People Are Using Recycled Laptop Batteries To Power Their Homes (vice.com) 157
New submitter gooddogsgotoheaven writes: DIY Powerwall builders from around the world are harvesting old laptop batteries and turning them into powerful batteries capable of supplying energy to their entire homes. "It's the future. It's clean, simple, efficient and powerful," Jehu Garcia, one of the most popular powerwall builders, told me. He and people like him are deciding for themselves what the future of alternative energy will look like, instead of waiting for technology companies to shape it for them. "The end result is being able to rely on something I not only built myself but understand the ins and outs of to power some or all of my electricity in my home. That is inspiring," Joe Williams, another powerwall builder, told me.
IDTS (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus. Nope, nope, nope. Dying in a fire isn't my preferred way to go.
Re:IDTS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IDTS (Score:5, Insightful)
I have had more than double the number of batteries for my laptops than I have had laptops.
Battery lifetimes seem to be about a third of the computer.
Where are they getting perfectly good batteries that are "recycled"?
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Re: IDTS (Score:2)
Indeed. From my own personal disassembly, inspection and testing of both laptop battery packs and power tool battery packs, I'd say the laptop battery packs are engineered to fail. The Ryobi Li-Ion power tool battery packs I've had show far more advanced circuitry inside of them to maintain perfect charge balance between all 5 cells used in series. I've used my Ryobi packs heavily for years and have never had any completely shutdown -- only degrade in charge run-time slowly over time.
Laptop batteries on the
Re: IDTS (Score:2, Interesting)
They're not perfectly good. Most often, one group of cells is dead, but the others are fine. Sometimes all are fine, but so out of balance that the electronics cannot rectify it. Sometimes they are worn and don't have enough capacity for a portable application. And sometimes all cells are fine but the electronics is faulty.
Re:IDTS (Score:5, Informative)
Laptop batteries are made up for several individual cells. Often only one or two cells die, and the rest are fine. Take the pack apart, test each cell and discard the duff ones.
This happens because cheap cells have variable quality, and because heat kills batteries but tends to be very uneven in a laptop, mostly on one side where the CPU is.
Between old laptop batteries and old power tool batteries, and even written off cars, you can get a nearly infinite supply of very cheap/free LiPo cells that just need disassembling and testing.
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I don't know. Disassembling a Li-Ion battery pack is a little like disarming a bomb. Get some thick plexiglass to protect yourself :-)
For stationary use, you can't go wrong with NiFe batteries. You just need lots of space, and maybe your own forklift...
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If these people were doing that, fine. They are not. They put these battery packs right in their homes.
They are amateurs with no idea of risk management or statistics and often only passing EE skills.
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If these people were doing that, fine. They are not. They put these battery packs right in their homes. They are amateurs with no idea of risk management or statistics and often only passing EE skills.
And yet from TFA:
Most hobbyists I spoke to said they don't keep their powerwalls inside their homes for safety reasons or to comply with local regulations.
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Most hobbyists I spoke to said they don't keep their powerwalls inside their homes for safety reasons or to comply with local regulations.
And then you look at the pictures in the article...
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Meh, you build yourself a little block shed separated from your house.
Yeah, that's what the Nuclear Boy Scout did.
Maybe we should encourage more folks to skip those dangerous batteries, and go straight for their own private nukes . . . ?
You'll shoot your eye out kid! (Score:2)
Re: IDTS (Score:1)
I could say the same about car tinkerers. Gasoline is flammable as fuck.
And I find that the average intelligence among those who like to tinker with electricity is higher than that among those who like to tinker with cars.
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And the coming wave of cars to tinker with that have THREE batteries. In different places.For different purposes.
Great fun. Next, sourcing new dash screens in 14 years
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That's why you don't work on your car in your living room.
Re: IDTS (Score:4, Funny)
That's why you don't work on your car in your living room.
Well, for some of us folks . . . that rusty Chevy up on cinder blocks on the front lawn IS the living room . . .
Re:IDTS (Score:5, Interesting)
That was also my first thought, before I read TFA. Searching on 'safe' in it I find these quotes, and it's not all the hits:
So, there is definitely some caution here, and awareness that such pre-used batteries may not be useful enough due to low charge levels.
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Fires bad, mmmm'kay?
Fire burns and stuff.
Not that I know about electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Not that I know about electricity (Score:1)
If you did know about electricity, you would know (or know how to learn) which parts of the idea are bad and how to avoid or minimize the dangers.
Re: Not that I know about electricity (Score:4, Insightful)
Good thing I have slashdot commenters to know this stuff for me. So ya. What guy this said...
by burtosis ( 1124179 )
The problem with using laptop batteries is not the batteries, the tesla uses them. The problem is the smart battery circuitry needed to monitor currents and voltages, balance cells, thermally monitor strings (or ideally individual cells), gas gauge, and safely disconnect problem cells from the system. The major advancement in the tesla is the amazing cooling/heating system and the ability to rewire itself to stop using problem cells. Simply wiring up a bank of unmonitored cells is a disaster waiting to happen. The vast majority of home hobbiests lack the knowledge and wherewithal to implement proper battery safety. The packs in the stock photos, if lithium cells, are a disaster in the making. Disclaimer: have designed smart battery circuits for lithium batteries used in actual products.
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You would be surprised how many good cells get thrown away. Often one cell in a pack dies and the whole pack is discarded, despite the rest of the cells having plenty of life left in them.
Written off cars are another source of well maintained, barely used cells - a Nissan Leaf 24kWh pack will easily do 200k miles with 20% capacity loss even with constant rapid charging and 100% top-offs, so one with 40k miles that gets written off is going to have a lot of cells with a lot of life left in them.
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But this seems to be a really, really bad idea. Just on the face of it.
My friend cut himself sharpening his knife the other day. On the face of it, pretty much everything seems like a bad idea if you have no idea what you're doing.
And how much is your fire insurance premium? (Score:1)
Just asking...
Other sources of cheap batteries (Score:5, Funny)
I think there's a huge stash of "almost new" Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries that aren't being used now.
Re:While you joke... (Score:4, Funny)
Those would probably be perfectly fine for use in a static enclosure.
The problem that caused the fires was related to those battery packs being overflexed due to their size and the limited rigidity of the note 7 case for those size batteries was it not?
I have a mental image of a house down the street exploding after a minor earthquake. The neighbors are all loafing around the sidewalk looking at the debris. "A-yep. Samsung batteries. Shouldna used 'em."
Re:Other sources of cheap batteries (Score:5, Funny)
I think there's a huge stash of "almost new" Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries that aren't being used now.
I've got a few crates of them stored away for winter. It's gonna slash my heating bill by 70%!
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If you can get past the smell.
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I work in IT - I got used to bad smells long ago.
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If the smell you've gotten used to is smoke escaping from batteries, someone is doing something wrong.
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I think there's a huge stash of "almost new" Samsung Galaxy Note 7 batteries that aren't being used now.
Just surround them with thermoelectric generating materials and you'd do fine... Hell, you'll probably get a credit back from the local utility company.
Subject: Fire (Score:1)
Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road... no, that's too formal.
[deletes text, starts again]
Fire - exclamation mark - fire - exclamation mark - help me - exclamation mark. 123 Cavendon Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. Yours truly, Maurice Moss.
They're full of 18650's. (Score:1)
I run my flash lights, USB battery packs, and e-cigarette with 18650 cells salvaged from old laptop batteries. And working in IT gives me an unlimited supply of them.
Of course, like fryer oil, they won't be free once enough people find a use for them.
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High drain 26650's [gearbest.com] are the real schnizzle at about 5 bucks each.
Lithium batteries are not to be taken lightly (Score:5, Informative)
They are very power efficient, and also very dangerous:
- Overcharge it too much: boom
- Drain it completely, and then try to charge: boom
- Puncture: boom
- Overheat: boom
- Make your own battery with cells you found around, and not use a good controller: boom, boom, boom
Of course it is possible to use lots of cheap batteries, with a very good controller system. This is what Tesla does for its current cars. However the system needs to monitor each cell and pack, and have safety precautions to disconnect them if them become faulty.
Basically, do not try this at home.
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Basically, do not try this at home.
So, I can still power my home with it, right?
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Basically, do not try this at home.
So, I can still power my home with it, right?
Yes you could but it's like giving a 4yr old the controls to a 20 ton front end loader in your backyard. I'd rather a trained professional operate something capable of demolishing my home in minutes but to each their own.
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- Overcharge - Good charging apparatus.
- Drain it completely - Good charging apparatus and battery management, as noted in the article.
- Puncture - Stop puncturing your powerwall cells, please, just as you don't twist off the natural gas connectors to see want's inside. Darwinian problem.
- Overheat - battery management, and a thermostat
- Make your own battery with cells you found around, and not use a good controller - yeah, doing it right is pretty much a Darwinian problem.
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- Drain it completely, and then try to charge: boom
Great, now that Slashdot knows this, "Da Terrorists" knows it as well.
And the USA government will know it, and WILL ban laptops on flights.
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Ohh.
Thanks for the heads up!
Re:Lithium batteries are not to be taken lightly (Score:4, Interesting)
The main problem with using used cells from old laptop batteries is that they're not all the same age and therefore you have no way of judging what their true capacity or overall health is. If you were linking up the actual packs they're in, and using the built-on microcontroller-based charge-discharge controller to manage each pack, then it would be reasonably safe, but dismantling them from random packs and assembling them into huge banks? You're asking for disaster to happen. The best you could do there would be to have a very sophisticated management controller(s) monitoring smaller banks of cells, disconnecting them at the first sign of failure of any single cell in that bank -- and also a automated fire-supression system that can handle a catastrophic failure, and perhaps an explosion-proof enclosure for all the banks of cells. Li+ cells may be ubiquitos at this point in time, but they're still far from Amateur Night to work with, especially in the huge quantities these guys (who, according to the article) are indeed complete amateurs. From what I know of it (and I worked somewhere where I did quite a bit of research into the subject of building Li+ battery packs), if they were buying new cells in those quantities, the manufacturer might insist on seeing their controller design(s) before accepting the purchase.
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I'd be a lot more worried about counterfeit cheap crap batteries than I would be about old batteries originally used by reputable vendors, once tested.
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Of course it is possible to use lots of cheap batteries, with a very good controller system. This is what Tesla does for its current cars. However the system needs to monitor each cell and pack, and have safety precautions to disconnect them if them become faulty.
Yet they still catch fire and the same batteries used in vehicles are being used in power walls installed in homes.
- Overcharge it too much: boom
- Drain it completely, and then try to charge: boom
- Puncture: boom
- Overheat: boom
- Make your own battery with cells you found around, and not use a good controller: boom, boom, boom
Do all of these with lithium iron phosphate and worse case your battery turns into a paper weight.
The problem in my view isn't cheap batteries and controllers as much as the industries love affair with inherently dangerous chemistries and hoping for the best.
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Sounds good on the surface but (Score:5, Insightful)
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IIRC every parallel element in a Li pack should be monitored and individually controlled, correct?
so I can have 100 cells in 10 strings of 10 and would need 10 controllers* to monitor said pack.
Then the parallel pack itself can be treated somewhat simply as a larger battery equivalent (e.g. if each of the hypothetical strings is 1Ah then I can treat the pack as a single 10Ah battery). The danger comes into play when cells are in parallel without protection, as then the stronger cell can actually damage the
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IIRC every parallel element in a Li pack should be monitored and individually controlled, correct?
so I can have 100 cells in 10 strings of 10 and would need 10 controllers* to monitor said pack.
Then the parallel pack itself can be treated somewhat simply as a larger battery equivalent (e.g. if each of the hypothetical strings is 1Ah then I can treat the pack as a single 10Ah battery). The danger comes into play when cells are in parallel without protection, as then the stronger cell can actually damage the weaker cell in boundary conditions, leading to over depletion and over charging situations.
*in this case controller is specifically: LV cutoff to prevent over depletion of string Charge current limiting HV cutoff possibly max current drain too.
Close but no. As another poster pointed out a single failure in that parallel pack, if shorted causes a cascade like failure of every cell in parallel discharging at unsafe levels and likely results in a fire. If a cell goes high resistance or open the others have to work harder (supply more current per cell) to keep the same load and can be thermally stressed and fail by temperature overload - you need balanced cells with internal resistance and capacity to be nearly equal as imbalance likely from used r
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The problem is the smart battery circuitry needed to monitor currents and voltages, balance cells, thermally monitor strings (or ideally individual cells), gas gauge, and safely disconnect problem cells from the system.
Fortunately Tesla says you can use their battery management system patents royalty free. I haven't read them, so I don't know if they're typical useless patent dreck or not, but at least in theory, there's detailed documentation on the industry-leading many-cell pack and its safety systems, which so far have proven to be fairly impressive. Even if it's only the typical hand-wavy description, it should at least provide a hint about how to handle all of those things you mentioned.
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Tesla modules cannot "rewire themselves". Individual cells are connected in parallel via low current fuse wires. The hope is the fuse will open if there's ever anything wonky in any individual cell. There are a few thermistors in the pack going to the mini-BMS board in the module; that board is *part* of the BMS, not a free running BMS in itself.
Hobbyists should follow this design. However, we've all seen the idiots welding dozens of batteries together with strips that could carry hundreds of amp before fai
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Most people do not understand risk and risk management as done in professional engineering. These people all have no formal EE training and some apparently have no formal training at all. Hence they probably feel pretty smart for "showing the professionals how it is done" and are completely unaware and would not understand anyways why the actual experts go to all that trouble needed to make this safe. They will find out by repeating the history they are unaware of.
Re: Sounds good on the surface but (Score:1)
One of the photos looks like they were testing individual cells, a necessary process but tedious for more than a few.
The thin wire in the bus bar video will fuse at about 10A so I guess that's the current protection for each cell though as each module can only be monitored as a unit, unless the fuse or the cell itself blows there's no way to find which of the 80 cells have failed without unsoldering them. All I've read says soldering to 18650 cells will damage them which makes me wonder how competent the g
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"dimensioned to melt"
Functional equivalent: fuses. Problem solved.
Extremely Hazardous (Score:3)
Unless these people built a cinderblock bunker roofed with a galvanized steel roof (i.e. no wood in the structure at all) and a steel fire rated door that is completely removed from their main residence, the first time one of these Lithium batteries fails thermally, their entire "wall" will likely go up and burn down their house. If they have each battery in a ceramic, isolated cubby outside their house, they are marginally better, but this is definitely not a good way to go about powering your house or living off grid... You are better off building your own lead acid battery array with deep cycle batteries...
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I was going to say aren't the deep cycle batteries used more often for this? of course you get over 100Ah and they start getting expensive.
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Yes, that is the standard approach, and for good reason. There is no reason you can't build your own battery bank though. (Very few people have the technical skill to build a battery charge/discharge balancer though.)
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My ex-wife's dad used to have a whole house UPS built from a rectifier, inverter, charge controller and a bunch of deep cycle batteries.
LK
Nickel-Iron Battery (Score:1)
Most power my home with DIY batteries folks use the Nickel-Iron Battery [wikipedia.org].
It's not the most efficient battery, but it tolerates abuse (aka DIY stupidity) and usually doesn't explode unless you do something really dumb.
Trying this DIY approach with Lithium batteries?
Let's not and say we did.
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Careful. NiFe blows off hydrogen when charged. Hydrogen will explode from a tiny spark.
Ah, you might want to rethink that one (Score:1)
Your powerwall might turn into a firewall
This too will become illegal... (Score:1)
OR
The energy companies will lobby to REQUIRE that federal law prohibits re-using the cells from internally sealed battery packs as "They just aren't safe!". They'll cite public battery fires and MSDS listing the "Volatile internal chemicals!" in the batteries that are safely contained UNLESS OPENED.
These power walls are f
WTF!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Where are they getting these used laptop batteries that still have life in them?
My experience has been that a typical laptop battery will last about 2 years. 3 if you're will to work in small spurts before hunting down a power outlet. Most are run till the batteries are useless, and then spend a while as a makeshift desktop by constantly being connected to the charger. In a couple cases, the laptop was still useful enough to spring for a replacement battery.
I just don't see where enough recycle-able batteries will come from for this "movement" to ever be anything other than an oddity. With the tedium of:
- connecting hundreds of cells that you've already determined are not new, if not at the end of their usable life
-purchasing or building your own controllers with failsafe features
-replacing cells as they begin dying off
I would think it would make most people opt for buying one of Tesla's products.
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My bet would be that most packs fail in one bad cell, leaving several good cells remaining.
My real question is, where are you getting laptop batteries with cylindrical cells? I thought they were all pouch over the last decade or so due to the thin craze.
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But I don't see why anyone would want to do this for themselves. What they save in money they must surely lose in time and house / injury claims if their house goes up in smoke.
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one bad cell in the pack can render the entire pack useless.
TFA says they test each cell through a discharge/charge cycle, my guess being that they cull the horrible ones, and bin sort the rest.
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Depends on the battery configuration, but usually they have multiple batteries set in a parallel configuration. If a battery cell on the first rail completely dies, you can still get the proper voltage from the second rail, but you now have half the battery life. Some people will change out the battery at that point, others will wait until a battery on the 2nd rail fails and battery power goes to zero or insanely short like 3 mins of charge. There might be 6 good batteries and 2 bad batteries in the pac
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Where are they getting these used laptop batteries that still have life in them?
They aren't. They are getting used laptop battery cells that still have life in them. Most laptop batteries will typically be dead when only one cell has crapped itself.
Charge and discharge test each individual cell and dispose of the faulty one.
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blip (Score:2)
Just wait a few years! (Score:2)
In a few years, all the thermal issue with lithium batteries are going to be a thing of the past. If not for improved safety then you should at wait because the new batteries are going to cause the price of the preset battery forms to plummet. Before installing this shit, do check with your insurance company to see if they will cover you if a battery fire does burn down your house because when one battery goes, they ALL go.
Disaster waiting to happen (Score:2, Informative)
If one of the laptop battery is on recall list that's one ticking fuse in your powerwall
if i ever went off the grid (Score:2)
1 megawatt = 1000 kwh? (Score:3)
The giant battery system will be able to store 1 megawatt of power—1000 kWh
I... don't even know what to do with that sentence. Watts are not equivalent to kilowatt-hours.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Sounds good. Those things never explode, right?
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Of course not! These batteries were harvested by loving hands and made of perfectly natural organic lithium. This is the gentle touch of Mother Nature's power.
How long is it going to last? (Score:2)
The battery in my laptop lasts only a few years before it's basically a brick. And they are using used batteries to build this thing?
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Hmm. (Score:2)
I've got probably a 5 gallon buckets worth of bad laptop batteries i've yet to come up with a good use for them.
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I have a better proposal (Score:1)
I have a better idea. Let's get a hundred hamsters, and put them into a hundred wheels. Or maybe rats, as they are stronger. We can harvest rats in large cities and feed them with refuse. Wheels will provide with electricity whole houses, maybe even hospitals and schools! And it's clean, simple, efficient and powerful! It's natural, organic synergy! Where should I apply for a patent? Although I recall this idea was already featured in one of the Gummi Bears episodes, but this time it's for real!
Seems too tedious... (Score:1)
However, more power to those that indulge! (pun intended!).
"supplying energy" (Score:2)
Pleas stop saying "supplying energy". Gas and coal are something that "supplies energy". Batteries store and release energy. (unless you're burning them and turning that heat into energy I suppose)
You still have to charge them, storage isn't anything very incredible here. And old batteries can be pretty wasteful at that too. The manufacturers don't make the packs easy to take apart and separate the cells, and
meanwhile in soviet Hellgium (Score:1)
and people always lol like you exaggerate and me like "well come live here then"
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When I reached out to the laptop manufacturers, both Dell and HP discouraged hobbyists from reusing their batteries. "Dell laptop batteries are designed to be used within Dell-branded products only and we do not recommend or endorse any other use," a spokesperson from Dell told Motherboard in an email.
And they shouldn't. Companies can't dance this legal knife's edge, endorsing alternate battery usage, on the hope that DIYers* know what they are doing and the pinky promise that they or their families won't sue if they get hurt by fucking around with batteries.
*Some DIYers are very competent and understand engineering for safety, and may in fact be engineers. Some DIYers are very enthusiastic idiots.
Seems like they could sign a waiver and take care of that part. I think another worry, and possibly a bigger one, may be finding a bunch of them improperly disposed of and getting blamed for it. Hard to sign that away in a waiver because the cells are not traceable.
Re: Why (Score:1)
Broken laptop batteries often have some perfectly good cells inside, and they are free or next to. Lead-acid is heavy, wears out quickly and is not that efficient.
Re: stupid, dangerous, inefficient. (Score:1)