolling you down or replying to your post. I've opted for the latter so that at least you can think before you post the next time.
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Maybe they did it to justify the West dumping all the broken electronics onto a barge and sailing it to India where it becomes somebody else's problem.
This was my first thought. Sounds like a scheme to export an ever-increasing scrap battery problem to the under-developed world, while circumventing the over-developed world's stricter regulations about safe disposal.
India has an average of between 2000 and 3000 hours of sunshine a year, depending on the region, making a far stronger case for solar power and other innovative lighting solutions, such as the recycled plastic bottle [aliteroflight.org] solar pipe light mentioned by thunderclap [slashdot.org].
40 watt PC battery vs. 3 watt LED (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, your laptop battery may not hold enough charge to power your laptop any more, but an LED needs a lot less power than your laptop, depending on what it's being used for. Most of the lightbulb-replacement LED bulbs I've seen want 9-23 watts, but the flashlights are more like 3w, and nightlights are more like 0.5 watts.
Also, that laptop battery is a battery of cells, and they usually don't all die at once. They may not be in good enough shape to remanufacture into new laptop batteries, but still have enough of them good enough to disassemble at third-world labor costs to recover cells for off-grid LED lighting.
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" but an LED needs a lot less power than your laptop,"
Bullshit. I've got LEDs that consume more power than a DESKTOP system with QUAD SLI.
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I've got LEDs that consume more power than a DESKTOP system with QUAD SLI.
Are those LEDs incredibly bright or incredibly inefficient?
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300+ lumens per watt and rising.
In other words, beyond anything you currently understand or have likely ever seen, let alone imagined.
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Ah, so you're just waving your dick around hoping someone will be impressed.
I'd be more impressed if your associated commentary was cognitively coherent:
> beyond anything you... have likely ever seen, let alone imagined.
So, you're suggesting the things I've imagined is a smaller and more restrictive set than the things I've seen? If that's your frame of reference you'll forgive if I'm unimpressed with your "revelations".
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"Ah, so you're just waving your dick around hoping someone will be impressed."
Not my fault you're too incompetent to Google and realize Cree has had this tech out for nearly a year.
Which again, reinforces my point - beyond your imagination, because you can't even see or find out for yourself. You seem to lack the cognitive ability. Pretty typical of a 7-digit UID holder.
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You seem to lack the cognitive ability. Pretty typical of a 7-digit UID holder.
What is wrong with you, Sonny, is that some early onset Alzheimer's or were you born like that?
Let me guess, your fancy LED lets you see the past and the future in addition to seeing everything I've seen or imagined?
How many tinfoil layers does the hat need to block the radiation?
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Yes, there are some high-power, high efficiency LEDs out there. My point is - so what? That only strengthens the original point that an LED consumes far less power than a similarly bright (the implied quality you seem to have completely overlooked) incandescent.
Yes, a fire hose can move astounding amounts of water very quickly, but that has absolutely no bearing on the fact that a $5 treadle pump would revolutionize the world.
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I'm doubting these are a single LED but a bunch of LEDs stuck together.
Even if it is a single LED, that's not what we're talking about. We're
talking about low watt LEDs that can run for days on a small battery.
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Cree XP-G2 is a single-diode LED at 10w.
We've got LARGE-PLANE LEDs now that require that much power. We're past COB arrays. Get with the times or don't speak about a subject you know nothing about, yea?
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What's the point? Yes, LED First-World light bulbs are a thing. They can be big and bright and consume significant amounts of power, albeit less than older lamps do.
But I make coffee in the morning using a 3-diode LED reading lamp that's had the same 2 AA batteries powering it for about 18 months now. It's still bright enough to find my way around the kitchen. And, for that matter, to read by.
We're not necessarily talking about turning slum shacks into the Metropolitan Opera house, just adding enough light
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Okay. Next time, I'll just pop the battery from my old laptop into my new laptop. Because there's nothing at all proprietary about the shape of the case.
Re: sorry, all my laptop batteries are dead (Score:1)
This is /. and no one has commented on restoring your own batteries by swapping out dead cells. It's the same in RC, power tools, and even forklifts. Or throw away and buy new. Whatever.
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Personally, I prefer not to use a soldering iron around electronics while they're carrying electricity. Maybe it's just me.
But yes, you can do that. Very few people do.
Re: sorry, all my laptop batteries are dead (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, I was soldering tabbed NiCD batteries into packs for my RC car when I was 12. Being afraid of small, low-voltage power sources because high-power sources could hurt you is like being afraid of house cats because lions and tigers can hurt you.
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I got thrown across the room by a picture tube's hot lead when I was about that age. So you'll forgive me for being overly cautious. :-)
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A quote from wikipedia to drive the point home:
A flyback transformer and its associated circuitry operate at very high voltages at low currents ( far beyond mains voltage. While most flybacks do not supply enough power to kill directly, the voltage they employ can cause violent muscle spasms if touched; and such spasms usually cause injury. A common injury that occurs when one is shocked is actually to be injured not as much by the shock itself, but when the victim's hand or arm is thrown back against other internal components in the display device. Therefore, only trained persons should touch or modify these devices, after first ensuring that the transformer is switched off and any stored energy has been safely discharged. The CRT attached to the flyback has an inherent capacitance which can hold a high voltage charge for more than a week after the power is switched off.
So your ignorance about electricity then means overly cautious now. Don't be.
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I wasn't ignorant about electricity then. I just screwed up when disconnecting the flyback from the picture tube. (I don't remember why I was disconnecting the flyback; it was too long ago.)
And FWIW, I'm not worried about getting shocked by three or four volts—I've touched bare batteries often enough that they don't really concern me. I'm worried about using tools around them, though, for several reasons:
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dgatwood may be over-paranoid, but Lithium Ion batteries aren't to be messed with unless you enjoy dealing with thermal runaway.
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I'll chime in for the "actual experience" bit. I've twice seen li-ion batteries suffer catastrophic failure due to mishandling. Both times it was cheap Ebay Nokia replacement batteries that went up in smoke and a bit of flame after the phone was dropped.
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I followed a thread on candlepowerforums about a guy who experienced permanent lung damage due to two mismatched lithium ion batteries in a flash light - one was presumably significantly in a different state of charge OR just a bad cell; experienced severe discharging and proceeded to thermal runaway in his house. In trying to get the light outside, he breathed in the toxic fumes and has permanent lung damage as a result. Be careful....
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Spoken by someone who probably never had a house cat snap at their forearm and have one of their fangs neatly catch the middle of a tendon as it sunk in. True, not as bad as a lion or tiger, but weeks of pain and discomfort nonetheless. And, it was our cat who did this -- a rescue cat who was very affectionate but had, shall I say, some "quirks" that if your attention wandered could result in suboptimal results.
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Always bring a shotgun to a cat fight. Just to remind you,
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Yea, but that's NiCD, which doesn't care TOO much about being heated up so much.
Now go do that with Lithium 18650 batteries. Hope you don't cause thermal runaway and have that battery explode.
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You can't do that with a laptop battery pack. It would mess up the gas gauge counter (which, depending on the pack's firmware, could or could be not a recoverable event) and also could damage the cell-sensing circuits (during the initial assembly, there is a precise order in which the cells are connected to the pcb).
Only 1S packs could be replaced this way, but these don't use the standard 18650 units and are not found in laptops.
Re:sorry, all my laptop batteries are dead (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with Lithium ion batteries is that their failure mode is often really obnoxious. When one cell in a pack fails, the battery ceases to be usable as a laptop battery, because as soon as you discharge down below some arbitrary fraction of its capacity, the voltage suddenly plummets below the operating threshold for your hardware, and the machine shuts itself off unceremoniously, with no opportunity to save your work or shut down cleanly. If the failure percentage is 5%, a few people will put up with it, and make a mental note not to let it get too low. If the battery drops dead at 60%, or if the failure point is a bit more variable, then you have to be pretty seriously hardcore to keep using the battery, because you risk losing all your data if you do.
However, under a lighter current draw, those same batteries will behave much better. The voltage probably won't sag at all, because (if I understand the problem correctly) there's enough time for the charge to properly redistribute itself across the entire pack even with a single, high-resistance (bad) cell. And even if it does sag, a voltage sag on an LED light would just make it put out less light, which isn't a big deal. For that matter, if they're cracking open the packs, they could probably fully utilize most of the cells for years before they would fail, so long as they toss the cells that have failed.
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" And even if it does sag, a voltage sag on an LED light would just make it put out less light"
LEDs are voltage-operated devices, if the voltage sags, odds are you're not going to keep the LED lit. 3.7v nominal li-ion cell drops below 3v (most white LEDs require 3v minimum) and it's simply not going to work any longer.
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But we're talking about a laptop battery pack, which is probably wired in groups of 4 cells. The laptop will tolerate down to... maybe 11.4V (12V - 5%) and the highest voltage the pack will ever produce is about 16V. If you naïvely design a light using four LEDs in series, then y
Re:sorry, all my laptop batteries are dead (Score:5, Interesting)
An incredibly useful amount of light can be provided by an LED headlamp for many, hours running on just a pair of AAA batteries. I hang it around camp all the time as a lantern providing indirect light, or more than enough direct light to read by. And that represents about 3Wh of capacity, versus the 60Wh for a smallish laptop battery. That small battery, reduced to only 10% of it's already meager original capacity, is not going to give you even remotely enough power for your laptop to be portable anymore, but would still provide twice the capacity of that headlamp. At 20% capacity you're probably overdue for a battery replacement if mobility is important to you, and that will give you 8 AAAs worth of power.
So we've got what, maybe $8 worth of decent quality NiMH-equivalnets right there, being thrown away as nicely packaged trash? If you can harness that trash stream to make solar lamps you could improve a lot of lives, while making sure those batteries get every last bit of life wrung out of them by people who know the value of a nickel.
I see two potential problems though - the first is pollution: we'd be interrupting a recycling-stream (one can hope) to re-purpose the batteries. We'd want to make sure they get back into that stream when fully dead. Hopefully there's large enough profit margins or subsidies in the system that people can make money buying dead batteries from people in the slums and villages to sell to the recycling plants, otherwise we have to trust to sufficient environmental awareness to keep these things out of the rubbish heaps.
The second is the fire hazard. I'm not certain how much, the fire hazard of a Li-ion battery increases when it's on its last legs, but distributing large quantities of low-individual-risk firebombs among the world's slums could be unfortunate.
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In every 'dead' laptop battery I've torn down, one cell (or pair, in parallel) is totally kaput, and the remaining cells retain at least 50% of their nameplate capacity. Protection circuitry will lockout recharging of the whole pack, which wouldn't work with the dead cell anyway.
So the battery as a whole is utterly useless for the laptop, but 2/3rds of the cells or more have some life left in them, for other purposes.
I imagine a lot of the too-cheap-to-be-true off-label replacement laptop batteries are in f
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"Protection circuitry will lockout recharging of the whole pack, which wouldn't work with the dead cell anyway"
A lot of packs have irreversible lockouts - once a pack has failed it won't charge even if the failed cell is replaced.
"Programmed obselescence", etc etc. There's no good reason for this kind of obnoxious behaviour, except to make the packs "unrepairable"
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The most common cause for laptop batteries failing is one cell has failed. Usually the one on the end of the battery that's closest to the CPU or otherwise hotter than the others.
The rest of the cells won't be that bad.
What happens to these at the true end-of-life? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do the communities who benefit from the secondary-use life of these batteries have the infrastructure and culture to properly recycle the materials; or will they end up in landfill/discarded into the environment?
Stangley yes. Probably better than we have (Score:3)
If not, we didn't care before when we sent them our batteries so why should caring about it be an issue now when it can get in the way of an improvement?
Was a real answer what you were looking for or was it just a petty flag waving exercise that makes us all look bad?
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More likely they have the cheap labor and lack of environmental laws so the processing of the materials and disposal of the waste is much more economical.
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I have to agree overall, but perhaps it is worth focusing exclusively on regions that have an existing electronics recycling industry. That way the worst case is they're ending up in the same places as now. For India they have this already, in Africa I suspect it varies substantially from country to country what type of wastes people are used to handling.
I know when I donate used electronics (for recycling) and expired textiles, the electronics are going to Asia and the textiles are going to Africa where 2
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Lithium cells are pretty benign in general. There are a few variants in chemistry, the worst would probably be the cobalt based ones. (others use various combinations of iron, nickel, manganese, and phosphorous, which are pretty tame). Though the cobalt variants are quite common.
NiCd is far worse, cadmium is fairly nasty... much more than cobalt.
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Do the communities who benefit from the secondary-use life of these batteries have the infrastructure and culture to properly recycle the materials
I have an idea - let's get them evening lighting they can afford, so they can be a bit more productive and start building the wealth they'll need to get into a modernized high-tech society.
Look into the history of lamp oil prices, for instance, and its impact on economic development. Teaser: $140/gal (2014) for lamp oil before the Industrial Revolution.
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>> that'll pollute *their* environment, not ours, right?
I think you've hit the nail on their head. It sounds like someone's just figured out a way to turn this problem:
Q) How do we ship all our old batteries to a third-world country and then dump them in local landfills, gullies and rivers?
into this opportunity:
A) Repackage the batteries individually and ship them to locals in third-party countries. Then, when they dump the batteries improperly - hey, it's not our fault - we TRIED to give them flashl
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Because re-use requires a trip to a special handler of electronic materials, and recycling is done curbside. If you could get the garbage haulers to invest in electronics recycling and put it curbside, then people would know it is more important to somebody than the recycling.
They are opening up the packs, testing... (Score:2)
... and using only the "good" elements (when one or two elements fail the battery is dead for laptop use).
This is precisly what I've been doing for many years, any decent flashlight (or R/C or electronics) forum has at least one huge thread about people doing this.
I have an electric bike pack made out of the best cells recovered from (dead) laptops batteries. I've been using the individual cells for (flash)lights for years and in fact there are so many fake (or just "cheap") 18650 on the market now that if
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"
This is precisly what I've been doing for many years, any decent flashlight (or R/C or electronics) forum has at least one huge thread about people doing this."
Yep, and half the times I've seen it on Candlepower, someone invariably does something stupid because the wannabe EEs that made the thread still don't have half a clue about what they're talking about. Next thing you know you've got pictures of thermal runaway and melted metal flashlights (because lithium fires are fucking HOT.)
Unless one is Class-D
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"half the time... invariably" you can just stop there, you're just reciting anecdotes like a meathead. You may or may not know anything about batteries, but just speaking to humans about batteries you "still don't have a clue."
Did you ever consider people troll the threads with those pictures either as a warning, or because the pictures are exiting? What makes you think that the existence of negative forum responses means anything at all?
Do you figure that when the user you respond to, who has a lower user
Old LiIon batteries, what could possibly go wrong? (Score:3)
So, these recycled batteries are being charged with what kind of charging controller, using what kind of input power?
If it's something creative like solar, I'd be very surprised if we don't get an impressive fire out of the first 100 unit-years of use...
Even if they have "grid power" to charge from, the charge controllers had better be good enough to sense a damaged cell, and when those sophisticated chargers refuse to charge the pack anymore, some genius level electrical engineer will hook up a "dumb" NiCad charger to the pack and get some more life out of it - the practice will spread and it won't be long before somebody sets the shanty town ablaze...
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That's really my question here: what is the power return after charging a typical battery pack. If you wind up putting in 10Whrs to get 1 back out, then I'd have to wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient just to burn candles & kerosene. The fact that you're using an LED will be insignificant compared to the wasted power during the charging.
If a cell won't charge, then you're toting around a block of dead weight between the site of charging and the site of usage. (Not efficient.) If a cell won't hold a
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The article mentioned that this was meant for places off the grid, so I'd assume they're using something like solar to charge the cells.
If that's the case, then there's nothing really wasted, since the sun will shine anyway.
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One of the great ironies of our modern era is the simultaneous effort to reduce technology consuming westerners to the level of subsistence farmers in the name of ecology and to turn subsistence farmers into technology consuming westerners in the name of development.
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For the shallow reader wanting to save materials and energy, this looks like a great idea.
It isn't for people who have internet and time to read crap like this site.
For somebody with a name involving patents, it seems exceptionally daft to trot out the old "if this really were a good idea, someone would have put it into use decades ago." Uhm, no. Who the fuck told you that ideas make it to market based on how "good" they are?! Poor child, you've been lied to.
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I'd be worried if somebody is using altered chargers to charge the battery even though they will make it so that it doesn't fit the same charger. But that is always true. That would be the exact same problem if they were being given free new laptops with working batteries, too. So that is a non-comment.
Electricity only comes in one type. Solar energy does not create different electricity that a power grid. It isn't flat or flabby or watered down, it doesn't have bees or mosquitoes stuck in it. In places tha
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Solar energy is actually flabby and watered down as it is typically delivered, especially on shoestring budgets.
When you have access to "mains" 110 or 220 VAC at 10+ amps, you trim it down and deliver it exactly as desired to charge your cells (within the budget constraints of how "smart" you can make the charger) in this scenario, the aged cells can probably be handled safely.
When you have 0.1sqm of budget solar cells delivering your power, and an aged LiIon cell as your storage medium, the electronics bet
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You should really look into it if you're so interested, find out about how to create simple circuits that only charge at the correct voltage and current.
You don't just grab a photovoltaic cell and duct tape the wires to the battery.
the most costly part (Score:2)
so you trade out the cost of a battery for labor, and the battery is still damaged goods when done
To coin Barry Manalow... (Score:1)
So are they remanufacturing them? (Score:2)
Are they basically just remanufacturing the recovered cells into some kind of standardized battery pack with a standardized charging and usage interfaces?
I'm curious why this isn't done now if there's value in the cells vs. a more material-based recycling that uses them as input into creating new cells. I'd wager the argument is basically economic -- the cost of some other kind of battery input (new alkaline cells or "good" Li cells or whatever) is cheaper/better than these kinds of cells.
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tore open discarded laptop battery packaging and extracted individual storage units called cells, tested those individually to pick out the good ones, and recombined them to form refurbished battery packs...IBM is not considering this as a business but says the technology could be offered free to poor countries.
The reason nobody has done this before is because someone has to pay for it.
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Risk. Your laptop battery pack shuts down if one of eight (or whatever) LiON cells goes below some threshold. So it doesn't overheat and catch fire in your carry-on luggage or somewhere equally inconvenient. But this means that the other seven cells are probably near the end of their life as well. So replacing the one bad one isn't an economically viable option.
The upside of TFA's proposed application is that these single cells, used for a lighting application probably present a lower hazard risk than in a
Most batteries have cell management done wrong (Score:2)
Unfortunately, most multi-cell batteries do cell management wrong and are unable to isolate dead cells. A typical "dead" battery has one bad cell, with other cells having more than another lifetime of reasonable performance ahead of them. Most laptop and power tool batteries will work completely satisfactorily if you merely break up the cells and apply proper cell and charge management that is able to extract charge from and impart charge to each cell independent of other cells.
Most "dead" batteries that pe
Indians need light? (Score:1)
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You are Exactly the person the grandparent post is talking about.
Here in Japan, we have current meters on a lot of electrical panels (Because you likely don't know: Japan is a major 1st world country, was #2 GDP until a year or so ago). Also, our electricity service is about 30 amps per residence. I have heat on when I need it, in the rooms I need it in (guess what... just like North America before about 1960s). I take the train to the office at 1/10th the cost, save the fuel/pollution and do email/read
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If you want to live that way, then do it. But don't tell others they have to live that way. It's not to anyone's detriment other than the person spending. And it doesn't matter if someone else wastes something that isn't yours so let it go already.
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And it doesn't matter if someone else wastes something that isn't yours
Yes, it does matter.
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You surely have chosen the right nickname!
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> It's not to anyone's detriment other than the person spending.
False premise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
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And I will false premise your false premise. External costs are realized by cheaper prices to the consumer which is a shortcut to you paying for them anyways if the costs of every single externality was actually built into the cost of everything. Unthinkers like you likely assume that these external costs would come out of the profit those greedy share holders make like the pension funds and crap which is wrong. Those costs would be folded into the costs of products which you would end up paying anyways. An
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You understanding of economics is poor. You also missed the main point: Externalities usually affect others than those who benefit from cheaper prices.
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It all works out in the wash. Your vegan all natural food benifited from the same cheap energy costs that my fast food did. Your prius takes advantAge of the same exteralities that my diesel truck did. Your solar pannels are the same. But in the same sense of "you didn't build that", the exact proportipns aren't the exact same but it works out kn the wash.
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Rather obviously it does not work out in the wash. This discussion was about the massive waste of energy in the US which leads to a per capita consumption which is about twice that of other highly developed countries such as Japan and Germany and order of magnitude compared to developing countries. The externalities of the energy use affect people globally (like the war in Iraq and its dire consquences or global warming). As such, your idea that "It's not to anyone's detriment other than the person spendi
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It still works out in the wash.
Japan and Germany has benefited greatly over the years from the US wasting energy. The obvious is the lack of military needed by them because the US wasted energy, the investment the US has directly put into them by bases and such. But there are other ways they benefited like economic stability (trading with the US) and tourism dollars. Welcome to the new world order I guess. It's the same as the old world order except someone not as innocent as you thought.
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Blah blah blah, I don't understand the concept of opportunity cost therefore people should ignore the expense of replacing equipment that is a little wasteful of a resource that is currently very cheap.
You don't need a 1kWe monster for day-to-day tasks, but if you want to have one for special tasks (computer game playing might be a hobby of yours, and is certainly less energy intensive than other hobbies you might have. Auto racing, for example), it might not make sense to also have an 80W computer for general use.
To pay off a $300, 80W machine in this scenario, at US prices you'd need to have like 3000 hours of low-intensity computing tasks. That's the break-even point assuming you're comparing it to a
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Nobody ever said that- that I am aware of. I most certainly did not. If you think I did, you might want to try a different translation service or something. All I said was do what you want to do, and let everyone else do what they want to do. It's a simple premise of freedom.
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"I wonder why they don't use car batteries instead?"
... because pretty much everything from a dead car battery can be recycled to make new car batteries and other stuff [batteryrecycling.com] ...
The battery is broken apart in a hammer mill; a machine that hammers the battery into pieces. The broken battery pieces are then placed into a vat, where the lead and heavy materials fall to the bottom and the plastic floats. At this point, the polypropylene pieces are scooped away and the liquids are drawn off, leaving the plastic
Polypropylene pieces are washed, blown dry, and sent to a plastic recycler where the pieces are melted together into an almost liquid state. The molten plastic is put through an extruder that produces small plastic pellets of a uniform size. The pellets are sold to a manufacturer of battery cases and the process begins again.
Lead grids, lead oxide, and other lead parts are cleaned and heated within smelting furnaces. The molten melted lead is then poured into ingot molds. After a few minutes, the impurities float to the top of the still molten lead in the ingot molds. These impurities are scraped away and the ingots are left to cool. When the ingots are cool, they’re removed from the molds and sent to battery manufacturers, where they’re re-melted and used in the production of new batteries.
Old battery acid can be handled in two ways: 1) The acid is neutralized with an industrial compound similar to household baking soda. Neutralization turns the acid into water. The water is then treated, cleaned, tested in a waste water treatment plant to be sure it meets clean water standards. 2) The acid is processed and converted to sodium sulfate, an odorless white powder that’s used in laundry detergent, glass, and textile manufacturing.
Indians... (Score:1)
Poor people tend to breed more because:
You could sterilise them now, but the slums would still be repopulated in no time if you don't tackle the root causes of poverty.